As Neil Brown points out this week, the Victorian government has now embarked on the insanity of ‘our very own third chamber of parliament, the Orwellian-named Aboriginal Representative body and its stepchild, the Treaty Authority that will negotiate treaties between the Victorian government and aboriginals’.

Neil Brown QC, apart from being a brilliant writer, was of course deputy leader of the federal Liberal party and a shadow attorney-Ggneral. Which is our way of saying he knows of what he speaks when he writes:

‘The two bodies created by the Victorian legislation are clearly racist because the electoral roll and the qualification for standing as a candidate for election can be reached only by members of one race, the aboriginal race; all other races are excluded. Moreover, their function is to confer benefits and privileges on the members of one race, but not of any other race, and to compel compliance with the race laws by the rest of us.’

Part of the process that Victorians will be subject to in coming years, as will all of us if the referendum on the Voice succeeds, is the equally Orwellian named ritual of ‘truth-telling’.

‘Truth-telling’ – ironically – first came to prominence during the end of apartheid in South Africa. Part of Nelson Mandela’s idea to heal his bitterly divided nation was the concept of all the old ills being aired for future generations to fully understand the depths of evil that apartheid had spawned. But a key component of Mandela’s plan was that once the ‘truth-telling’ process was over, that was that. Forgiveness and reconciliation would automatically replace racial hatreds and tribal conflict. Peace and love would fill the South African skies.

To what degree the South African ‘truth-telling’ helped or hindered unifying blacks and whites is a matter of conjecture. But regardless of outcome, the intent was clear: this was to spell the end of apartheid.

How depressing and how bitterly ironic that indigenous Australians, the Labor party, the Greens and leftist activists are desperate to embark on an Australian version of ‘truth-telling’ that will usher in, as opposed to usher out, our very own uniquely Aussie form of apartheid.

More depressing of course is the fact that in this post-modern, neo-Marxist world – where according to the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Meghan Markle ‘your truth’ is as valid as ‘my truth’ even if they are self-contradictory – it is highly unlikely that there will be much genuinely objective historical truth in the much-touted telling. Expect a plethora of poisoned blankets, massacres, lynchings, slavery and so on that fits the leftist narrative regardless of whether the stories have much historical validity or credibility.

Also expect a howling silence from the Left when it comes to ‘truth-telling’ about how dire and desperate were the conditions many aborigines lived in prior to settlement and how for many individuals and their offspring the white man’s arrival, accompanied by health, modernity and industrial power, was to prove a blessing rather than a curse.

Meanwhile, as the wheels fall of the entire Covid fandango, it is increasingly urgent that Australians demand a royal commission into the abuse of political power over the last two-and-a-half years. This is not a matter left versus right, of Libs versus Labor, or even of vaxxed versus unvaxxed. Rather, the question that must be answered is how it was that so many accepted health protocols and political conventions were overturned in the blink of an eye. Yes, the virus was new. Yes, it was scary. Yes, governments needed to respond. But the simple reality that a royal commission must explain to ensure that it never occurs again is that at every level of federal and state government, and including the health bureaucracies, the long-standing checks and balances were ignored or wilfully silenced. Any who voiced a dissenting opinion were treated as pariahs, any who spoke out about their concerns were silenced. Some were even trampled underfoot by overzealous police officers. Has anyone yet been held to account? How do we guarantee that such excessive government power is never permitted to occur again. We need a royal commission. We need genuine, honest and in-depth Covid truth-telling.