Policy can’t grant what only hearts can give

This year marks a watershed moment in Australia’s long and fraught journey toward justice and reconciliation. In Melbourne on 12 November 2025, the State of Victoria formally signed the country’s long-awaited first treaty with its First Peoples, under the framework of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria. The agreement enshrines in law a structure for truth-telling, a recognitional shift in power and voice, and a pathway toward reparative and institutional reform.

This has lessons for all the other states and territories in Australia as well as the Commonwealth.

Yet the signing also brings into sharp relief a deeper question – how does a society burdened by structural harms find a way to build a shared future when forgiveness remains a voluntary, deeply personal act, not something that can be produced by legislation?

For Indigenous Victorians, the treaty offers the recognition and agency long denied; for the broader community, it offers the hope of a healed national relationship built on justice. For public policy, it presents a test-case – can political institutions create the conditions under which forgiveness might arise, without assuming it or demanding it?

Victoria’s treaty’s promise lies in constructing a serious architecture of relational repair, through truth-telling, reparations, meaningful structural reform, so that forgiveness becomes possible, rather than being forced. In doing so, the Victorian treaty invites us to rethink the very meaning of “moving on” – not as forgetting or excusing past harm, but as transforming the terms under which we coexist, acknowledging that unconditional release cannot come until accountability and recognition have done their work.

Forgiveness has long occupied the private corner of society, a virtue of individual character, a difficult generosity extended from one person to another. In most cultural and religious traditions, forgiveness is something whispered, not legislated; granted, not claimed; offered, not extracted. It has always belonged to the realm of conscience, not statute. And yet the political world keeps returning to it, as if no society scarred by injustice can avoid wrestling with the question – how do we live together again after harm?

This tension is especially sharp in countries like Australia, where historical dispossession, racial injustice, and structural inequality have left wounds that will not heal on their own. It is equally present in post-conflict nations elsewhere, South Africa, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, where truth commissions and transitional justice mechanisms tried to offer both justice and release without fully achieving either. Forgiveness has become inseparable from public policy because collective life demands some method of reckoning with past wrongs. And yet forgiveness itself resists being absorbed into the machinery of the state.

An Ethical Paradox

Here lies the ethical paradox – forgiveness cannot be mandated without betraying its essence, but a society burdened by cumulative harms cannot build a shared future without some form of moral release from its past. The challenge for policymakers is not to require forgiveness, that would be a further violation, but to cultivate the conditions under which it may become possible. Forgiveness is a social capacity – a way of loosening the grip of historical injuries so that people and institutions can imagine futures not wholly determined by the cruelties of yesterday.

But this capacity does not appear spontaneously, and it certainly does not appear under coercion. It requires political architecture, not just moral pressure, structural reform, not sentimental appeals. It requires truth-telling, tangible reparation, institutional humility, and a serious redistribution of power. Without these, talk of forgiveness becomes not only hollow, but harmful.

Private forgiveness is morally meaningful precisely because it is voluntary. It is a refusal to let harm wholly define one’s moral horizon. It can be painful, costly, and transformative. But when political institutions invoke forgiveness, particularly in contexts of colonisation, systemic injustice, or state violence, the landscape changes. The power imbalance alters the moral meaning of the act.

A survivor forgiving an offender is one thing. A state asking survivors to forgive the state is another entirely.

States have police forces, court systems, prisons, budgets, legislatures, and coercive power. Citizens, by contrast, have their stories, their wounds, and their demands for justice. When a government gestures toward a language of forgiveness without first addressing the asymmetry of power, it risks reenacting the very injustices it claims to redress. In this sense, the greatest ethical danger of public forgiveness is that it may be used to excuse inaction – let us forgive and move on, the rhetoric goes, before anything substantive has changed.

The Politics of Forgiveness

Forgiveness becomes political precisely when injustice is political. A person who has been insulted may forgive privately. A people who have been dispossessed cannot. Their suffering is structural, intergenerational, and ongoing. Any meaningful ethic of public forgiveness must begin by recognising this distinction.

Even though forgiveness cannot be mandated, societies cannot simply avoid the question either. A community that refuses to look backward cannot look forward with clarity. Historical wrongs do not dissipate through neglect; they accumulate, hardening into resentment, mistrust, and cultural fracture. A nation that pretends to “move on” while leaving inequity untouched simply buries its past alive.

This is why South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its flaws, remains a reference point in debates about national healing. The TRC did not insist that victims forgive their oppressors. Instead, it attempted, imperfectly, to create a space where truth could be spoken publicly and heard collectively. Whether or not this led to personal forgiveness was beside the point; what mattered was that the nation could at least acknowledge the reality of its past rather than live in denial.

Similarly, in Australia, the Uluru Statement from the Heart does not provide forgiveness. It asks for recognition, voice, and structural reform, the preconditions for any moral repair. It understands, as all serious political ethics must, that no group can be expected to forgive a system that continues to harm them.

And yet even when forgiveness is not spoken aloud, the desire for release persists beneath the surface. The national psyche strains under the weight of unfinished histories. People want to believe that reconciliation is possible, even if they disagree about what that reconciliation requires. Politicians want to close the chapter so they can govern in the present. Citizens want to stop fighting over the past so they can imagine something better for the future.

This longing does not make forgiveness a matter for legislation. But it does make it a matter for policy design.

In public contexts, forgiveness cannot be demanded, incentivised, or administratively nudged without losing its moral integrity. Consider a truth commission that urges victims to forgive perpetrators as part of its official process. Such an institution may appear to promote reconciliation, but it inadvertently places a moral burden on victims rather than on those who inflicted harm. It transforms forgiveness into a civic duty, a requirement for national unity, rather than a personal moral choice.

More troublingly, mandated forgiveness can mask unresolved power dynamics. If a government calls for forgiveness while continuing unjust policies, the rhetoric becomes a tool of domination – we apologise; now stop complaining. This weaponisation of forgiveness has occurred repeatedly in colonial contexts, including here in Australia. Governments issue symbolic gestures without altering the material conditions of those harmed. This is not reconciliation; it is public relations.

Even well-meaning policymakers can fall into this trap. The language of “moving forward,” “healing,” and “unity” is politically attractive because it suggests closure. But closure is not something a government can legislate into existence. It must be earned through justice.

Thus, the first ethical rule of public forgiveness is simple – the state cannot ask for forgiveness until it has done everything within its power to rectify the harm. And even then, it must never expect it.

Public institutions must understand their place in the moral sequence. Truth precedes reconciliation; reparations precede forgiveness; justice precedes healing.

Practical Measures

If forgiveness cannot be mandated, what can policymakers do? The answer lies not in moral exhortation but in structural transformation.

1. Truth-Telling

Truth-telling is an institutional acknowledgment of responsibility. It requires governments to listen, not dictate; to admit wrongdoing, not justify it; to document harm, not obscure it. Properly designed truth-telling processes do not ask victims to forgive. They ask society to listen with seriousness and humility.

Australia’s emerging truth-telling commissions, such as the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria, are important examples. Their purpose is not to extract forgiveness but to create a shared factual foundation for future policy. Without truth, forgiveness is premature; without truth, justice is impossible. There are many things the Federal Government, and other states and territories can take away from this.

2. Reparations

Reparations, financial, institutional, territorial, educational, or symbolic, are not acts of generosity. They are acts of responsibility. They acknowledge that harm has costs, and those costs are borne unequally. Reparations shift the burden from the wounded to the offenders, and from the present generations suffering injustice to the descendants and institutions that benefited from it.

Reparations do not purchase forgiveness. They make future coexistence ethically plausible.

3. Structural Reform

No amount of apology or symbolic gesture can substitute for structural change. If the systems that produced the harm remain in place, then forgiveness becomes an unreasonable expectation. Structural reform may include constitutional recognition, shifts in governance, redistribution of authority, reforms to policing and justice systems, and changes to public spending priorities.

These reforms are the preconditions for a society in which forgiveness might one day become imaginable. Without them, any call for forgiveness is a demand for acquiescence.

Forgiveness, when it arises, is a sign that certain conditions have been met – that harms have been acknowledged, that injustice has been addressed, that dignity has been restored. It is not a response that governments can command, nor even one they can fully predict. But they can make it more likely by transforming the conditions under which citizens relate to one another.

Just as importantly, policymakers must understand that forgiveness is not the only moral response to injustice. Some individuals or communities may choose never to forgive, and that choice is ethically legitimate. Justice does not require forgiveness. A decent society must be robust enough to accommodate both those who forgive and those who refuse.

Indeed, sometimes refusing to forgive is itself a moral stance, a refusal to normalise violence, a refusal to allow history to be rewritten, a refusal to grant cheap moral absolution. A state that insists on universal forgiveness will simply create another injustice.

Forgiveness, when it occurs, should be understood as a social possibility, not a moral duty.

Policymakers often yearn for closure, a sense that the difficult past has been resolved and that the nation can move forward. But closure is a psychological concept, not a legislative one. What states can strive for instead is coexistence with integrity – a future in which people can live together respectfully even when their experiences of the past differ.

Coexistence does not require forgiveness from everyone. It requires justice, respect, equality, and shared institutions that protect the vulnerable. It requires a political culture in which truth is not feared, in which historical memory is not weaponised, and in which no group’s trauma is treated as an inconvenience.

A nation that prioritises these values may one day see the emergence of forgiveness in the private sphere. But even if it does not, it can still build a future that honours dignity and fosters trust.

Forgiveness cannot be legislated. It cannot be mandated, requested, or insinuated into policy language. It is too delicate, too intimate, too morally significant to be bent to the purposes of the state.

But the absence of state-mandated forgiveness does not absolve governments of responsibility. On the contrary, it makes their task more demanding. Policymakers must build the conditions in which forgiveness becomes possible, through truth-telling, reparations, and structural reform, while never presuming that forgiveness will follow.

The measure of a just society is whether the political community does everything within its power to make forgiveness unnecessary, because justice has already done its work.

Until then, the most ethical stance the state can take is humility – to repair what can be repaired, reform what must be reformed, and give those who have suffered most the dignity of choosing their own response.

Forgiveness is a gift of the human spirit. Public policy cannot command it. But it can, if guided by courage and compassion, make space for it to arise, freely, authentically, and on terms defined by those who were harmed, not those who seek absolution.