Australia’s decades of harmful policy will be repaid in intergenerational trauma, and inquiries can only do so much

How many more inquiries into the decades-long consequences of bad policy must we live through?
How many more times must the traumatic legacy of lives damaged by the state and its agencies be presented in tearful testimony to well-meaning commissioners?
How many more carefully calibrated recommendations must pile up waiting for consideration by interdepartmental committees?
How many possible solutions will be pushed to the too-hard basket?
How many politicians must say sorry, before rinsing and repeating?
Over the past three decades there have been dozens of inquiries addressing how the wrongs of the past have devastated lives. I wouldn’t be surprised if Australia had set a world record; the reports have certainly created a tragically rich body of mistakes, data, cases, and stories.
Stolen children, deaths in custody, stolen wages, forced child migrants, mothers whose babies were taken and children brutalised in custody. Victims of nuclear testing, asbestos, chemicals, poisoned water, sexual abuse, institutional abuse. Mistreatment in care of the most vulnerable aged, disabled, and young. Robodebt. Organisational cultures that protect bullies and predators. Failure to act on the data that is assiduously collected and that – had it been acted on – might have saved lives.
And more. On and on they go. This week we were reminded that, despite scores of inquiries, three veterans a fortnight take their own lives – adding to the more than 3,000 women and men who have since 1997.
Brave and damaged people again and again tell the stories of how the systems that were meant to help them failed. How trauma disrupted their lives. But the systems roll on, with a few dollars of compensation, a restructure here and a legislative tweak there.
Why do we keep repeating the same mistakes?
No conscientious public servant or politician wants people to suffer. But time and again they make decisions that mean many do. The jargon is to call it “unintended consequences”, but all too often the consequences were predictable, as the resistance to making information available to the inquiries shows. That is why the proposal to require all new legislation to include a suicide check needs to be taken seriously.
There is a pattern here.
The people most likely to be affected are those pushed to the bottom rungs of society. Noel Pearson called them “the bottom million”, people who are the expendable ballast for the wealth and security of the rest. Poor, Indigenous, young, female and those carrying the heaviest burden of personal and intergenerational trauma.
There is something wrong at the core that means the failure of systems is noted only when enough individual damage forces it to the surface or the arrow points unequivocally to the guilty party.
Still, systems that have the unintended consequences of punishing the most vulnerable roll on; the politics of fear and blame demand it.
So here we go again trying to make sense of the argument that 10-year-olds should be incarcerated. Knowing that little children are being dispatched in record numbers to foster homes. Noting that men who have had previous contact with the criminal justice system dominate the stats of those who murder their partners and children. Conjuring images of asylum seekers setting themselves on fire.
Don’t for a minute imagine that the legacy will not be repaid in intergenerational trauma.
Australia has been at the forefront of inquiries that demonstrate how the personal is political. There was a time when these subjects were off limits, not to be talked about – victims were blamed and silence prevailed. This began to change with the groundbreaking royal commission into human relationships in 1974.
The commission provoked a furious backlash, as Michelle Arrow writes in The Seventies. But it encouraged tens of thousands to tell of their experience of sexual and gender discrimination, domestic abuse and the way the legal system perpetuated it.
It also laid the groundwork for legal changes that have transformed social relations, from anti-discrimination and anti-racism legislation to no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage.
After not being talked about, these experiences have in recent times triggered a boom in memoir writing. Everyone has a story. The hunger to know about the intimate broken details of people’s lives is apparently insatiable.
Often these books are written by people who were previously publicly invisible. In recent months, however, three people at the peak of their profession have told their stories and in doing so have helped explained the engine that has driven their careers.
Rhoda Roberts brought to life the extraordinary Roberts family, Bundjalung people from Lismore. Her one-woman play My Cousin Frank ostensibly tells the story of her cousin, who was the first Aboriginal athlete to compete in the Olympic Games. Audience members wiped tears from their faces as they stood to applaud a story of resistance, resilience, and the lingering effects of trauma.
Rebecca Huntley’s Sassafras describes how after decades of counselling, clinically administered MDMA therapy helped her break through the trauma which has not slowed her career, but has caused enormous pain and stress along the way.
And Gideon Haigh’s rightly much-lauded My Brother Jaz explains the death of his younger brother that has powered his prodigious, but coolly impersonal, output. “I’ve dropped the façade of being fine,” he writes, “I’m not fine; I’ve never really been fine … there is a solace in abandoning that pretence.”
Prof Judy Atkinson, who has spent her life working with First Nations people to deal with intergenerational trauma, but believes it touches us all, said, “There is an anger across this nation that we choose not to acknowledge … fuelled by racism, prejudice, discrimination and poverty. But under anger is always grief …”
Inquiries can help, but they are unlikely to solve the problem.
In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org