A year on, the Victorian Government is still yet to answer the recommendations of the Yoorrook Justice Commission
By Sue-Anne Hunter, Maggie Walter & Tony North
An apology is not a reform, and reconciliation is not justice. The people who gave their evidence were not promised sympathy. They were promised change, write former Yoorrook Justice Commissioners, Sue-Anne Hunter, Maggie Walter & Tony North.
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We served as Commissioners of Yoorrook Justice Commission, Victoria’s formal inquiry into the injustice done to First Peoples since colonisation, and Australia’s first formal truth-telling process of its kind. We were not appointed to stage a reconciliation or to make a moment the government could welcome and move past. Yoorrook was given the powers of a Royal Commission for one reason: to gather the truth under oath, and to set out, in binding detail, what must change. The truth was never the destination. The recommendations were. That is why we did it.
On 1 July last year, we handed two final reports to the government. They were never the same kind of document. The first, Truth Be Told, is the story: the record of what was done to First Peoples in Victoria since colonisation, now held in the State Library. The second, Yoorrook for Transformation, is the reform: one hundred recommendations to change the systems the first report lays bare.
A year on, the government has not formally responded to a single one of those recommendations. Not accepted, not rejected, not answered.
The difference between the two reports is the whole point. The story has been welcomed. It has been called historic, placed in the State Library, and honoured at ceremonies. That is the easy half, because accepting the truth costs a government nothing. The recommendations are the part that asks something of it, and they are the part it has left untouched. Victoria has accepted the account of the harm and declined, so far, to act on the remedy.
And it cannot be said the case is unproven, because the people who run these systems proved it for us, under oath.
Yoorrook found that racial bias affected the risk assessments that decide which families are reported and which children are removed. The department’s own senior official did not dispute the failures, and that the department had failed to give a third of the children in its care the cultural plans it is legally required to provide.
The Minister for Corrections confirmed that three out of every four Aboriginal children in youth detention entered through the child protection system. The Chief Commissioner of Police acknowledged that racism in his force had gone unchecked for generations, and apologised. Across the hearings, sixteen ministers and department heads apologised to us.
You cannot apologise sixteen times and then say you need more time to decide whether the problem is real. The government’s own witnesses settled that question. An apology is not a reform, and reconciliation is not justice. The people who gave their evidence were not promised sympathy. They were promised change.
None of this is for want of progress elsewhere. This past year, Victoria made treaty, and we do not say that lightly. We have collectively argued for treaty, and we are proud of what this state and our communities built together. Gellung Warl is now a permanent body with the standing to hold government to account.
But treaty was never meant to be the answer to everything. It was meant to open the door to a new relationship, not to become the room where every other obligation waits. The hundred recommendations are not treaty’s burden to carry. They are the government’s to answer, and they can be answered now, on the evidence already before it. Treaty deserves better than to be used as a reason for delay.
And they cannot wait. Every year without an answer is a year in the life of a child in care or a child in detention, and those years do not come back.
So, we are asking directly. Respond to the recommendations. Say what you will do, what you will not, and by when. You have already admitted the truth of why they are needed. Treaty has opened the door. Do not let the reforms be the thing that never comes through it.
About the authors
Sue-Anne Hunter is a Wurundjeri and Ngurai Illum Wurrung woman with extensive experience in governance and leadership. From May 2021 to 30 June 2025, she served as Deputy Chair of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Hunter now works as the National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People.
Maggie Walter is Palawa and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Tasmania. She was a Commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission from commencement in 2021 until completion in 2025.
Tony North is the Chair of the Victorian Law Reform Commission and was a Commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission from March 2024 until completion in 2025. He was a judge of the Federal Court of Australia from 1995 to 2018.
A very important statement. It should be across every front page. It’s making my blood boil.
Too many sorrys and not enough action