Which part of ‘No thanks’, many Australians may be wondering, does our Prime Minister not understand? Six months after the Voice to parliament was kicked comprehensively into touch by every state, Mr Albanese continues to declare at every opportunity that he remains committed to achieving an objective which, whatever he said to the contrary during the campaign, he must always have intended to be the next cab off the Reconciliation rank. To give this objective cultural heft, the Uluru Statement from the Heart calls it Makarrata, but even the white guilt repository we know as the ABC doesn’t use that word without its English translation; treaty, which is the preferred nomenclature of more honest activists like Lidia Thorpe. From the get-go Ms Thorpe, who disdained the Voice as a tokenistic distraction, was never less than forthright about her grail: the state and federal governments ceding sovereignty of the entire country to First Nation peoples. Which is to say, the devolvement of the power currently vested in our hard-earned constitution to the unelected heads of a few dozen extended families. Thorpe and hardline Yes advocates like Thomas Mayo never denied that they considered the Voice to be at best a warm-up to this main event, and that any long-term outcome short of Treaty would be unacceptable. It speaks to their honesty, if not their political nous, that they never resiled from that position, even when it became clear it was the prospect of Treaty, as much as anything anyone said about second chambers and Australia Day, which had undermined the initially majority public support for a Yes vote. From an integrity point of view, Mr Albanese’s continued commitment to Treaty is also commendable, but he cannot afford to be as candid as Mr Mayo or Ms Thorpe because he has an election to fight in the not-too-distant future. So when he does use the T-word he invariably adds a less contentious qualifier, citing the need for us all to work towards ‘treaty and truth-telling’. Mr Albanese will never be the Shane Warne of Australian politics, but he knows a bit about spin. And in much the same way that #MeToo and the media coverage it received made it impossible to see the noun ‘masculinity’ without also hearing the adjective ‘toxic’, Mr Albanese and his Sancho Panza Linda Burney are presumably hopeful that if the words treaty and truth-telling are seen together in public often enough, the former will be accorded a moral authority, and any opposition to it will be seen as not just misguided but wicked.

Truth-telling is not, of course, an Australian coinage; we imported it from South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission which Nelson Mandela instigated when he came to power required people who’d been victims of human rights violations under apartheid to testify about their experiences, and also invited their alleged persecutors to defend themselves in the hope of avoiding prosecution. Something similar was adopted by the Rwandan government in the wake of the Hutu Tutsi massacres. Mr Albanese has not given us any detail yet about the form Australia’s truth-telling might take, but given the Andrews government’s tendency to unilaterally pre-empt Canberra on most policy issues, it’s probably safe to say it will be a scaled up version of the Yoorrook Justice Commission which Mr Andrews green-lighted in 2020. According to its website, its purpose is to ‘investigate historical and ongoing injustices committed against Aboriginal Victorians since colonisation, across all areas of social, political and economic life’. I’m sure that the people who created the Commission – First Peoples Assembly of Victoria – see themselves as belonging to the same truth-telling tradition which inspired their South African and Rwandan counterparts. But there are two important differences. The most obvious one being that unlike the victims of injustice and violence in South Africa and Rwanda, almost all the Aboriginal people alleged to have been the victims of historical violence in Australia died a very long time ago. So they can’t testify to anything. And because Aboriginal culture never extended to writing, the only official records pertaining to such events were compiled by representatives of the system which allegedly perpetrated them. But the other, and perhaps more important difference is that in both the South African and Rwandan projects, reconciliation was an end in itself. What those governments wanted the outcome of their truth-telling to be was the overcoming of differences, the literal and figurative burying of hatchets. They hoped that the dialogues it facilitated would give the populations of those benighted countries the ‘closure’ they needed in order to move forward together as a single nation. They did not do it in anticipation of an event which would divide them in perpetuity.