What is Culturally Safe Practice

Culturally safe practice begins with an acknowledgement that meaning is never fixed. Our understanding of people, communities, and experiences is shaped by context, relationships, history, and the social constructs through which we interpret the world. The way we make sense of culture, identity, power, and belonging is influenced by our own assumptions, lived experiences, and the environments in which we work. Consequently, there is often a gap between what we intend to communicate, and how our actions are experienced by others. The gap referred to is not necessarily the result of ill intent; more often, it reflects the complexity of human interaction and the influence of unconscious beliefs and systemic structures.

Community & Social services operate within environments of constant change. Social expectations evolve, communities diversify, and new understandings of equity, inclusion, and self-determination continue to emerge. Ethical practice therefore requires practitioners to remain responsive to changing conditions, critically examine the potential risks before them, and recognise the vulnerability that exists for both service users and professionals.

Cultural safety is not achieved through certainty or mastery, but through ongoing reflection, humility, and a willingness to question deeply held assumptions.

The process of cultural safety demands that we experience both comfort whilst simultaneously experiencing discomfort. It requires practitioners to embrace the uncertainty, avoid seeking definitive answers and recognising that genuine learning often begins with acknowledging what we do not know. Cultural safety is acquired through transformative learning, where growth occurs through reflection on beliefs, values and practice.

To truly know is not simply to accumulate knowledge. It is to engage in a continuous process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Deconstruction challenges the assumptions, power structures, and dominant narratives that shape our understanding of culture and practice. Reconstruction involves creating a new ways of thinking ,and by being informed by our own critical reflection, listening authentically to the diverse perspectives of others, and most importantly engaging in authentic partnerships.

The Courage to Not Know

There is a peculiar confidence that often accompanies professional practice. We are trained to assess, diagnose, analyse, intervene and evaluate. We are rewarded for competence, expertise and certainty. Communities expect us to know, organisations require us to know, and our professional identities are often built upon the assumption that knowing is the beginning of good practice.

Yet cultural safety asks something radically different of us.

It asks whether what we know is enough.

More importantly, it asks how we came to know it in the first place.

Cultural safety is not a checklist, a competency or a destination. It is an ongoing ethical practice of questioning what we know, recognising the limitations of our perspectives, and remaining open to being changed by our encounters with others. One of the greatest barrier to culturally safe practice is rarely ignorance. More often, it is certainty, the quiet confidence that our understanding is complete.

The courage to not know is therefore the first act of cultural safety.

This courage is difficult because uncertainty feels uncomfortable. Human beings naturally seek coherence and predictability. We construct stories about the world that help us make sense of our experiences, and over time these stories become so familiar that we mistake them for reality itself. We rarely notice the lens through which we are looking because we have always looked through it.

Culture is one of those lenses.

Culture is not simply a collection of customs, traditions or beliefs. It is the often unseen way people interpret the world, make meaning, build relationships and understand what it means to live well. Culture shapes how we experience family, authority, identity, grief, celebration, belonging and hope. Like a lens, it is largely invisible to the person looking through it, yet profoundly influences everything they see.

Perhaps this is why culture can be so difficult to recognise. We cannot easily see the lens through which we ourselves are looking.

This challenge finds an interesting parallel in the spiritual tradition of St Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius encouraged people to cultivate the discipline of seeing God in all things—not because God was absent, but because our perception was limited. The task was not to create God's presence but to become attentive to what had always been there.

Seeing culture requires a similar discipline.

Culture is not always obvious. It exists in the everyday rhythms of life, in relationships, language, values, silence, humour, obligation, memory and identity. It is the living expression of what gives people meaning and coherence. Like the transcendent realities described by Ignatius, culture cannot always be measured or reduced to a checklist. It must first be noticed.

Learning to notice demands discipline.

It requires us to question assumptions that have become comfortable. It asks us to sit with complexity rather than rush towards certainty. It invites us to remain curious when simple answers would feel safer. This is difficult because uncertainty creates vulnerability, and vulnerability is something most professionals have been taught to avoid. In a society characterised by continual change, certainty provides psychological safety, even when it limits ethical practice.

The concept of social construction challenges us precisely because it unsettles this comfort. If our understandings of family, professionalism, success, authority or even normality are socially constructed, then they are neither universal nor inevitable. They have been shaped by history, language, institutions and relationships. Recognising this is not an invitation to abandon truth; it is an invitation to become more humble about our own.

Humility matters because power determines whose knowledge counts.

Knowledge is never neutral. Some voices are amplified while others are ignored. Some ways of knowing become policy, legislation and professional standards, while others are dismissed as anecdotal or subjective. This imbalance has profound consequences for Aboriginal peoples across metropolitan, rural and remote Australia. Too often, opportunities to influence systems, shape decisions and define solutions have been constrained by historical exclusion, structural inequality and the ongoing effects of colonisation. Communities whose knowledge has sustained generations are frequently subjected to scrutiny rather than recognised as equal partners in understanding what contributes to wellbeing.

When people's knowledge does not count, neither does their experience.

Cultural safety therefore asks more than whether we value diversity. It asks whether we are willing to examine the systems that determine whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is trusted and whose perspectives shape practice. This is where transformation begins.

Transformation is not about acquiring more information about other cultures. It is about changing the way we come to know. Before we can reconstruct a more culturally safe practice, we must first have the courage to deconstruct the assumptions that have quietly shaped our own.

The journey begins, not with certainty, but with the courage to say: Perhaps there is more to see than I have yet learned to notice.

Cultural safety is not sustained by guilt; it is sustained by responsibility. Responsibility begins with acknowledging that the systems we inherit are not the same as the systems we choose to reproduce.

When we understand that knowledge has so often been shaped by power, we also recognise that it can be reshaped through relationships. Every respectful conversation, every act of gracious listening, every decision to share power, and every willingness to remain open contributes to a different way of practising.

Change rarely begins with sweeping reform. More often, it begins with individuals who develop the courage to question what has always seemed normal.

Valuing difference requires more than celebrating diversity. It asks us to become genuinely interested in perspectives that challenge our own. By no means is this comfortable, especially when difference disrupts certainty. Hidden assumptions invite us into conversations where there are no answers. Yet it is this precise discomfort that fertilises the seed of growth. Carl Jung observed, that we do not become whole by avoiding what lies hidden within us, but by bringing it into consciousness. In much the same way, cultural safety invites us to recognise the unseen beliefs and biases that shape our practice.

There is a temptation to seek cultural safety as though it were a destination, a point at which we can finally say that we understand another culture well enough to practise safely. Such certainty is both unattainable and undesirable. Cultural safety is better understood as an orientation rather than an achievement. It is a commitment to ongoing learning, critical reflection and ethical responsiveness. It asks not, Have I learned enough? but rather, Am I still willing to learn?

Perhaps this is what we most desire from cultural safety

Not perfection, but deeper understanding.

Not certainty, but curiosity.

Not expertise over others, but relationships with others.

Not the elimination of difference, but the capacity to value difference as a source of wisdom rather than a problem to be solved.

If cultural safety changes anything, it first changes the practitioner. It reshapes the way we see ourselves, the people we work alongside and the communities we serve. It reminds us that our task is not to become experts in other people's cultures but to become more attentive, more humble and more willing to be transformed by the encounter itself.

The work of reconstruction begins when we have the courage to examine the assumptions that have shaped our knowing. Imagine becoming free to build a practice that is grounded not in certainty, but in relationship.

Learning to See With More Than Our Eyes

We often assume that what we see is reality.

It is not.

What we see is reality as it has been interpreted through our experiences, our relationships, our education, our history and our culture.

We often assume that what we see is reality

It is not.

What we see is reality as it has been interpreted through our experiences, our relationships, our education, our history and our culture. Imagine driving to work one morning. A lone cockatoo catches your attention. Moments later, a flock circles overhead, and from the corner of your eye two crows settle on an electrical wire. We have all witnessed the same scene, yet we may not have experienced the same reality.

One person simply notices birds and wonders whether they might leave a mess on the car. Another barely notices them at all, distracted by a phone conversation or the demands of the day ahead. Someone with an interest in birdlife may identify the species, observe their behaviour and delight in the encounter. What I see is communication. The cockatoos are there to invite me to listen, while the crows remind me to distinguish wisdom from gossip, truth from noise, and what deserves my attention from what merely competes for it.

Which interpretation is correct?

Perhaps that is the wrong question.

The point is not whether the birds carry symbolic meaning. The point is that every one of us brings a different way of knowing to the same experience. Our perception is never simply about what is before our eyes. It is shaped by our memories, beliefs, culture, relationships and expectations. We do not merely observe the world; we participate in creating its meaning.

Cultural safety begins when we recognise that the people we meet are also making meaning through their own experiences. If we assume that our interpretation is the only reality, we close ourselves to understanding theirs. If, instead, we become curious about how another person has come to see the world as they do, we take our first step towards genuine cultural safety 

Learning to see with more than our eyes means becoming attentive not only to what is visible, but also to the stories, histories, emotions, relationships and ways of knowing that give the visible its meaning.

Every society develops stories about itself. Over time these stories become so familiar that they are no longer recognised as stories. They become "common sense". We stop asking where they came from because they appear to have always existed.

This is what we mean by a social construct.

A social construct is not a lie.

Nor is it an objective truth.

It is an idea, belief or way of organising the world that exists because people collectively agree to treat it as real. Money, borders, professionalism, race, status, success and even normality derive much of their meaning from shared human agreement rather than inherent physical reality.

Social constructs are powerful because they influence what we notice, what we ignore and what we accept without question. They shape our expectations of ourselves and of others. They become the lenses through which we experience the world.

The challenge for cultural safety is that we often mistake these lenses for reality itself.

Learning to see therefore requires more than opening our eyes.

It requires learning to notice what our eyes alone cannot perceive.

To hear the stories that have not been told.

To sense discomfort before we understand its source.

To pay attention to silence as carefully as words.

To recognise the significance of place, relationship, memory and history.

To become attentive to the assumptions we carry into every encounter.

Seeing, in this sense, is an act of ethical attentiveness.

It is not passive observation.

It is the disciplined practice of becoming aware of what has always been present but has remained unnoticed. Cultural safety is less about challenging what we see and more about becoming curious about how we have come to see it.

For many practitioners, this feels unfamiliar. The language of culture can seem complex, politically charged or overwhelming. We worry about saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong question or exposing our own lack of knowledge. Suddenly, what we confidently practise in every other aspect of our professional lives feels uncertain.

Community and social service professionals are already highly skilled in reflective practice. We regularly examine our decisions, question our interventions, evaluate outcomes and consider how our values influence our work. Reflection is embedded within supervision, professional development and ethical practice. We understand that growth requires us to pause, examine our thinking and consider alternative perspectives.

So why does reflection become so much more difficult when culture enters the conversation?

Perhaps it is because we imagine cultural safety as something separate from reflective practice, rather than recognising it as one of its deepest expressions. Reflection asks us to examine our actions. Critical reflection asks us to examine our assumptions. Cultural safety asks us to examine how those assumptions have been shaped by culture, history, power and lived experience.The methodology has not changed. The context has.

When practitioners encounter cultural safety, they often experience it as a tangled ball of complexity that must somehow be unravelled before they can begin. The conversations seem bigger, the history more confronting, and the possibility of getting it wrong more intimidating. The result is that many people either retreat into silence or search for simple answers to questions that have no simple answers.

Yet perhaps we have made cultural safety more complicated than it needs to be. The same reflective disciplines we use every day can guide us here. Instead of asking, "What happened?" we might ask, "How did I make meaning of what happened?" Instead of asking, "Why did I respond that way?" we might ask, "What assumptions shaped my response?" Instead of asking, "What could I do differently?" we might ask, "What different way of knowing might I need to consider?" These are not different questions. They are deeper questions.

Cultural safety does not require us to abandon reflective practice. It invites us to extend it. The task is not to unravel culture as though it were an impossible knot. The task is to patiently untangle the assumptions that shape our own understanding. Each reflection gently loosens another thread. Over time, what once appeared chaotic begins to reveal its pattern. Understanding does not emerge from finding the right answer. It emerges from learning to ask better questions.

Ethical community service delivery requires us to be reflective. It encourages practitioners to pause, examine their actions and consider how their thinking influences their practice. This remains an indispensable discipline. Cultural safety invite us to go one step further, it invites us to also examine what has happened.

If we consider a psychoanalytic perspective, curiosity then sits in what was or is happening beneath what happened.

Professor Russell Meares' Conversational Model reminds us that people come to know themselves through relationship. Meaning is not simply exchanged through conversation; it is created within it. Every interaction contains spoken words, but also silence, emotion, memory, expectation and unconscious assumptions. There is always a conversation beneath the conversation.

Cultural safety invites us to become attentive to both.

When we enter a conversation, we do not arrive as neutral observers. We bring our histories, identities, professional training, cultural assumptions, anxieties and hopes. The person sitting opposite us does the same. The encounter therefore becomes much more than an exchange of information. It becomes a meeting of two worlds of meaning.

Perhaps this is where reflective practice can deepen and merge into cultural safety.

Rather than asking only, What did I say?, we might ask, What was I communicating without words?

Rather than asking, Why did the conversation become difficult?, we might ask, What assumptions, fears or histories were present that neither of us could yet name

Rather than asking, How can I solve this problem?, we might ask, What is this relationship inviting me to understand about myself and about the other person?

These questions are not intended to make cultural safety more complex. They simply acknowledge that human relationships are more complex than our professional frameworks sometimes allow.

The work of cultural safety is therefore not merely reflective. It is relational. It requires us to become increasingly aware of the visible and invisible dynamics that shape every encounter.

In this sense, learning to see with more than our eyes also means learning to listen with more than our ears. It means attending to the conversation beneath the conversation, where meaning is continually being created, challenged and transformed.

Notice Power

Most meaningful conversations do not begin with what matters most.

When we meet a close friend, we rarely begin by speaking about our deepest fears, our greatest griefs and or our most profound hopes. We greet one another. We settle ourselves into each other's presence. We exchange stories about our day, our families, our work or the weather. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, something begins to shift.

The conversation deepens.

There comes a moment when words are no longer simply exchanged. Something more significant begins to emerge. We begin speaking, not merely about events, but about ourselves. We risk revealing what lies beneath the surface. We move from information to meaning.

These are the conversations we long for.

They cannot be hurried.

They cannot be demanded.

They cannot be manufactured through technique.

They are made possible through trust.

Trust creates the conditions in which people begin to speak from a place of inwardness, from that deeply personal place where identity, experience, memory and hope come together. It is here that culture becomes visible, not as a concept to be explained, but as a lived reality to be shared.

Yet there is another presence in every conversation.

Power

Power determines who feels safe enough to speak.

Power influences whose stories are believed, whose questions are welcomed and whose silence is misunderstood.

Power is not always loud.

Often it is almost invisible.

It is present in professional titles, organisational authority, social expectations, historical relationships and cultural norms. It is present in who asks the questions, who records the answers, who writes the reports and who ultimately decides what those answers mean.

Power also exists within ourselves.

It is found in our need to be competent, to be certain, to be accepted and to be recognised as knowledgeable. Sometimes our desire to help can become a subtle exercise of power, because helping can unintentionally position one person as the expert and another as the recipient. Without reflection, our professional certainty can leave little room for another person's way of knowing.

Perhaps this is why cultural safety requires us to notice power before we attempt to change it. Power is rarely sustained because people are malicious.More often, it is sustained because it has become normal.

Like culture itself, power is often most influential when it remains unseen.

One of the most subtle expressions of power is found in our desire to help.

Community and social service professionals rarely enter the profession because they wish to dominate others. Quite the opposite. Most are deeply committed to improving lives, reducing suffering and creating opportunities for people to flourish. Yet good intentions do not exempt us from reflecting on how power operates within our relationships.

Helping always carries the possibility of creating an imbalance.

When we arrive with education, professional authority and organisational legitimacy, we bring forms of power that may not be immediately visible to us. We ask questions, complete assessments, develop plans and connect people with services. These actions are often necessary and compassionate. However, they can also unintentionally communicate that we are the ones who know, while the other person becomes the one who receives.

This dynamic becomes even more complex when authentic relationships begin to develop.

As practitioners, we often strive to create safety, trust and connection. We listen deeply. We share moments of vulnerability. We laugh together, sit with grief together and celebrate progress together. For a time, the relationship may feel deeply mutual. The participant may experience genuine belonging and believe that they have finally found someone who sees them, values them and will walk alongside them.

From the practitioner's perspective, this relationship exists within professional boundaries and organisational realities. Caseloads change. Funding cycles end. Roles are restructured. New crises emerge. Practitioners move on because the work requires them to.

The participant experiences something very different. What felt like a relationship of mutual respect can suddenly become another experience of abandonment. Questions emerge that are rarely spoken aloud. Was I not important enough? Did I misunderstand what this relationship meant? Why did the conversation stop? Why was I left behind?These questions reveal something profound about power.

The practitioner always knew the relationship had limits. The participant may not have experienced those limits in the same way. This is not simply disappointment.

For many people, particularly those whose lives have already been marked by trauma, exclusion or repeated experiences of institutional failure, it can become a form of moral injury. Trust was not only invested in an individual practitioner; it was invested in the possibility that this time the relationship might be different.

For many Aboriginal communities, this experience has been repeated across generations. Governments, agencies and institutions have arrived with promises of partnership, consultation and change. Communities have shared stories, knowledge and aspirations. They have participated in yarning circles, advisory groups and consultations with genuine hope that their voices would shape decisions.

Too often, the conversations end. Reports are written. Funding priorities change. Governments change. People move on, whilst communities remain.

The injury is not simply that change failed to occur. The injury lies in the repeated experience of being invited into relationship, encouraged to trust, and then left to carry the silence that follows. Like the ending of an important relationship without explanation, the absence itself becomes a message. It can leave communities questioning whether they were truly heard or whether their participation served purposes other than their own.

This is why cultural safety asks us to notice power not only in what we do, but in the expectations our relationships create.

Ethical practice requires more than good intentions. It requires honesty about the limits of our role, humility about the power we carry and a commitment to ensuring that the relationships we build strengthen people's agency rather than unintentionally deepen their dependence on us.

The deepest expression of culturally safe practice is not to become indispensable. It is to ensure that people leave our relationships with greater dignity, greater voice and greater power than when they first entered them.

The work of cultural safety is therefore not to deny power, nor to feel guilty for possessing it. Rather, it is to become conscious of how power shapes every encounter and to ask whether our relationships create space for mutual dignity, shared meaning and genuine partnership.

Every conversation offers us a choice. Will this encounter reinforce existing power, or will it become a place where power is shared? The answer begins, not with policy, but with the way we choose to be present to another human being.

Power is not simply about who holds authority today. Power is also about memory.

Every encounter carries with it the echoes of encounters that came before. People do not enter relationships as blank slates. They bring histories of trust and distrust, experiences of being heard and ignored, moments of dignity and moments of exclusion. Communities do the same.

For Aboriginal communities, relationships with government and community service systems are understood within a much longer relational history. Colonisation, dispossession, the Stolen Generations, exclusion from decision-making and repeated cycles of consultation without enduring change are not isolated historical events. They have shaped how many communities experience contemporary relationships with institutions.

Consequently, today's conversation is rarely experienced as only today's conversation. It sits within a much longer story.

This understanding changes the way we think about power. Power is not simply exercised through legislation, organisational authority or professional expertise. It is also exercised through the consistency, or inconsistency, of relationships. It is expressed in whether communities experience themselves as genuine partners or as participants in yet another conversation whose outcome has already been determined.

When those relationships cannot be sustained, the injury extends beyond disappointment. The injury lies in the mismatch between the relationship that was experienced and the relationship the system was capable of sustaining. This is the sense in which I use the term moral injury. While the concept has its origins in describing the psychological and ethical impact of events that violate deeply held moral beliefs, I use it here to describe the cumulative relational injury that occurs when systems repeatedly invite trust, encourage participation and create hope, yet fail to sustain the reciprocity those relationships appear to promise.

The moral injury is not caused simply because a relationship ends. Relationships naturally change and conclude. Rather, the injury emerges when people experience themselves as having entered a relationship of mutual respect, only to discover that the relationship was always constrained by institutional realities that were not equally visible to both parties.

For many Aboriginal communities, this pattern has been repeated across generations. Consultation has often been sincere at the level of individual practitioners, yet constrained by systems that cannot consistently honour the relationships they encourage. Each new engagement is therefore interpreted not only through the intentions of those present, but through the remembered experience of those who came before.

This is why cultural safety cannot be reduced to individual competence. It requires systems capable of sustaining the relationships they ask communities to invest in.

The persistent over-representation of Aboriginal children in Australia's out-of-home care system reminds us that these questions are not merely theoretical. They reveal enduring imbalances of power and invite us to ask difficult questions about whose knowledge informs decisions, whose voices shape interventions and whose understanding of family, safety and wellbeing becomes the dominant framework for action.

These are not questions intended to induce guilt. They are questions intended to cultivate responsibility. Cultural safety asks us to notice where power has become normal, where relationships have become transactional and where trust has been unintentionally eroded. Only by noticing these patterns can we begin the work of reconstructing systems that honour the dignity, knowledge and sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples.

To deconstruct power is not to reject it. Nor is it to deny that some people hold greater authority, knowledge or responsibility than others. Rather, it is to recognise that power is always present, always shaping relationships and always influencing how meaning is created.

The work of reconstruction begins when we stop asking, How can I use my power well? and begin asking, How can my power create greater power in others?

Cultural safety is not achieved when power disappears. It is achieved when power becomes conscious, accountable and relational. When authority creates agency rather than dependence. When expertise invites wisdom rather than replacing it. When conversations become partnerships rather than interventions. When systems become capable of sustaining the trust they ask communities to invest in.

Perhaps this is the deepest reconstruction of all. We cease to understand power as something we possess. Instead, we begin to understand it as something we hold in trust.

Power is no longer measured by our capacity to influence others. It is measured by our willingness to create the conditions in which others can exercise their own voice, agency and sovereignty. Only then does power become an expression of cultural safety rather than an obstacle to it.

Courage to remain

From childhood we are taught to ask, "Can we fix it?" and to celebrate the response, "Yes, we can!" Professional practice often reinforces the same instinct. We are trained to identify problems, develop solutions and implement change. Yet cultural safety invites a different question. Before asking, "Can we fix it?", we might first ask, "Have we truly understood it?" Sometimes the most courageous response is not to rush towards the solution, but to remain in the relationship long enough for understanding to emerge.

We live in a society that values solutions. When something is broken, we fix it.When a system fails, we redesign it. When evidence identifies a problem, we develop a new framework, implement a new policy or introduce a new model of practice.

The movement from problem to solution is deeply embedded within professional life. Yet cultural safety invites us to question whether every problem is ready to be solved.

Not everything that is dismantled is immediately rebuilt.

There is a space between deconstruction and reconstruction that modern practice often overlooks. It is an uncomfortable space, probably why most people and practitioners want to avoid it. A space without certainty can feel very difficult for many people.

Without clear outcomes and without immediate answers, leaves many professionals are rarely taught how to remain here.

Instead, we are rewarded for action.

Government policies, organisational reforms and evidence-based initiatives frequently move rapidly from recognising a problem to implementing a solution. The pressure to respond is understandable. Communities deserve action. Practitioners want to improve outcomes. Leaders are expected to lead.

Yet there is a danger in rebuilding too quickly.

If we reconstruct before we have truly understood what has been dismantled, we risk rebuilding the same assumptions in different language.

The framework changes, but the thinking doesn't. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing culturally safe practice within Community services. The work is not simply to change systems, it is about allowing ourselves to be changed, before we change systems. Holding this tension requires a very different kind of courage.

Reflecting upon this journey, I cannot help but return to the work of Carl Jung and his description of holding the tension of opposites. At first glance, this may appear to be a psychological concept with little relevance to community services or cultural safety. Yet the more I reflect upon it, the more I believe it sits at the very heart of culturally safe practice.

Jung observed that human beings have a remarkable tendency to seek resolution. We are uncomfortable with uncertainty. When confronted with competing truths, conflicting values or opposing perspectives, our instinct is often to choose one position and reject the other. Certainty provides relief. Ambiguity demands emotional effort.

Yet Jung proposed something profoundly different. What he suggested was that genuine psychological growth does not occur by prematurely resolving opposing realities, but by developing the capacity to remain with them. He described this as holding the tension of opposites, the discipline of allowing two seemingly contradictory truths to coexist without rushing to declare one right and the other wrong.

One might say that this is extraordinarily difficult. We as practitioners often get stuck, we consider that by holding the tension might be seen as indecisive or passive. Hold the tension actually acknowledges that our first interpretation may be incomplete, and that deeper understanding often emerges only when we resist the urge for immediate certainty.

Within cultural safety, capacity to hold space and be reflective becomes an ethical discipline.

We may hold professional expertise as practitioners in the Community sector, but simultaneously not fully recognise that lived experience carries forms of knowledge that is not availed to us. Too often we value evidence, whilst failing to acknowledge that not everything that matters, can be measured.

We may hold organisational responsibility while recognising the sovereignty of communities to define their own realities but fail to act. We may believe we are helping while simultaneously asking whether our helping is unintentionally reinforcing unequal relationships of power. These are not problems to be solved as quickly as possible, yet we must always apply a timeframe.

They are tensions to be inhabited thoughtfully.

Perhaps this is where many attempts at cultural reform falter. We become anxious in the presence of complexity and seek to relieve that anxiety by developing new frameworks, new competencies or new policies. Action feels productive. Certainty feels responsible. Yet if action emerges before understanding, we may simply reconstruct the same assumptions within a different framework.

Jung believed that remaining with the tension creates the possibility for something genuinely new to emerge. He referred to this process as the transcendent function—the psyche's capacity to move beyond an either/or way of thinking towards a deeper integration that honours the complexity of human experience.

This resonates profoundly with cultural safety.

Cultural safety does not ask us to choose between professional knowledge and community wisdom. What it is asking is for us to remain in relationship long enough for a different way of knowing to emerge.

"Deep listening is not the absence of speaking. It is the discipline of allowing another person's reality to exist without immediately translating it into our own"

By holding still, and not engaging in a theory or a method of practices, doesn't mean that we are abandoning our expertise. Humility allows us to hold expertise without rejecting evidence what is does is asks us to recognise that evidence in culture.

Only through meaningful relationship can we come to understanding. It is far more courageous to hold the tension than it is to resolve it prematurely. It requires us to resist the professional temptation to fix, explain or conclude before the relationship has revealed what truly needs to be understood. This understanding has emerged for me not simply through theory, but through years of working alongside Aboriginal communities and participating in the development of government initiatives. Time and again I have watched systems move quickly from consultation to solution. Communities are invited to contribute, stories are shared, reports are written, and policies are developed claiming to have been informed by consultation. Yet consultation is not the same as relationship. Consultation gathers information; relationship cultivates understanding.

Relationship cannot be compressed into a workshop, a survey or a series of meetings. It requires time, consistency and the humility to remain present long enough for trust, meaning and wisdom to emerge. When we mistake consultation for relationship, we risk responding to what was said rather than understanding what was meant. Cultural safety asks us to remain in the tension for longer, allowing relationship, not urgency, to shape our understanding before we seek to rebuild.

Perhaps cultural safety is less about arriving at the correct answer than about developing the capacity to remain faithfully present within complexity until wisdom begins to emerge.

This understanding finds resonance in Professor Russell Meares' Conversational Model, developed through the University of Sydney. The model proposes that meaningful psychological change does not arise simply from techniques or expert interpretation, but through the gradual development of a reliable, authentic and sustained relationship. Within that relationship, meaning is not imposed by the therapist; it emerges through conversation. Although the therapist brings professional knowledge, the relationship itself remains grounded in mutual presence, curiosity and respect. It is the quality and continuity of the encounter that allows new ways of understanding to develop.

I cannot help but wonder whether these same relational principles have much broader application. If sustained conversation can contribute to profound psychological change, what might become possible if governments, organisations and communities approached consultation with the same commitment to relationship, consistency and deep listening? Rather than viewing consultation as a discrete event, we might begin to understand it as an ongoing conversation through which trust, shared meaning and collective wisdom emerge over time. This is not a conclusion, but a proposition worthy of exploration. If cultural safety is truly relational, then perhaps it is relationship itself, not consultation, that becomes the catalyst for meaningful and enduring change.

While the Conversational Model has its origins in the pioneering work of Professor Robert Hobson, my own understanding has been profoundly influenced by the writings and teaching of Professor Russell Meares and the body of work developed through the University of Sydney. It is through this lens that I have come to appreciate conversation not simply as a method of communication, but as a relational space in which meaning, identity and understanding emerge.

The Four Movements

"Every enduring structure begins long before it can be seen"

A building does not begin with walls or a roof. It begins beneath the surface. The ground is prepared, the foundations are carefully laid and allowed to strengthen before the first framework is raised. Only then does the scaffolding appear, supporting the construction until the building is capable of standing on its own. The scaffolding is essential, but it is never the purpose. Once the building has found its strength, the scaffolding is removed, revealing the structure that has been formed from within.

Community and social services often work in the opposite direction. We become captivated by the scaffolding. We develop new frameworks, introduce evidence-based models, write policies, establish competencies and launch ambitious reforms. These are important, but they are not the foundation. When the work of formation is neglected, even the most sophisticated frameworks struggle to create lasting change. Without strong foundations, the scaffolding may look impressive for a time, yet the structure beneath it remains fragile.

The purpose of this work is not about building better, newer framework. It is about strengthening the foundations upon which culturally safe practice can endure. It is written from the belief that lasting change is not created by introducing another model or another competency. Lasting change begins with the formation of the practitioner, the formation of relationships and, ultimately, the formation of systems capable of sustaining trust over time.

The four movements that follow are not techniques to be mastered. They are the foundations upon which culturally safe practice is built. They invite us into a process of formation before transformation, because only what has been well formed can remain stable enough to support genuine and enduring change.

Human understanding rarely changes because we are given more information. More often, it changes because something interrupts the way we have always understood ourselves and the world. Transformation is not linear. It is relational, reflective and deeply human.

"Formation is not something we accomplish through effort alone. It is the gentle work of becoming attentive to what has always been present, allowing each encounter to shape us with wisdom, humility and grace"

The invitation is open. Not to master another framework or acquire another competency, but to enter a lifelong journey of formation. These movements are not stages to be completed. They are rhythms to which we continually return.

First Movement – Notice

Every transformation begins with noticing.

We notice our assumptions.

We notice our certainty.

We notice the stories we tell ourselves.

We notice power.

We notice the emotions that arise within us.

We notice the assumptions embedded within our organisations, our professions and our society.

Noticing is an act of attentiveness.

We cannot change what we have not first learned to see.

Second Movement – Hold

Once we notice something, our instinct is often to solve it.

Cultural safety asks something much more difficult.

Remain.

Hold the tension.

Resist the temptation to rush towards certainty.

Allow discomfort to become a teacher rather than a problem to eliminate.

This movement requires patience, humility and discernment.

It is here that genuine understanding begins to emerge.

Third Movement – Encounter

Understanding does not occur in isolation.

It emerges through relationship.

Every encounter is an invitation to listen beyond words, to recognise another person's sovereignty over their own experience and to allow our own understanding to be reshaped through genuine dialogue.

Culture cannot be understood from a distance.

It can only be encountered.

Fourth Movement – Discern

Transformation is never simply intellectual.

It changes who we are.

As our assumptions are deconstructed and reconstructed, our practice begins to change because we have changed.

We no longer strive to become culturally competent.

We become practitioners who remain open to continual formation.

This movement never ends.

Every new encounter returns us once again to the beginning.

We notice.

We hold.

We encounter.

We become.

Then we notice again.

This is not a cycle of repetition.

It is a spiral of growth of discernment.

Discernment is often misunderstood as simply making a decision. In its deepest sense, it is something far richer. Discernment is the disciplined practice of learning to recognise what is asking to emerge from an encounter before deciding how to respond. It asks us to resist the pressure for immediate answers and instead remain attentive to what is unfolding within ourselves, within the other person and within the relationship we are creating together.

My own understanding of discernment has been profoundly shaped by the spiritual tradition of St Ignatius of Loyola, whose writings and practices have influenced my way of listening, reflecting and making sense of complex human experiences. Through contemporary Ignatian scholars, I have come to appreciate discernment not as a religious technique, but as a way of attending deeply to the movements that shape our thinking, our relationships and our decisions.

Although my understanding has been formed through this tradition, I do not believe discernment belongs exclusively to any one faith or philosophy. Every culture has ways of recognising that there is something within the human experience that cannot be reduced to logic alone. Whether we speak of spirit, intuition, wisdom, deep listening or the transcendent dimensions of our humanity, we acknowledge that people are more than their behaviours, their diagnoses or their circumstances. There is a deeper reality that reveals itself only when we are willing to become still enough to notice it.

For me, cultural safety asks us to cultivate this same discipline. Before we respond, before we intervene, before we rebuild, we are first invited to discern. We ask not only, "What should I do?" but "What is this encounter asking of me?" It is within that question that relationship begins to guide practice, and practice begins to honour the dignity, sovereignty and humanity of those we serve.

Each return through these four movements, notice, hold, encounter and discern, forms us a little more deeply. We become increasingly attentive to what has previously gone unnoticed, more comfortable holding uncertainty, more authentic in relationship, and more discerning of what each person, family and community is inviting us to understand before we seek to respond.

Perhaps one of the greatest barriers to culturally safe practice is not that it is too complex, but that we have made it appear too mysterious.

Time and again I am asked, What is cultural safety? What does culturally safe practice actually mean? The questions are often asked with genuine curiosity, yet they also reveal a growing anxiety that cultural safety is somehow an elusive concept, understood only by specialists or those with particular cultural expertise.

I do not believe this is true.

Most people already practise forms of cultural safety in their everyday lives. We understand that respect requires us to recognise what matters to another person and to respond accordingly. We would not knowingly disregard another person's religious practices, cultural traditions or family values simply because they differ from our own. We understand that dignity begins by acknowledging difference rather than expecting everyone to conform to our way of being.

What changes in the context of Aboriginal communities is not the principle of cultural safety, but the depth of relationship required to practise it well. Aboriginal cultural safety asks us to recognise that today's encounter is shaped by a much longer history of relationships, power and trust. It asks us to remain curious rather than anxious, relational rather than procedural, and discerning rather than reactive. Cultural safety is not mysterious. It is profoundly human. It begins when we have the humility to ask, What matters to you, and how can my practice honour that?

Practice example:

Not long ago, I worked with two beautiful Aboriginal sisters, just three and five years of age. Circumstances had resulted in them leaving the care of their Aboriginal grandparents and moving into the home of a caring non-Aboriginal foster family. There is no criticism in this story. The carers were generous, compassionate and committed. They had completed every assessment, every training requirement and every element of the approval process. They wanted nothing more than to love these children well.

Yet, despite all of this, something was missing.

With great humility and remarkable courage, the carers eventually said, "These kids are black."

They were not speaking about the colour of the children's skin. They were speaking about culture. They recognised that these little girls carried ways of being, relating and understanding the world that they could not simply learn from a handbook or a training course. They could see the girls' distress. They could feel the distance that remained despite every effort they made. And with extraordinary generosity, they placed the children's needs ahead of their own hopes. In one phone call to me in my role as a Principal Officer said, "They need Aboriginal carers."

An Aboriginal family was identified, absolutely an extraordinary outcome as they are rare to find. The arrangements were made, placement matching occurred and these two little cherubs set off to another new home.

As the caseworker drove the girls, some eight hours from their previous placement, one of the little ones quietly asked,

"Are they black?"

The caseworker paused.

"What do you mean?"

"You know..." she replied, "...black like me."

When they arrived, the front door opened and a beautiful Aboriginal woman stepped onto the front yard, smiling with a warmth that needed no explanation. Before anyone had spoken another word, both little girls ran towards her.

"They're black!"

She gathered one child into each arm, held them close, and carried them inside.

In that moment, I find myself reflecting upon everything this book has attempted to explore.

No policy explained what happened.

No framework created that embrace.

No competency produced that sense of belonging.

Those little girls did not need someone to explain cultural safety.

They recognised it the moment they encountered it.

Perhaps this is what discernment ultimately invites us to see.

Cultural safety is not something we declare.

It is something another person experiences.

Sometimes the deepest wisdom is found not in our ability to explain what cultural safety is, but in our willingness to notice the quiet moments in which it quietly reveals itself.

Making Meaning

As leaders or practitioners with the Community services sector, we make decisions every day that seem straightforward. We respond to legislation, implement policy and fulfil our responsibilities because they are required of us. We assume that if our intentions are ethical and our actions are reasonable, then the meaning of those actions will also be understood as we intended.

Yet human experience rarely works that way.

Not long ago, as part of our obligations under work health and safety legislation, I ensured that information about our Work Health and Safety Committee was clearly displayed within the workplace. The notice included the names, photographs and contact details of committee members, along with information about meetings and how staff could raise concerns. From my perspective, it was a simple act of compliance and transparency, an attempt to make the workplace safer and ensure everyone knew where support could be found.

Only later did I learn that another person experienced the same notice very differently. Rather than seeing safety, they saw the photograph of someone they perceived as unsafe because of their own lived experience within the workplace. The notice that I believed represented care and accountability had, for them, become confronting and distressing.

Nothing about the notice had changed.

What changed was my understanding of its meaning.

That meaning did not exist in the policy, the photograph or the legislation itself. It emerged only when another person shared how they had experienced it. Until that conversation occurred, I could only understand my own intention. I could not understand their reality.

Perhaps this is one of the most important lessons in cultural safety. Meaning does not belong solely to the person who acts. Nor does it belong solely to the person who experiences the action. Meaning emerges in the space between intention and experience, and it is only through genuine conversation that we begin to understand the difference.

"What gap might exist between my intention and another person's experience?"

This may be one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves as practitioners, leaders and policymakers.

Governments frequently introduce initiatives with genuine intentions. Programs are designed to improve health, education, child protection and community wellbeing. Significant resources are invested, evidence is reviewed and reforms are implemented with the sincere hope of making a positive difference. Good intentions should never be dismissed.

Yet good intentions alone cannot determine whether something is experienced as culturally safe.

The experience of communities may differ profoundly from the intention of those designing the initiative. What appears to be an innovative solution from within government may be experienced quite differently by the people whose lives it seeks to influence. This is not necessarily because the policy is flawed, but because meaning cannot be designed in isolation from the people who will live with its consequences.

This is why self-determination is not simply a policy aspiration; it is a relational necessity. Enduring change is far more likely when communities are not merely consulted about solutions, but are trusted to help define the problem, shape the response and determine what success will look like. Cultural safety is strengthened when people become active authors of their own future rather than passive recipients of someone else's vision.

Encouragingly, I am beginning to see examples of this shift. One such example is the establishment of the Aboriginal Suicide Prevention Council by the Mental Health Commission of New South Wales. By bringing together Aboriginal leaders to guide this work over a sustained period, the initiative recognises that lasting solutions are strengthened when Aboriginal voices are central to decision-making rather than peripheral to it. While no model is complete, it reflects an important movement towards relationship, shared responsibility and self-determination—the very principles upon which culturally safe practice depends.

Sheree James 2026