Victorian Coalition vows to scrap Australia’s first statewide treaty with First Peoples if it wins government | Victorian politics

The Victoria Coalition has announced it will cancel Australia’s first formal statewide treaty agreement with First Nations peoples within 100 days of the government if elected in 2026.

As the lower house of the Victorian parliament began debating the statewide treaty bill on Tuesday, opposition leader Brad Battin and the Coalition’s Aboriginal affairs spokeswoman Melina Bath announced plans to repeal the treaty.

The coalition had already withdrawn its support for the deal process following the failure of a 2023 referendum to change Australia’s constitution to give parliament a federal voice.

But on Tuesday Bath said: “Not only do we oppose the deal passed by the lower house today, we will repeal it within the first 100 days.”

He said the opposition did not believe the agreement was the best way to deliver better outcomes for Aboriginal Victorians and would instead create a new government department, First Nations Victoria, to report to parliament and oversee progress on Closing the Gap targets.

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Bath told reporters there would be an advisory body within the ministry and that it would be solely the responsibility of one government minister.

“There needs to be a single minister responsible for service delivery, funding and policy direction integrated with public understanding and advice,” he said.

Under the coalition’s proposal, the advisory body would not be elected as in Victoria’s First People’s Assembly, which under the draft agreement would become a permanent representative body that would advise the government under a new statutory corporation called the Gellung Warl.

Bath said the Gellung Warl would have “power and authority” “never seen before”, while Battin said it would operate “effectively as another level of government”.

Prime Minister Jacinta Allan said the Coalition’s announcement was “divisive” and would “shatter” a decade of work by Victorian First Peoples.

“They told the Victorian community that if they were to have the privilege of holding the government, their first priority was not to build the future, but to tear it down, something that had been worked on for decades, not just the last 10 years that we had been working on,” Allan said.

Victoria Greens leader Ellen Sandell reiterated the party’s support for the deal bill and accused the Liberals of divisiveness.

“It is a great disrespect for the Liberals to turn their backs on this history-making moment and the Aboriginal Victorians who have been working on the agreement for years,” he said.

“Using this historic and proud moment to sow division is a new low, even for the Liberals. The Liberals have been a hopeless opposition and the fact that their only plan for Victoria is to drag us backwards shows just how unfit they are to govern.”

Once the bill passes parliament, as expected, with the support of the Greens and other progressives, the government and parliament will officially sign the settlement agreement. This will make Victoria the first state in the country to whitewash voice, treaty and truth, the three pillars of reform so heartily called for in the 2017 Uluru declaration.