Goodwill Has No Leverage

Professor Megan Davis asks Australia to measure reconciliation by consequence rather than sentiment: does a reform leave First Nations peoples with more authority over the decisions that govern their lives? For allies, three tests follow. Who holds authority over the objective? What leverage does the activity create? To whom are we answerable?

On 29 November 2024 the Queensland Parliament repealed the Path to Treaty Act 2023 and abolished the state’s Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, five months into a legislated three-year term. On 13 November 2025 the Victorian Parliament gave Royal Assent to the Statewide Treaty Act 2025, and the Premier and the co-chairs of the First Peoples’ Assembly signed Australia’s first treaty at Government House. Twelve months separate the two events, and between them lies the central warning in Megan Davis’s argument.

One state showed how quickly a government can dismantle an institution that Parliament created by ordinary statute. The other showed what an elected First Nations body can secure when it holds a seat at the negotiating table, and its opposition has promised to dismantle that body within a hundred days of winning the election due on 28 November 2026. Goodwill explains neither outcome adequately. Relationships and trust shaped Victoria’s negotiation, and goodwill alone could neither create the institution nor protect it. Both outcomes turned ultimately on political power: who held it, how the law entrenched it, and what a change of government could undo.

Davis has spent two decades pressing that distinction between a politics of feeling and a politics of power. Her account of justice respects truth-telling and relationship, and it refuses to let either stand in for First Nations political authority. For non-Indigenous allies, it changes the operative question from how to express solidarity to how to help shift power. What follows sets out her argument, reads it against what has happened since the 2023 referendum, and proposes three tests that allies can apply to their own conduct: authority, leverage, and accountability.

Who Megan Davis is

Megan Davis is a Cobble Cobble woman of the Barunggam Nation in south-west Queensland. She is Scientia Professor and Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law at UNSW Sydney, Pro Vice-Chancellor Society, and co-chair of the Uluru Dialogue. She was a principal architect of the Referendum Council’s deliberative process, the thirteen regional dialogues that produced the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and she read the Statement aloud at Uluru on 26 May 2017. She chaired the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, served on the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, holds the Sydney Peace Prize, and became a Companion of the Order of Australia in the 2025 Australia Day Honours. She spent the 2024–2025 academic year at Harvard as the Whitlam Fraser Chair in Australian Studies, and her 2023 Quarterly Essay, Voice of Reason: On Recognition and Renewal, sets out the case for the Voice at length.¹

Those credentials matter here for one reason. When Davis describes what First Nations people asked for, she speaks as one of the people who designed the process that asked them.

Reconciliation without consequences

Davis’s critique targets a particular habit. Since the 1990s Australians have often treated reconciliation as a relationship to cultivate, separate from rights, justice, and institutional change. Writing on her appointment to the Referendum Council in December 2015, she placed recognition on a spectrum, from “weak” acknowledgement in a preamble to “strong” recognition through structural reform, and reported that many Aboriginal people feared symbolic or minimalist change would lack the durability to compel real change on the ground.² In her 2018 Parkes Oration she named truth and justice “the twin pillars of reconciliation” and warned that no new expression of popular sovereignty could bypass the unfinished questions of dispossession.³

At the launch of the Towards Truth database she put the point sharply. The problem with two decades of reconciliation, she said, was that truth had formed no part of the framework, and that the framework had required little of the state while relying heavily on private action by corporations, charities, universities, sporting clubs, and individuals. The Uluru process, in her account, brought rights and justice back into the conversation.⁴ During National Reconciliation Week in 2026 she went further in The Weekend Australian and argued that reconciliation itself now forms part of the problem.⁵

None of this dismisses Reconciliation Action Plans, commemorations, or educational programs. They can educate, alter institutional cultures, and build the relationships from which solidarity grows. Davis’s point concerns what they cannot do.

Goodwill has no leverage. Awareness redistributes no authority. Respectful language obliges no government to listen. Attendance at an event gives no community greater control over policy, resources, or the institutions that shape its members’ lives. The question that follows is institutional: what obligations bind governments, and who holds a durable capacity to influence the decisions governments make about First Nations peoples?

Voice, Treaty, and Truth: an architecture

The Uluru Statement from the Heart names the crisis as structural. It describes “the torment of our powerlessness” and calls for a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution and a Makarrata Commission to supervise agreement-making and truth-telling.⁶ The dialogues sequenced those three elements deliberately. Voice came first because participants judged that First Nations could enter no treaty with the state until the state had recognised a representative First Nations body; agreement-making and truth followed.⁷

Davis has repeatedly cautioned against lifting truth out of that sequence and treating it as the easy substitute for the rest. After the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, she told the Towards Truth audience, a truth commission was “not what our people asked for,” and the Voice came first.⁴ On 11 June 2026 she wrote that she supports truth-telling and the Towards Truth database itself, but that “a top-down, state supervised transitional justice ‘truth’ process is not the right approach” at this juncture, and that “political strategy matters as much as righteous aspirations.”⁵ Historian Kate Fullagar, writing in March 2026, traced the same logic through the Referendum Council’s final report: the dialogues placed truth third on purpose, and the report engaged history at length, so the sequence reflected a judgement about strategy rather than indifference to the past.⁸

The questions Davis presses concern authorisation and consequence. Who determines the form of a process? Who speaks for whom? Who controls its findings? What obligations follow? Does the process leave First Nations peoples with greater influence over law, policy, and resources, or does it chiefly enlarge the settler state’s account of itself?

A disagreement inside the movement

Stating that position honestly means stating the disagreement around it. In January 2026 former Yoorrook commissioner Travis Lovett announced a walk from Melbourne to Canberra to press for a national truth-telling process, with public backing from Social Justice Commissioner Katie Kiss, Tony McAvoy SC, and Jill Gallagher of the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation. Davis told the ABC the same week that she doubted a large push for truth and treaty existed beyond social media, that day-to-day survival occupied most of the communities she spoke with, and that national commissions of that kind, like the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody before them, “suck the energy out of all other things.” Her question was blunt: if governments cannot get Closing the Gap right, why establish another institution to do something else?⁹

Lovett’s reply deserves equal weight. Truth without justice is fragile, he said, and that is exactly why First Peoples need a seat at the decision-making table.⁹ The two positions differ on sequence and strategy. On the principle they agree: truth must lead to authority. Anyone who supports community truth-telling, as I do, has to hold both judgements at once. Local truth-telling that builds a constituency and points that constituency toward institutional change belongs to the architecture. A national process that absorbs a decade of political energy and leaves the state’s decision-making untouched does not.

The disagreement also illustrates Davis’s own warning against manufactured consensus. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples comprise many nations, communities, and political perspectives, and allies serve none of them by selecting whichever First Nations voice endorses their preferred position.

What two states have shown

The Queensland and Victorian examples turn Davis’s argument about durability into evidence.

Queensland’s Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry commenced on 1 July 2024 under the Path to Treaty Act 2023, held its first Meanjin hearings in September 2024, and took evidence from seven state agencies. The incoming government introduced repeal legislation on 28 November 2024; Royal Assent followed the next day, and the Inquiry ceased to exist five months into a legislated three-year term.¹⁰ Parliament made it, and Parliament unmade it. That episode illustrates the vulnerability that informed the dialogues’ insistence on constitutional entrenchment for the Voice.

Victoria took the other road. The First Peoples’ Assembly, an elected body established in 2018 to negotiate treaty, sat across the table from the state for seven years. Yoorrook’s final reports reached Parliament on 1 July 2025. The Statewide Treaty Bill passed both houses in October 2025, received Royal Assent on 13 November 2025, and commenced on 12 December 2025. The Act establishes Gellung Warl, a permanent statutory body that advises government and Parliament on matters affecting First Peoples, represents them in continuing treaty negotiations, holds government to account for its commitments, and provides for ongoing truth-telling.¹¹ Many of the representative, advisory, and accountability functions envisaged for a national Voice now exist in one state, by treaty, through an elected First Nations body.

Two qualifications keep the comparison honest, and the second has hardened into a deadline. Gellung Warl rests on statute, and the Act itself declares the body subject to parliamentary sovereignty. Treaty adds political and moral weight; it adds no constitutional protection. In October 2025 the Victorian Coalition pledged to repeal the Statewide Treaty Act within its first hundred days in office and to replace Gellung Warl with a government department, First Nations Victoria, advised by an unelected group. Jess Wilson reaffirmed the pledge when she became Liberal leader in November 2025, and the party held to it through the Assembly elections of March and April 2026.¹⁶ On 28 July 2026 Jacinta Allan resigned as Premier after losing the support of her caucus, with Labor trailing the Coalition in published polling four months from the election on 28 November 2026.¹⁷ A body that took a decade of negotiation to build, and that Aboriginal Victorians elected only months ago, may not survive the summer.

The Victorian example therefore proves two things at once. Structural change can happen in Australia, and an elected First Nations body can win real functions from the state. And a change of government can strip those functions away by simple majority, exactly as Queensland did in 2024. The example leaves open the question of durability that Davis raised in 2015, and she has kept raising it. In January 2026 she observed that the federal government’s economic-empowerment agenda borrows from Canada and the United States, where robust treaties and constitutional recognition underpin such policies, and that Australia has neither.⁹

Reading the referendum for power

On 14 October 2023 Australians rejected the constitutional Voice: 39.94 per cent voted Yes nationally, and 31.79 per cent in Queensland.¹² That result belongs in any honest account of Davis’s argument, because it tested the argument’s own theory of change.

The No campaign made arguments, and allies who dismiss them as manufactured fear learn nothing from the loss. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine argued that the proposal divided Australians by race, that the government had supplied too little detail about the body’s design, and that practical outcomes in health, housing, and safety mattered more than a constitutional advisory body. Post-referendum research by Ian McAllister and Nicholas Biddle found that the absence of bipartisan support led many voters to weigh the perceived risk of constitutional change above the prospect of better outcomes for First Nations people.¹² Those arguments persist. Shadow minister Kerrynne Liddle now presses the practical-outcomes case against exactly the position Davis holds, and she told the ABC in January 2026 that the communities she visits talk about health and housing, never about truth-telling.⁹

The loss demonstrates the limit of moral invitation. A proposal developed through the most extensive First Nations deliberation in the country’s history still failed against organised opposition, the advantages of the status quo, and an electorate primed to see risk. Persuasion operates inside structures of power. Reform needs constituencies, organisation, trusted messengers, institutional alliances, leverage, and the sustained capacity to answer fear and misinformation.

Davis has drawn the same lesson. In October 2024 she told The Guardian that governments would find Indigenous affairs “more difficult and complicated” without a legitimately elected body of representatives to consult.¹³ After a year at Harvard and Pennsylvania she described a different attitude to political loss in the United States: people there ask what comes next and how to go again. The referendum, she said in January 2026, was a political loss at a point in time, and it left the case for the Voice and constitutional recognition intact.⁹

Shifting power has a measurable form

“Shifting power” risks becoming one more slogan unless it names an institutional test. Australia already has one, signed by every government in the country.

The 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap binds the Commonwealth, the states, the territories, and local government to four Priority Reforms, the first of which commits them to formal partnerships and shared decision-making with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In February 2024 the Productivity Commission’s first three-yearly review found that governments had largely not fulfilled those commitments, that most actions relabelled business as usual, and that a persistent “government knows best” attitude blocked any real transfer of power. Its first recommendation was that governments share power.¹⁴ A second review is under way, with the final report due to the Joint Council by late 2027.¹⁵ Davis named Closing the Gap as the focus for 2026 for the same reason: most indicators show no closing gap at all.⁹

That review supplies the test. A reform shifts power when it strengthens the capacity of First Nations peoples and their representative organisations to set priorities rather than respond to priorities set elsewhere; when it gives them greater authority over policy design, more control over community-directed resources, and enforceable processes through which governments must listen, negotiate, and account for their decisions. Depending on context it may take the form of Indigenous decision-making over land and cultural heritage, community control in health, housing, and family services, agreement-making, transparent funding, or accountability mechanisms with teeth.

First Nations communities are not politically homogeneous, and no single body speaks for all of them in all circumstances. The common test still applies: does the reform leave First Nations people with greater authority, stronger leverage, and more durable influence over the decisions that affect them? Where the answer is no, admirable language changes nothing.

Three tests for allies

For allies, Davis’s framework raises the standard of usefulness. Listening, reading, attending local events, and learning history remain necessary. They supply no evidence on their own that power has shifted. The practical question is whether an activity advances priorities that First Nations people and organisations have defined, or chiefly improves the ally’s sense of awareness and decency. Three tests separate solidarity from performance.

Authority

Who defined the objective? Who holds authority to revise it? Who decides what success means?

Following First Nations leadership means resourcing, amplifying, facilitating access, and doing unglamorous organisational labour, rather than hosting, interpreting, or becoming the public face of an initiative. It also means using the phrase “First Nations leadership” with care. Allies should not manufacture consensus, select a convenient Indigenous endorser, or claim authority to certify who speaks authentically. Respect for First Nations authority requires attention to context, community, mandate, and relationship.

Leverage

What capacity does the activity create to influence resources, rules, or decisions?

Education should connect to accountable action. A forum, reading group, commemoration, or truth-telling event should lead somewhere: support for a First Nations-controlled organisation, a submission on a defined issue, pressure on an institution, a meeting with a decision-maker, mobilisation of a constituency, or a public commitment that others can later test. Allies should learn the institutional terrain, because the substantive questions concern government decision-making, land and heritage, justice, child and family policy, housing, health, funding, and the rules that govern consultation and accountability.

Many allies hold standing in universities, unions, churches, professional bodies, councils, political parties, media organisations, philanthropic institutions, or government agencies. The test is whether they use that standing to open institutional doors, direct resources, and create consequences in support of priorities that First Nations leadership has shaped.

Accountability

To whom are allies answerable for what they undertake in the name of solidarity?

Good intentions cannot serve as the sole measure, because people judge the consequences of their own conduct poorly. Allies need relationships and practices through which others can question their assumptions, test their commitments, and hold their use of First Nations issues to account. Accountability does not require locating one Indigenous person to approve every action, and it should impose no additional burden of supervision on already stretched community leaders. It requires clarity about whose priorities an activity advances, whether the community invited it, what commitments the ally has made, and how the ally will respond when challenged.

What comes next

Davis’s contribution respects reconciliation’s best aspirations and refuses reconciliation without consequences. Her work asks Australia to judge progress by whether First Nations peoples hold a meaningful and enduring place in the decisions that shape their lives, and she has kept asking since the referendum, at Harvard, in The Weekend Australian, and on the ABC. The evidence since 2023 has sharpened her case. Queensland showed what statute cannot protect. Victoria showed what an elected First Nations body can win, and may show by early 2027 how fast a new government can take it back. The Productivity Commission showed how far every government still stands from the power-sharing it signed. The Voice remains, as she told The Guardian, an idea whose time will come.

For allies, the final test asks how our presence changed the distribution of power: whether First Nations people now hold greater authority, stronger leverage, and more durable control over the decisions that affect them. Every other measure of solidarity answers to that one.

Notes

1. UNSW Sydney, “Professor Megan Davis,” https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/megan-davis; Uluru Dialogue, “Professor Megan Davis,” https://ulurustatement.org/about-us/our-people/megan-davis/; UNSW Newsroom, “UNSW community recognised with Australia Day Honours,” 26 January 2025, https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/01/UNSW-community-recognised-with-Australia-Day-Honours; UNSW Newsroom, “Megan Davis appointed visiting professor at Harvard,” December 2023, https://www.unsw.edu.au/news/2023/12/megan-davis-appointed-visiting-professor-at-harvard-; Megan Davis, Voice of Reason: On Recognition and Renewal, Quarterly Essay 90 (Black Inc., 2023), https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/voice-reason.

2. UNSW Newsroom, “Megan Davis appointed to PM’s Referendum Council,” December 2015, https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2015/12/megan-davis-appointed-to-pm-s-referendum-council. Davis describes recognition as a spectrum running from “weak” acknowledgement to “strong” structural reform.

3. Megan Davis, 2018 Parkes Oration, Parkes Foundation, https://parkesfoundation.org.au/activities/orations/2018-oration/.

4. Uluru Dialogue, “Prof Davis: Voice more important than truth commissions,” report of Davis’s speech at the launch of the Towards Truth database, https://ulurustatement.org/prof-davis-voice-more-important-than-truth-commissions/.

5. Megan Davis, “What I am Reading! (Weekly),” Substack, 11 June 2026, https://professormegandavis1.substack.com/p/what-i-am-reading-the-problem-with. The post links her National Reconciliation Week 2026 comments on the timing of truth-telling and her opinion piece in The Weekend Australian arguing that reconciliation forms part of the problem, and reports unpublished research finding that the broader community does not support truth-telling.

6. Uluru Statement from the Heart, 26 May 2017, https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/.

7. UNSW Indigenous Law Centre, “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” https://www.unsw.edu.au/indigenous/research/uluru-statement-from-the-heart; and Megan Davis, “Voice, treaty, truth: Q&A with Professor Megan Davis,” Contact, University of Queensland, 2020, https://stories.uq.edu.au/contact-magazine/2020/voice-treaty-truth/index.html, in which Davis explains that the dialogues determined First Nations could enter no treaty with the state before recognition of their Voice.

8. Kate Fullagar, “Why does Truth come third?”, Inside Story, 27 March 2026, https://insidestory.org.au/why-does-truth-come-third/.

9. Dana Morse and Sean Mantesso, “From truth-telling to closing the gap, First Nations leaders outline their priorities in 2026,” ABC News, 25 January 2026, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-25/truth-telling-closing-the-gap-indigenous-affairs-agenda-2026/106260862. The article records Davis’s scepticism about a national truth-telling body, her priority on Closing the Gap, her comparison with Canada and the United States, and her account of political loss; Travis Lovett’s case for a national process and his planned walk to Canberra; and Kerrynne Liddle’s practical-outcomes position.

10. Queensland Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, established under the Path to Treaty Act 2023 (Qld); commenced 1 July 2024; first Meanjin hearings 18–20 September 2024 and a session with seven government agencies on 24 September 2024; repeal legislation introduced 28 November 2024; Royal Assent 29 November 2024. The same episode appears in my essay From Discomfort to Responsibility.

11. Premier of Victoria, “Victoria’s Treaty Becomes Law,” 13 November 2025, https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/victorias-treaty-becomes-law; Governor of Victoria, “Granting of Royal Assent for the Statewide Treaty Bill,” 13 November 2025, https://www.governor.vic.gov.au/granting-royal-assent-statewide-treaty-bill; Treaty Victoria, “Treaty timeline,” https://www.treatyvictoria.vic.gov.au/timeline. The Statewide Treaty Act 2025 (Vic) passed the Legislative Assembly on 16 October 2025 and the Legislative Council on 30 October 2025; the treaty commenced on 12 December 2025.

12. Australian Electoral Commission, 2023 federal referendum results, https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/referendums/2023.htm: Yes 39.94 per cent nationally and 31.79 per cent in Queensland. Ian McAllister and Nicholas Biddle, “Safety or Change? The 2023 Australian Voice Referendum,” Australian Journal of Political Science 59, no. 2 (2024): 141–160.

13. “‘An idea whose time will come’: Megan Davis on the way forward after Voice referendum loss,” The Guardian, 4 October 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/04/an-idea-whose-time-will-come-megan-davis-on-the-way-forward-after-voice-referendum-loss.

14. Productivity Commission, Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap: Study Report, released 7 February 2024, https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries-and-research/closing-the-gap-review/report/. The Commission found commitments largely unfulfilled and recommended that governments share power, support Indigenous data sovereignty, rethink mainstream systems and culture, and strengthen accountability.

15. Minister for Indigenous Australians, “Second Productivity Commission Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap,” August 2026, https://ministers.pmc.gov.au/mccarthy/second-productivity-commission-review-national-agreement-closing-gap.

16. “Victorian Liberals to scrap statewide Treaty if elected,” ABC News, 14 October 2025, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-14/victoria-liberal-opposition-first-peoples-treaty-scrapped/105888108; “New Victorian Liberal leader reaffirms party’s plan to abolish Treaty,” National Indigenous Times, 20 November 2025, https://nit.com.au/20-11-2025/21388/new-victorian-liberal-leader-reaffirms-partys-plan-to-abolish-treaty; “Treaty elections underway in Victoria as changes flow from nation-leading agreement,” ABC News, 28 March 2026, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-28/first-peoples-assembly-voting-treaty-next-step/106504744. On the Act’s own statement that Gellung Warl is subject to parliamentary sovereignty and holds no veto, see First Peoples–State Relations, “Information about Victoria’s Treaty and Statewide Treaty Act 2025,” https://www.firstpeoplesrelations.vic.gov.au/information-about-victorias-treaty-and-statewide-treaty-act-2025. YouGov polling commissioned by Common Threads in August 2026 found 40 per cent of Victorians supported Treaty and 32 per cent opposed it: National Indigenous Times, 10 August 2026, https://nit.com.au/10-08-2026/25851/polling-shows-liberals-treaty-repeal-not-a-priority-for-victorian-voters.

17. “Ben Carroll replaces Jacinta Allan as Victorian premier in bruising leadership spill,” ABC News, 28 July 2026, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-28/jacinta-allan-resigns-as-premier-of-victoria/106799850. The Victorian election falls on the last Saturday of November under the state’s fixed-term rules.

The sources, annotated

Seventeen notes support this essay. A companion page annotates the sources behind them, Davis’s own statements from 2015 to 2026, the Uluru architecture, the state record in Queensland and Victoria, and the referendum research, with a paragraph on what each contributes to the argument. Read the annotated guide to the sources →