'At the end of the day, we're all human, aren't we?': Relationality as a rationale for judicial cross-cultural education.

Since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, judicial education in Indigenous contexts has been recognised as an important undertaking, but judicial officers, academics, and Indigenous stakeholders prioritise different rationales for such programs. In this presentation, I will outline a typology of three rationales emerging from the literature, which I have categorised as pragmatic, ethical and critical. I applied this typology to an analysis of 18 interviews conducted with judicial officers and Aboriginal participants following three on-Country immersion programs for judges in Western Australia held between 2016 and 2022. In the interviews, both groups were asked why they felt judicial officers should undertake cross-cultural education. While participants’ responses reflected those found in the literature, both cohorts also identified a fourth rationale that is absent from the scholarship: relational. Taking judicial officers out of the courtroom and ‘on-Country’ shifts the balance of power and opens opportunities for judges and Aboriginal people to experience a reciprocal exchange. I argue that a focus on the relational can move the cross-cultural program beyond simply ‘professional development’ to an opportunity for all participants to experience a shared humanity. This presentation is a work-in-progress of a paper currently under review for a special issue journal on Indigenous-context education in the Law. An early iteration was discussed at a workshop of legal and socio-legal scholars at the University of Sydney in June 2025. The paper will comprise a chapter of my PhD, which I am completing by publication at POLIS—The Centre for Social Policy Research, at the ANU. Funding is from the WA Crime Statistics and Research Criminal Justice Grant at the Western Australian Department of Justice (Department).[1] [1] The views expressed in this presentation are my own and should not be considered as either endorsed by the Department or an expression of the policies or view of the Department. Any errors of omission or commission are the responsibility of the researcher.