Opening Address for the Abrahamic Leaders’ Dinner, Victoria
Wiradjuri Language Note: This speech uses Wiradjuri language, the language of the largest single nation on the continent. Key terms: Ngurambang (Country, law, belonging), Dhuray (connection), Winhangadhurinya (deep listening), Mandaang guwu (thank you).
Opening
Elders, faith leaders, honoured guests, I want to begin, as is right on this country, by acknowledging the Continuing Custodians of this land, the Wurrundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, whose unbroken connection to Country stretches back beyond the oldest texts of any of our traditions. Their sovereignty was never ceded, a reality is not merely a legal or political matter, it is a theological and spiritual one, as I hope to explore tonight.
In Wiradjuri country, the vast three-rivers country of central New South Wales, the largest single language group on this continent,the web of kinship and belonging is held in a single word: Ngurambang. It means Country, law, home. But it is more than any of these English words can carry alone. Ngurambang is the living relational field in which every person, every ancestor, every creature, and every place is held together. You do not exist as an individual floating free in space. You exist as a node in a vast living web. The thread running through that web is Dhuray, connection itself.
Your dignity, aka your worth, place and obligations, is not something you carry inside you like a coin in a pocket. It is something enacted between you and every other node in the web nurturing you.
Tonight we are gathered to explore the idea of Shared Human Dignity. It is a beautiful phrase, but (and there is always a but) I want to suggest to you that it may be, as it is commonly understood, a kind of philosophical sleight of hand, and confronting that honestly is the only way to make it real.
The Myth of Universal Dignity
The dominant Western idea,inherited through the Abrahamic traditions and the Enlightenment, is that human dignity is universal, intrinsic, and equal. Every person, by virtue of being human, carries this inalienable worth.
I think it is a magnificent idea, although I suspect we need to ask a different question: How is dignity actually distributed in practice?
When the English invaders arrived on these shores after Cook’s 1770 declaration of ownership, they carried with them a fully-formed theology and philosophy of human dignity. As a collective they could quote scripture and believed, sincerely, in the sacred worth of persons. Nevertheless, the people who had lived on this continent for sixty thousand years, who had developed the world’s oldest continuous spiritual tradition, had mapped every visible star, named every plant and sung every river into being, were seen not as full bearers of dignity, but as obstacles, curiosities, or children in need of civilising.
This was not a failure of the idea of universal dignity. It was a revelation of how dignity actually works in human communities, how it is distributed. It is not universal in practice. It is contextual, relational and mediated by those with power to do so. It flows from where we stand.
We extend dignity most fully and most automatically to those who are legible to us, those who share our symbols, our rites, our categories of personhood. The stranger, the other, the one who prays differently, who relates to land differently, who structures family differently, they receive a diminished version. Not because we are hypocrites (though sometimes we are), but because dignity in practice is a grammar, and we only fully speak one grammar.
The gap between declared dignity and distributed dignity is where people die. I want to show what I mean in the Australian context.
Since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody reported in 1991, 617 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody. In 2024–25, 33 Indigenous people died in custody, the highest figure in 45 years of record-keeping. The Royal Commission made 339 recommendations which have not been implemented in any meaningful aggregate sense. This is not a policy gap but a policy choice, sustained across governments of every persuasion.
The Stolen Generations, the forced removal of Aboriginal children under assimilation policies from approximately the 1910s through to the 1970s, were acknowledged in the National Apology of 2008. Rudd’s apology was given 18 years ago. And yet: As of 2024, over 20,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are in out-of-home care, representing 41% of all children in the system, despite Aboriginal children comprising only 6% of the child population. The disparity ratio has been increasing, not decreasing. The Closing the Gap target is formally assessed as worsening. The Stolen Generations did not end with the apology, they continued. Albeit, under new legal language and bureaucratic forms, but the same logic: Aboriginal families and communities cannot be trusted to raise their children.
Indigenous young people aged 10–17 are now 27 times more likely to be in detention than non-Indigenous young people, up from 15 times as likely in 2020. The non-Indigenous youth detention rate has been declining. The Indigenous rate has been rising. The minimum age of criminal responsibility in Australia remains 10 years old, one of the lowest in the developed world, and Aboriginal children are its primary objects.
Aboriginal adults comprise 37% of the Australian prison population despite being approximately 3.2% of the general population. The incarceration rate, 2,630 per 100,000 Indigenous adults as of December 2025, is approximately 16 times the non-Indigenous rate. This is not the residue of a historical problem. It is an active, growing, contemporaneous crisis.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians still die, on average, nearly nine years earlier than non-Indigenous Australians. The Closing the Gap 2031 target to close the life expectancy gap entirely is not on track. Under comparable methodologies, the gap has not meaningfully narrowed since the early 1980s.
A quarter of Australia’s workforce work in organisations with a RAP. 88% of RAP employees believe truth-telling is important to acknowledge Australia’s shared history, and 94% believe the relationship between non-Indigenous and First peoples is important for the nation; despite this the statistical outcomes noted above continue to worsen. A RAP on a shelf and dignity enacted in practice are not the same thing.
These figures are the empirical test of what we mean when we say shared human dignity. You cannot declare dignity universal while producing these numbers. The numbers are the judgement on the declaration.
This is what it looks like when dignity is distributed from a position of power rather than enacted in a reciprocal relationship. If dignity is offered as charity rather than obligation and in the grammar of worth belonging only to one party in the encounter, it is not distributed, only administered.
Dignity as Enacted, Not Declared
In Wiradjuri understanding and grammar, the world is not made of objects but of relationships. Ngurambang, Country, is not a backdrop against which human life occurs. Country is alive, relational, co-constitutive, reciprocal. You belong to Country; Country belongs to you. The river has its own dignity, its own personhood, because it exists in relationship, not because some philosopher declared it intrinsically valuable.
Dignity, in this understanding, is enacted. It is performed in the daily acts of seeing, naming, welcoming, and being accountable to one another. The Wiradjuri values say it plainly: yindyamarra: deep respect; marrumbang: love; ngumbadal: unity; winhangagigilanha: caring for each other. These are not individual virtues. They are relational practices only existing in the space between people.
The ceremony of Welcome to Country is not merely a cultural formality. It is a theological and spiritual ceremony. It says: I see you. I recognise your place in the web. I take responsibility for this encounter between us. Without that act, the encounter is not fully dignified, for either party.
If dignity is relational and enacted, then it is not enough to hold it as an abstract principle. The question is: what do you do when you actually meet the other? Do you see them? Do you hear them in their own grammar? Or do you process them through yours, translating them into categories you already have?
The Abrahamic traditions each contain deep resources for this understanding. The Hebrew tzelem Elohim, made in the image of God, is not, in its deepest understanding, a static property of individuals. It is a capacity for relationship, for response, for being called by name and answering. The Islamic karāma, the dignity conferred by God on the human person, is inseparable from the amāna, the trust and responsibility we bear toward one another and toward creation. The Christian theology of the imago Dei reaches its fullest expression not in isolation but in the community of persons, the doctrine of the Trinity itself a model of identity constituted through relationship.
The tragedy is these traditions, each rich with relational understandings of dignity, have often exported a diminished version to those they encountered, a dignity that said: you are human, and therefore we owe you certain things; but you are not fully legible to us, and so what we owe you will be managed by our categories, not yours.
This is precisely what happened and continues to happen here, on this continent, in this state. Victoria leads the country in the removal of our children, has toughened bail laws affecting our women and children, and has only accepted four of the 46 recommendations of Yoorook despite signing the first Treaty in this country with Traditional people.
The Challenge for Abrahamic Leaders
I want to speak now directly to the extraordinary people gathered in this room.
You lead communities collectively holding the spiritual lives of millions of Australians. You carry traditions, thousands of years old,Christianity, Judaism, Islam, in which we find profound resources for a genuinely relational dignity. Resources going far beyond tolerance of the other but speak of covenant, of neighbour, of the other as the site of encounter with God.
Here I need to name something honestly, with respect and without accusation.
Your traditions have not always enacted this dignity toward one another.
The centuries of Christian antisemitism such as the crusades, not to mention the long shadow of colonialism carried in the name of the Cross. The mutual suspicion between Muslim and Jewish communities, particularly in this moment of global crisis. The way religious identity can calcify into tribal boundary-marking, where the dignity we offer to our own is not quite the same as the dignity we offer to the outsider.
This is not unique to your traditions. It is descriptive of the human condition. Despite that being accepted, it is particularly painful when it occurs within traditions explicitly teaching the sacred worth of every person.
Perhaps here is where the wisdom of this land offers something profound and specific.
In this country, Indigenous peoples have encountered all three Abrahamic traditions,sometimes as agents of colonisation, sometimes as genuine partners in solidarity. Many Aboriginal Christians have made the Gospel their own in ways that have transformed it. Northern Aboriginal people’s relationships with Muslim Macassan traders, long before European contact, were characterised by remarkable mutuality and exchange. There are Jewish Australians who have stood with First Nations communities in their longest struggle.
What made the difference, in every case, was not the theology people declared. It was whether they were willing to come and stand on Country, literally and metaphorically. OIn doing so, they were open to receive the hospitality of the other, to be shaped by the encounter and not just to offer their own.
Shared human dignity,genuine shared dignity, requires that we allow the other to determine some of the terms of the encounter. This requires us to accept we are not always the ones defining what dignity looks like, what it requires, what it costs.
For your traditions, this can be a profound spiritual challenge. Because each of your traditions carries a conviction that it possesses the fullest truth about the human person. We are not asking you to abandon that conviction. I am asking what it looks like to hold that conviction alongside a genuine openness to being surprised, being formed, being redeemed by the dignity of the other.
An Invitation
In Wiradjuri, there is a word: Winhangadhurinya.
It means meditation, deep listening, knowing, and reflecting,all woven into one. It shares its root with winhangagigilanha,caring for each other, because in Wiradjuri understanding, to truly listen is to care.
The act of listening is the act of love.
Winhangadhurinya is not a technique, instead it is a spiritual discipline. It provides us with a way of extending dignity to the other by allowing their reality to land before you shape it. It is the opposite of translating everything immediately into your own grammar.
I want to suggest to you, as you gather here tonight, and as you continue your conversations in the weeks and months ahead, that this is the practice your traditions most need from one another, and most need in relation to this land and its First Peoples.
Not agreement nor the collapse of difference nor a monoculture, but Winhangadhurinya. Deep listening. The willingness to be present to a dignity unlike yours, spoken in another’s grammar, existing outside your categories, and holding such presence as a sacred act.
The question is not whether we believe in shared human dignity. The question is whether we are willing to let it be truly shared, which means letting it be shaped by the other, not just extended from us to the other.
The oldest continuous spiritual tradition on earth has something to teach the Abrahamic traditions about this. Not because Aboriginal spirituality is primitive or preparatory, but because it has, for sixty thousand years, sustained a way of being in relationship — held in the word Ngurambang, woven together through Dhuray, practised daily as Winhangadhurinya —not requiring the erasure of the other in order to know itself.
This is the gift I offer you. I invite you, tonight, to receive it.
Mandaang guwu.
Wiradjuri Glossary
Key terms used in this speech, from Wiradjuri language (central New South Wales):
Ngurambang — Country, law, and ancestral belonging — the living relational field connecting people, place, and law.
Dhuray — Connection — the thread of relationship between people, animals, land, and water.
Winhangadhurinya — Deep listening, meditation, knowing and reflecting — the practice of still, receptive awareness.
Yindyamarra — Deep respect — one of the foundational Wiradjuri relational values.
Marrumbang — Love.
Ngumbadal — Unity.
Winhangagigilanha — Caring for each other.
Mandaang guwu — Thank you.
Statistical Sources
The statistics cited in Part One are drawn from the following sources:
Australian Institute of Criminology (2025). National Deaths in Custody Program — Statistical Report 57. AIC, Canberra.
AIHW (2024). Child Protection Australia 2023–24. AIHW, Canberra.
AIHW (2024). Youth Detention Population in Australia 2024. AIHW, Canberra.
ABS (2025). Corrective Services Australia, December Quarter 2025. ABS, Canberra.
ABS (2024). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Life Expectancy, 2020–2022. ABS, Canberra.
Productivity Commission (2024). Closing the Gap Data Dashboard: Outcome Areas 10, 11, 12.
Yoorrook Justice Commission (2025). Final Report. Tabled Victorian Parliament, 1 July 2025.