Mediating the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Alanna Myers, whose focus is on Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission and the questions of truth-telling and media coverage it raises. The defeat of the Voice to Parliament referendum seems to signal that Australians are not yet ready to embrace such truth-telling, yet at the same time Victoria is pushing ahead with its own truth-telling commission, which commenced here in the past week.

This has not received anywhere near the same level of coverage as the Voice referendum has received; this may be understandable given their different natures, yet must still be noted. Horse race journalism largely drowned out the potential for a more deeply insightful coverage of the referendum, and this points to the underlying logics of the news media covering these issues; this undermines the potential for truth-telling processes to break through the silence that surrounds historical and continuing injustices.

Truth-telling commissions tend to address past injustices in order to advance towards restorative justice and reconciliation; scholarly assessments of such commissions tend to take normative or critical approaches, either assessing their performance against possible outcomes or critiquing them for rehabilitating the settler-colonial state.

With the rise of digital and social media such commissions have adopted greater mediatisation approaches, potentially enabling them to bypass the disinterest of mainstream news media but also possibly retraumatising those giving evidence at such commissions; publicness should not necessarily be seen as an untrammelled public good, but can also entrench racial stereotypes and do further harm.

In the context of Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission, then, how are these challenges managed? Following a consultative process since 2018, the commission was established in 2021 with the full powers of a Royal Commission, and commenced hearings in 2022; it aims to establish an official record of the impact of colonisation on Victoria’s First Peoples, develop a shared understanding of these impacts, and make recommendations for addressing them. These aims build on top of each other, of course, and truth-telling is therefore foundational to any further work.

The commission has been quite mediatised, with a well-designed public Website and high-definition livestreams and recordings of its proceedings as well as searchable evidence and submissions libraries online; it also has active social media accounts across various platforms. As its work continues, this mediatisation strategy must be further assessed, and audience responses to its work also need to be analysed – especially as Victoria approaches its next round of state elections in 2026.