From Voice to violence: the referendum and the unravelling of reconciliation.

Reconciliation is not in crisis. It has been politically exhausted. The 2023 referendum did not simply reject a policy mechanism. It rejected the premise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should hold any structured, enduring voice within the nation state. What was refused was modest, procedural, and carefully constrained. The scale of that refusal clarified the limits of the national imagination. It marked the point at which reconciliation, as a state-sanctioned project, lost any credible claim to transformative potential.

Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University made public a statement following the referendum which identified this clearly. The result was not a rupture from the past. It was its continuation. A reaffirmation of a settler colonial order that does not accommodate Indigenous sovereignty, but manages it. Reconciliation has always depended on a fragile fiction. That the state and its citizens were willing, at some level, to confront the foundations of dispossession and restructure the distribution of power. The referendum outcome exposed that fiction. What has followed has confirmed it.

In the aftermath, public discourse has increasingly turned to the language of “social cohesion” as a way of stabilising the national narrative. In a recent intervention, Melissa Lucashenko reflects on the need to rebuild cohesion in a fractured society. While this call resonates at one level, it also requires interrogation. Cohesion on what terms, and for whose benefit? If cohesion demands that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain within a structure that continues to deny sovereignty, redistribute harm, and normalise violence, then it is not cohesion. It is compliance. It is the reassertion of a national order that has already made clear the limits of what it will concede.

The attempted bombing at an Invasion Day event in Western Australia in 2026 must be understood within this frame. A homemade explosive device was thrown into a crowd gathered to mark survival and protest. It failed to detonate. That failure does not lessen the political meaning of the act. This was an attempt to inflict mass harm on Indigenous people and their allies. Authorities have identified it as racially motivated and aligned with nationalist ideology. This matters because it locates the act within a broader political formation rather than as an isolated incident.

The attack on Camp Sovereignty in Naarm (Melbourne) sits alongside it. Neo-Nazi groups did not remain at the margins. They entered an Indigenous protest site, assaulted people, tore down flags, and desecrated a sacred fire. This was organised racial violence directed at a space of Indigenous political expression. It was an assertion that Indigenous sovereignty claims will be met not only with denial, but with force.

That hostility is now openly performed in national spaces. At Anzac Day dawn services in 2026, Welcome to Country ceremonies were met with boos. Four white men, who self-identify as Neo-Nazi’s have been charged. This was not a private sentiment. It was collective, audible, and unapologetic. It occurred within one of the most symbolically dense rituals of the Australian nation. The message was clear. Indigenous presence, even in ceremonial form, is contested. Indigenous authority, even on Indigenous land, is rejected.

These incidents mark a shift. Not in the underlying structure, but in its visibility. What was once moderated through the language of reconciliation is now expressed more directly.

This must be understood alongside the ongoing, systemic forms of violence that have never ceased. Deaths in custody continue at unacceptable rates. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are removed from their families at levels that cannot be explained away as policy drift or administrative failure. These are enduring features of governance. They reflect a system that continues to intervene in, regulate, and disrupt Indigenous life.

Within this landscape, gendered violence demands particular attention. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience violence at significantly higher rates than non-Indigenous women. This is well established. What is less frequently acknowledged is how this violence is structured. It is not only interpersonal. It is institutional, historical, and ongoing.

Colonial violence was always gendered. From the earliest moments of invasion, sexual violence was deployed as a tool of domination. That legacy has not dissipated. It is reproduced across multiple sites. Policing, child protection systems, health services, and carceral institutions all play a role in shaping the conditions in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women live, parent, and when possible, survive.

The current moment intensifies these dynamics. As public hostility toward Indigenous peoples becomes more visible, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are often positioned at the intersection of multiple forms of violence. They are targets of racist abuse, disproportionately affected by state intervention, and overrepresented among victims of family and domestic violence. At the same time, they are frequently constructed as responsible for managing these crises, whether through expectations of community leadership, caregiving, or participation in systems that continue to harm them.

This is what epistemic violence looks like in practice. Not a single event, but a convergence. Interpersonal violence, state violence, and racialised hostility intersect to produce conditions of sustained harm. The attempted bombing, the neo-Nazi attack, the booing at Anzac Day, the ongoing deaths in custody, and the disproportionate removal of children are not separate phenomena. They are connected through the same governing logic.

Reconciliation discourse has never adequately accounted for this. It has tended to isolate issues. To treat gendered violence as a social problem, racism as an attitudinal issue, and state intervention as a policy domain. This fragmentation obscures the structural coherence of what is taking place.

The failure of reconciliation, then, is not only a failure of national unity. It is a failure to address the conditions that produce ongoing harm, particularly for those most exposed to it.

Continuing to invoke reconciliation in this context risks misdiagnosing the problem. It suggests that the issue is a lack of understanding or goodwill. That with enough education, dialogue, or symbolic recognition, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state can be repaired.

The evidence does not support this.

What we are seeing is not a breakdown in communication. It is a refusal of transformation. A refusal that is expressed across institutional, social, and increasingly violent domains.

The referendum clarified this refusal. The events that have followed have enacted it.

The task now is not to revive reconciliation as a framework. It is to confront the conditions that have rendered it untenable. That includes recognising the centrality of gendered and epistemic violence in shaping Indigenous experiences of the state. CEVAW’s research and engagement is committed to moving beyond narratives of inclusion toward analyses of power, control, and survival.

Reconciliation promised a shared future grounded in recognition and respect. What has emerged instead is a more explicit articulation of the limits of that promise.

The question is no longer whether reconciliation can be repaired.

It is what comes after its collapse.