South Australia will establish a truth-telling commission within the next couple of months, backed by $8.5 million, Acting Premier Kyam Maher said at the Garma Festival in north east Arnhem Land over the weekend.
The commission will run a truth-telling process and advise the state government on a possible treaty framework. Maher, who is also Attorney-General and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, told NITV the commitment dated to 2019, when Labor was in opposition.
“This is about something we committed seven years ago to do in South Australia," he said.”
Labor won government in 2022 and a second term this year. In March 2023 it legislated a state Voice to Parliament, the first Australian jurisdiction to do so. That body has 12 members drawn from six regional bodies and elected by First Nations South Australians.
The federal Voice referendum was defeated in October 2023, with more than 60 per cent of Australians voting No. The states have moved in different directions since. Victoria concluded Australia's first state treaty in May 2026. Queensland repealed its Path to Treaty laws in late 2024.
Noel Pearson, one of the architects of the federal proposal, addressed Garma on Saturday for the first time since the defeat. "What right has anyone to raise hopes when those hopes were so badly misplaced?" he said. "What right has anyone to offer a vision that turns out to be a mirage?"
Pearson said discrete Indigenous communities had overwhelmingly wanted the Voice and the rest of the country had not. He added that he had to account for that, and that he stood at Garma three years later with great reluctance.
What he proposed instead was narrower and more concrete. Pearson called for guaranteed work and education in remote communities, and for Aboriginal affairs in those communities to become the sole jurisdiction of the Commonwealth, with state Aboriginal affairs departments abolished. That would remove a layer of separate administration rather than add one.
Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy used her Garma address to press states and territories on incarceration, telling the festival that more than 17,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are in custody, about a third of the national prisoner population. She indicated the Commonwealth was weighing stronger measures against jurisdictions falling behind on Closing the Gap. Foreign Minister Penny Wong also spoke, rejecting what she called a monocultural view of the country.
Maher did not name a commissioner or give a start date beyond the next couple of months. The $8.5 million is allocated. The enabling arrangements, including whether the commission will have powers to compel evidence, are not yet public.
