Victoria’s race-based ‘truth-telling’ body, the Yoorrook Justice Commission, handed down its Final Report on June 25, 2025. At a public cost of $50 million, the Commission delivered precisely what was expected: a racially framed reinterpretation of Victorian history, constructed to support a politicised narrative of grievance and entitlement.
The Commission (above) was chaired by “Professor Aunty” Eleanor Bourke AM, a respected Wergaia and Wamba Wamba Elder and prominent advocate in Indigenous education and justice. Whilst her credentials are well-established, her appointment raises legitimate questions about impartiality. In any other context, placing a long-standing activist at the head of an inquiry tasked with delivering ‘truth’ about her own identity group would be seen as a clear conflict of interest. What was presented as an independent truth-telling process was, from the outset, compromised by ideological alignment and predetermined conclusions.
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Identity today is self-ascribed, often politically or emotionally motivated, and increasingly divorced from any lived experience of traditional Aboriginal culture. To grant legal or institutional status to such identities is to enshrine a fiction, one that is rooted in neither race nor surviving culture, but in retrospective affiliation.
In sum, there is no coherent basis: biological, cultural, or historical, for recognising a distinct Aboriginal group in Victoria today. What remains is a modern population of mixed ancestry, well integrated into Australian society, with no unbroken connection to the pre-contact past.
To continue treating ‘Aboriginality’ as a special legal or political category is to perpetuate racial division and undermine the principles of equality before the law.
The term Aboriginal is now defined so broadly and ambiguously in legislation that it permits self-identification without any substantive racial or cultural connection to traditional Aboriginal society. It is estimated that as much as 30% of those ‘identifying’ have no descent at all. This elastic definition has facilitated the emergence of a politically assertive cult and highly organised identity group which has successfully extracted extensive concessions and resources from the Victorian public.
...The Victorian Labor Government, true to form, appears all but certain to embrace even the most extreme and unsubstantiated recommendations of Yoorrook. While it is unsurprising that individuals identifying as Aboriginal would pursue activism promising material and political gain, it defies reason that a sitting government would willingly discredit its own national history and entertain the transfer of billions in reparations, all based on a fabricated narrative masquerading as truth.
What is being advanced is not justice, but an ideologically constructed fiction, repackaged as moral authority—and the government’s complicity in this distortion represents a profound betrayal of historical integrity, public trust and the people of Victoria.Robert Hill
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