A special kind of betrayal occurs when a government apologises for historic injustice while actively engineering new injustice at the same time. The apology becomes a diversion. It asks us to mourn the past while ignoring the damage unfolding right in front of us.
That is exactly what the Victorian Government is doing today with its apology in Parliament to First Peoples.
The Yoorrook Justice Commission made it clear that colonisation is not a closed chapter. It never ended. It simply evolved into the systems that now govern our lives. It lives inside the laws, the policing practices and the institutional reflexes that push Aboriginal people into prisons at staggering rates.
This is hyperincarceration. It is not accidental. It is not neutral. It is the modern expression of an old project.
Yoorrook offered a path to interrupt that pattern. The Government stepped around it. It embraced the symbolic recommendations and avoided the structural ones. It selected comfort over courage.
The moment the Government dropped their mask came on the very day Premier Jacinta Allan signed Australia’s first Treaty.
The ceremony that morning was framed as historic. It was a declaration of truth and healing: a promise that things would be different. But by the afternoon, that promise was already broken.
On the very same day, the Premier announced new youth justice laws that will allow children to be sentenced as adults.
Children. Inserted into an adult legal system with full knowledge of who will feel the weight of it: Aboriginal children. Children who are already pushed to the margins by the consequences of dispossession, poverty and inter-generational trauma.
This is not policy drift. It is political instinct. Because when governments grow desperate, of any persuasion, they dust off the ‘Tough-On-Crime’ handbook. They reach for punishment because it is easy to sell. They reach for fear because it is easier than confronting the conditions they helped create. And they do it knowing exactly who will carry the consequences.
Hyperincarceration ratchets tighter every time a government chooses political survival over the safety of Aboriginal children. It ratchets tighter when trauma is treated as criminality. It ratchets tighter when the state chooses to punish the symptoms of its own failures.
And the contradictions are almost comedic. The Commonwealth has just banned under 16s from using social media on the grounds that children are too vulnerable. Yet the Victorian Government insists that these same children are somehow mature enough to receive adult sentences. Even the Victorian Attorney-General has acknowledged that the laws breach the Victorian Charter of Human Rights.
So what does the apology mean? What does Treaty mean? What does any commitment to justice mean in the face of this?
An apology without structural change is not an act of healing. It is a strategy to buy silence.
Treaty without justice is not a new relationship. It is a shield for political convenience. Reconciliation without accountability is an empty brand: a glossy label on an empty jar.
A government serious about repair would dismantle the drivers of hyperincarceration with urgency. It would listen to Yoorrook. It would put Aboriginal children at the centre of its decisions, not at the edges of its political calculus.
An apology without structural change is not an act of healing. It is a strategy to buy silence.
Instead, the Victorian Government is asking us to applaud a Treaty in the morning and accept the criminalisation of our children in the afternoon. It asks us to trust leaders who refuse to uphold even their own human rights laws.
A direct line runs from the violence of colonisation to the conditions facing Aboriginal people today. The Victorian Government had the opportunity to break that line. It chose to extend it.
Our children will be the ones who pay.
