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Beyond the One Page: Implementing Uluru
- Mark Neugebauer - FCP Australia
- 4 days ago
- 13 min read
What "Implementing Uluru in Full" Could Actually Mean For South Australia
Article 1 of a series on Voice, Truth, Treaty and the Uluru Statement in South Australia
When a government, or a Voice representative, says South Australia is implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart, or promises to see it implemented in full, I want to settle something more basic before asking whether that promise is wise: what, exactly, is being implemented?
The adopted Uluru Statement is a single, one-page text. That point should not be blurred. But the documentary record from which it emerged is considerably larger. It includes the ten Guiding Principles used to assess acceptable reform, and the records of twelve Regional Dialogues showing what participants were debating as concepts such as sovereignty, self-determination, agreement-making and truth-telling took shape.
Those sources are related, but they do not carry equal weight. The one-page Statement is the adopted consensus. The Guiding Principles record the framework against which reform options were assessed. The Dialogue records are the deliberative history: evidence of what was proposed, argued over, supported, modified and sometimes rejected. Treating all three as though they were the Statement would overstate the case. Pretending that only the final page matters would understate it.
That distinction matters because South Australia is no longer discussing Uluru as an abstract national aspiration. It has enacted a Voice, funded the next stage of Truth and Treaty, and repeatedly described that program as implementation of Uluru. My question is therefore narrower than whether the Statement itself is one page. It is this: when a government says it intends to implement Uluru "in full", what has it committed itself to pursuing, what remains genuinely undecided, and how would an ordinary South Australian tell the difference?
This is not a piece about whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage is real, or whether the people who produced the Uluru Statement had good reason to seek change. I take both seriously. My concern here is institutional and documentary: what does the public record actually establish about the direction of travel?
I raised this in passing in The Othering of the Citizen, which examined the representative structure South Australia has already enacted and the principle of citizenship it embodies. That piece deliberately left the wider program to one side: “Terms such as Treaty, self-determination and agreement-making can encompass a broad range of institutional arrangements, and South Australians have not yet been told precisely what will or will not fall within the negotiating envelope.”
This article, and those that follow it, begin that separate examination.
The one-page Statement
The adopted Uluru Statement from the Heart is one page long. It was endorsed at the National Constitutional Convention, held at Uluru from 23 to 26 May 2017, by delegates elected from twelve Regional Dialogues. Read in order, it makes four moves. First Nations, it says, “possessed this land under our own laws and customs” as “the first sovereign Nations,” and that sovereignty “is a spiritual notion” which “has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.”
Present disadvantage is described in structural terms: “This is the torment of our powerlessness.” The first institutional request follows from that diagnosis: “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.” And the Statement names its own destination beyond that request: “Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle,” asking for “a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.”
Voice, in other words, is the first ask in the document's own sequence, and Makarrata is named as the culmination. Truth-telling is not a separate afterthought tacked on afterwards; it sits inside the one Commission that is also meant to supervise agreement-making. Whatever else is contested about Uluru, that sequence is not a matter of interpretation. It is what the adopted text says.
The Guiding Principles
Before the Convention settled on the Statement's final wording, ten Guiding Principles had been distilled from the Regional Dialogues to guide the assessment of reform proposals. Megan Davis, one of the Statement's principal authors, describes the principles as extrapolated from the Dialogues so that, in her words, “a reform proposal could therefore only succeed at Uluru if it” met each of the ten.
The Referendum Council's Final Report records them as the framework against which acceptable reform was considered:
● does not diminish Aboriginal sovereignty and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty;
● involves substantive, structural reform;
● advances self-determination and the standards established under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
● recognises the status and rights of First Nations;
● tells the truth of history;
● does not foreclose on future advancement;
● does not waste the opportunity of reform;
● provides a mechanism for First Nations agreement-making;
● has the support of First Nations; and
● does not interfere with positive legal arrangements.
Their significance needs to be stated carefully. They are not legislation, they are not themselves the Uluru Statement, and they do not bind the South Australian Parliament. Their importance is interpretive: they tell us something about the criteria through which the reform ultimately adopted at Uluru was judged.
Seen that way, several matter particularly to the question this article is asking. Principle six, that reform should "not foreclose on future advancement", makes it difficult to treat the constitutional Voice as though it were intended to exhaust the reform agenda.
Principle eight identifies a mechanism for First Nations agreement-making as one of the criteria against which reform was assessed. Principle three expressly identifies self-determination and the standards established under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a benchmark.
None of that tells South Australia what a future Treaty must contain. It does tell us that structural reform, self-determination and agreement-making were not concepts added to the project years later. They formed part of the framework through which the Uluru reforms themselves were developed.
What the Regional Dialogues show
The Dialogue records sit another step away from the adopted Statement. That makes precision even more important. They show what participants proposed, debated and sometimes disagreed about. They do not convert every proposal raised in a working group into a national First Nations demand, much less into current South Australian Government policy.
The Hobart Dialogue, held at Risdon Cove from 9 to 11 December 2016, illustrates why the records nevertheless matter. Its final communiqué, in the Hobart Record of Meeting, recorded that constitutional recognition could only be considered alongside Treaty, and said Treaty needs to recognise, among other things, “sovereignty, a land and a financial settlement, and recognition of rights.” It also recorded agreement that Treaty should be carried into the Referendum Council's final report and pursued through legislation rather than included in the referendum proposal.
The underlying meeting record is more revealing still, because it shows disagreement about method. One working group's proposal was direct: “Use this Constitutional Recognition process to progress Treaty negotiations” and “Include treaty making in Constitution.” Another was just as direct in the opposite direction: “Leave Treaty out of the Constitution.”
Participants debated land, sovereignty, representation and the legal route through which agreement-making should occur. On the strength and permanence of a Voice, one working group insisted the Advisory Body must be included in the Constitution, and must “have teeth, has to be stronger than ‘advisory’, potentially ‘advocacy’,” and “have permanency, must be funded and changing it must be very hard.”
That disagreement is important. It is one reason these records should not be described as a hidden twenty-six-page manifesto or as a settled blueprint for what governments must now do. But the opposite conclusion does not follow either. The records show that terms such as Treaty, agreement-making and self-determination had substantive content. Participants were debating institutional form, land, financial settlement, rights and sovereignty, not merely using those words as ceremonial language.
Hobart was not the only Dialogue in which these ideas appeared. The same NIAA FOI compilation records other Dialogues treating the same terms as live and substantive rather than ceremonial: Broome delegates discussed a treaty or treaties that would protect land and water rights, Darwin's delegates described themselves in the record as “sovereign people,” and Perth's discussion pressed for First Nations governance and self-determination. None of that converts those discussions into a single national demand, but it means Hobart illustrates a pattern across the Dialogues rather than an isolated one.
Their evidentiary value therefore lies not in proving a predetermined destination, but in showing the breadth of the territory those open-ended terms were capable of covering from the beginning.
The "twenty-six-page" question
It is worth settling this plainly, because it gets in the way of the real argument if left open. In March 2023, the National Indigenous Australians Agency released FOI documents that included what became known as Document 14: the one-page Uluru Statement, followed by roughly twenty-five further pages of the Referendum Council's supporting material, including the Guiding Principles and the “Our Story” synthesis discussed above.
When this was highlighted during the referendum campaign, RMIT's FactLab recorded the Agency's own clarification: the pages released were “the one page Uluru Statement from the Heart, followed by 25 pages of background information and excerpts of regional dialogues.” Pat Anderson, co-chair of the Referendum Council, gave the same figure on the ABC's 7.30 program: “The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a one-pager. It's 439 words.” Megan Davis, one of the Statement's principal authors, said the same thing in her own words: “The Uluru Statement from the Heart is one page. It is 439 words.” The supporting material, she said, has “been public for seven years. They are found on the Referendum Council website. These are the official documents.”
So the discipline this article tries to hold is a narrow one: it is not a secret twenty-six page manifesto standing behind the public one-pager. It is also not simply a one-page request to be heard, as if the surrounding record did not exist or did not matter. The supporting record is public, official and, as the previous section shows, genuinely informative about the range of substantive possibilities participants understood those open-ended terms to be capable of encompassing.
There is value here in hearing directly from one of the people most closely involved in shaping the Uluru process.
Professor Megan Davis was a member of the Referendum Council and one of the principal architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. In the following excerpt from her June 2018 Human Rights Oration, Towards a Treaty, delivered little more than a year after the Uluru Convention, she speaks about the broader reform framework surrounding Uluru and the relationship between Voice, Treaty and Truth.
I include it not because every explanation given by an individual author becomes part of the adopted Statement, nor because it proves a predetermined government destination. It does something more useful for the purpose of this article: it allows readers to hear, in the words of someone centrally involved in the process, how the broader reform project was being understood soon after Uluru, and how its different stages were connected.
South Australia's own answer
This is not only a historical or federal question. South Australia has built a live, funded, statutory pathway that explicitly names itself as a response to Uluru, and the chronology is worth setting out precisely because loose chronology is where most of the public confusion about consent comes from.
2019. A state-based implementation of the Uluru Statement was among SA Labor's earliest commitments in opposition. Maher later told Parliament it was the party's “very first policy… announced, way back in July of 2019 during NAIDOC week,” and described the state-based program as comprising “Voice, Treaty and Truth.” He was explicit, even then, about the limits of that commitment: “we didn't commit to implement it in exactly the same way that has been proposed federally,” and on Treaty and Truth specifically, “we don't have a definitive plan about how we are going to do that.” (Hansard, Legislative Council, Thursday 22 February 2024, pp. 4898-99.)
March 2023. The party, by now in government, enacted the First Nations Voice Act 2023 (SA), before the federal referendum. Section 8 states the Truth and Treaty link directly, not by implication: “The provisions of this Act are intended to be read in conjunction with, and to complement, the provisions of any other Act that implements measures to progress Truth and Treaty, as identified in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.” Section 7 makes clear the Act does not limit other First Nations bodies or agreements, and section 50 requires an independent statutory review, by a First Nations reviewer recommended by the State Voice, between the Act's third and fourth anniversaries.
14 October 2023. South Australians voted 64.17 per cent No in the federal referendum, per the Australian Electoral Commission's official state results, with every federal division in the state returning a No majority. The State model was never separately put to South Australians in a referendum, and its implementation continued after the federal result. Premier Peter Malinauskas's own framing of the distinction, given to SBS News, is worth quoting: “South Australians are pretty smart… I think they know the difference between a constitutional change and a piece of legislation.”
17 October 2023. The distinction was put directly to Premier Peter Malinauskas in Parliament only three days after the referendum. He acknowledged that Australians had rejected the proposed constitutional Voice and said his government accepted that decision. He then distinguished the federal proposal from South Australia's legislated Voice, confirming that the latter remained government policy.
Asked immediately afterwards how the Government intended to progress Truth and Treaty, Malinauskas was equally direct: “we were very clear from the outset that Voice comes first.” Once the Voice was established, he said, “the government will turn its mind to Treaty and Truth.”
That exchange matters because it removes an ambiguity that later argument can otherwise introduce into the chronology. The South Australian Government did not treat the federal referendum result as settling its separate state program. It acknowledged the result, distinguished the legal questions, and publicly reaffirmed the sequence it intended to pursue. (Hansard, House of Assembly, Tuesday 17 October 2023, pp. 5618-19.)
13 November 2025. Danni Smith, Joint Presiding Member of the Voice, used her annual address to Parliament to press the point: “The Uluru Statement from the Heart sets out the path of Voice, Treaty, Truth. South Australia has achieved the first, now we must walk together for the second and the third,” she said, formally renewing “our call for the establishment of an independent commission for truth-telling and Treaty led by First Nations South Australians.” Her closing line was direct: “Without truth, we cannot heal. Without treaty, we cannot move beyond words to agreement.”
Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kyam Maher's response, reported the same day by InDaily, committed the government to “the full implementation of the Uluru Statement in South Australia,” adding that “work has commenced on looking at these aspects and particularly what other jurisdictions in Australia and around the world have done.”
3 June 2026. That work produced a budget line seven months later. The 2026–27 State Budget committed $8.5 million over four years “to support the establishment of a commission to undertake statewide Truth-telling and Treaty activities.”
The Government's accompanying 3 June announcement, republished as an SA Government release, went further in describing what that Commission was intended to become. It said the body would be headed by Aboriginal leaders able to provide “cultural authority and independent oversight,” with work to commence “in earnest in the new financial year.” Its purpose was described not only as acknowledging and recognising “the history and experience of Aboriginal South Australians,” but also as laying “the foundation for future Treaty activities.”
The 2026–27 Budget Measures Statement provides the financial detail: operating funding rising from $1.9 million in 2026–27 to $2.1 million by 2029–30, plus $421,000 in start-up investing funding, “to support the establishment of a Commission to undertake statewide Truth-telling and progress Treaty activities.”
That distinction matters. The Budget establishes that the next stage is funded. The Government's own accompanying explanation makes clear that the Commission is not being conceived solely as a historical or commemorative exercise: it is also intended to prepare the ground for Treaty.
2 August 2026. At the Garma Festival, Maher told SBS News the Commission would be stood up “over the next couple of months,” and was explicit that South Australia's program predates and does not depend on the 2023 referendum result: “This is about something we committed seven years ago to do in South Australia, and we will take that commitment.”
What none of this tells us yet is what the Commission will actually be able to do. Its legal form, whether it can compel witnesses or documents, what rules of evidence would apply, whether there will be one statewide agreement or several nation-based agreements, and what role the existing Voice will have in shaping or administering whatever comes next, are all things the government has not yet said in public.
That is not a criticism so much as a description of where the process currently stands, and it is the reason this series treats “South Australia is implementing Uluru” as a true but incomplete sentence.
What can be said with confidence
Already in force or already public. The one-page 2017 Statement names Voice, then Makarrata as culmination, then a Commission for agreement-making and truth-telling. The Guiding Principles make non-foreclosure and agreement-making explicit design tests. The Dialogue record is official public evidence of a wider range of aspirations than the one-pager alone conveys. South Australia's Voice Act section 8 expressly ties itself to future Truth and Treaty measures identified in the Uluru Statement. The SA Voice has formally and repeatedly called for an independent Truth and Treaty commission.
Funded and promised, not yet built. $8.5 million over four years from 2026-27 for a Commission to undertake truth-telling and progress Treaty activities, to be headed by Aboriginal leaders, with government statements pointing to establishment within a couple of months of August 2026.
Not yet known. The Commission's legal powers and evidentiary rules. Whether South Australia is heading toward one statewide Treaty, multiple nation-based agreements, or both. What subjects, if any, would be excluded from negotiation. The Voice's formal role in that process. Any government definition of self-determination in this context.
What this article does not establish
There is another boundary worth drawing just as clearly.
Nothing set out above establishes that the South Australian Government intends a particular land settlement, reparations scheme, revenue mechanism, transfer of governmental power, alteration of private freehold rights, or any other specific Treaty outcome. Those are separate questions, and they require separate evidence.
Nor does the Dialogue record transform possibilities raised in 2016 and 2017 into present government policy.
What the record does establish is narrower but important: the existing Voice was not presented by the Government as the endpoint of its Uluru commitment. Truth and Treaty were part of the stated sequence before the Voice was enacted, remained part of that sequence after the 2023 referendum, were formally called for by the State Voice in 2025, and are now backed by a funded Commission that the Government says it intends to appoint.
That is enough to justify asking where the limits lie without pretending those limits have already been crossed.
The question this leaves open
If Voice was never conceived, on the documents’ own terms, as the endpoint, then the useful question is not whether South Australia is “still implementing Uluru”. The Government has answered that question itself.
The harder question is: implementing it toward what?
Terms such as Treaty, self-determination and agreement-making can encompass a genuinely broad range of institutional arrangements. The Dialogue record reflects that breadth, and just as plainly reflects that participants themselves disagreed about form and method. The South Australian Government has now committed public money to moving further along that path, but South Australians have not yet been given a public document defining the outer legal, institutional and fiscal boundaries of what “full implementation” will mean.
That does not prove there is a secret destination. It identifies something more ordinary, and in some ways more important: a government can commit itself to a direction before it has publicly defined the limits of the destination.
What a state Truth process can compel, how contested evidence becomes official record, and what safeguards ought to govern that transition deserve their own examination. So do the legal and fiscal possibilities of Treaty, and the place of UNDRIP within one sovereign Australian state.
For this first article, the documentary point is enough.
South Australia has said where the next steps are. It has not yet publicly defined where those steps are allowed to end.
Article 2 — Who Defines the Truth? coming soon.
Thanks for reading.
God Bless
Mark
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