On the afternoon of 28 November 2024, Joshua Creamer — the Waanyi and Kalkadoon barrister chairing Queensland's Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry — learned that his inquiry was being shut down not from a phone call or a briefing, but from a parliamentary livestream. Legislation to repeal the Path to Treaty Act 2023 had been introduced that morning, folded into an otherwise unrelated bill about venues for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics. The inquiry, five months into a role designed to run three years, had already taken evidence from Queenslanders willing, for the first time in a formal state process, to put family and community accounts of colonisation on the public record. It would not get to finish. The repeal passed the Queensland Parliament the next day and received royal assent on 29 November 2024. The inquiry, and the treaty process it was built to support, ceased to exist.
Both halves of that story are true at once, and a fair audit has to hold them together. The government that ended the inquiry had told voters exactly what it planned to do, a year after Queenslanders delivered the country's most emphatic rejection of a related national process. The inquiry it closed had barely begun its work. What follows sets out the government's case at its strongest, the primary record of what the process cost and how it ended, and what Queensland has gained and lost since.
What the government did
Queensland's path to treaty began under the Palaszczuk Labor government, building on years of prior consultation through a Treaty Advancement Committee. The Path to Treaty Bill, tabled in February 2023, passed the Queensland Parliament on 10 May 2023 as the Path to Treaty Act 2023. A treaty, in this context, is a formal agreement between a government and First Nations peoples that recognises history and sets out a future relationship; truth-telling is the structured process of documenting what happened during and after colonisation, usually undertaken before any treaty is negotiated. The 2023 Act created two bodies to carry this out: the First Nations Treaty Institute, to support future treaty negotiations, and the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, a three-year, judicially-styled body tasked with recording the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Queensland. It was underpinned by a $300 million Path to Treaty Fund the government had established in June 2021, plus a further $10 million a year legislated for the duration of treaty-making (Queensland Treasury; Path to Treaty Act 2023, approx.).
The Act commenced in April 2024, inquiry members were appointed, and the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry began operating on 1 July 2024, holding its formal opening on 16 September 2024. Three months later, on 26 October 2024, Queenslanders elected David Crisafulli's LNP, ending nine years of Labor government. Crisafulli had campaigned for a year on repealing the treaty framework. On the first sitting day of the new Parliament, 28 November 2024, his government introduced the repeal as amendments within the Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games Arrangements and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 — a bill otherwise concerned with Olympic venue authorities. It passed under urgency, without referral to a portfolio committee for public submissions, and received royal assent the following day, 29 November 2024, formally abolishing the First Nations Treaty Institute and the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry and terminating its members' appointments. Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships Fiona Simpson said funds earmarked for the process would instead go to what the government called practical programs — housing, education, health and employment (Queensland Government, Ministerial Media Statement, 28-Nov-2024, approx.).
The strongest case
An election promise kept, against the backdrop of the country's most decisive "No"
The government's case has two genuinely strong legs. The first is electoral: Crisafulli campaigned openly on ending the Path to Treaty framework for a full year before polling day, and Queenslanders elected him regardless, on 26 October 2024, with the outcome never seriously in doubt. Even organisations critical of the repeal, such as the Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council, acknowledged the government was acting on a stated commitment rather than a surprise reversal. The second is the referendum: on 14 October 2023, Queensland recorded the highest "No" vote of any state in the national Voice referendum, at roughly 68 per cent, well above the 60.1 per cent "No" result recorded nationally (Australian Electoral Commission, referendum results, Oct-2023, approx.). Crisafulli can reasonably argue that a state which had, barely a year earlier, delivered the country's most decisive rejection of a related national reform had already signalled limited appetite for a further, state-based process — and that continuing to fund a three-year inquiry, at a running cost the government put at roughly $1.45 million in its first four months alone, was hard to justify without clearer public backing (Queensland Government, Ministerial Media Statement, 28-Nov-2024, approx.). Redirecting that money into measurable programs — health, housing and employment funding that can be tracked year to year — is, on its own terms, a defensible use of a genuine mandate.
The evidence
The primary record supports several of the government's factual claims, while also showing how compressed the process was. Queensland's Voice referendum result was real and decisive; the government's own figures on inquiry running costs, while not independently audited in the public record sighted for this article, are consistent with the scale of a body employing paid members and legal counsel. What the record does not support is any suggestion the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry had reached, let alone exhausted, the three-year term it was established to run.
The inquiry produced one substantive public output before it closed: a first report, The story of Queensland connects us all, describing hearings held and its planned next steps. It did not reach a final report or deliver the findings and recommendations the Act envisaged; the hearings, and the historical record they might have built, ended when the Act that created the inquiry was repealed, with its unpublished materials directed to the Queensland State Archives rather than into a completed public inquiry report (Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, Final Statement, Nov-2024).
The critique
Whatever view is taken of the underlying decision, the mechanism used to make it is hard to defend on process grounds alone. The Path to Treaty Act 2023 took more than a year from the tabling of its Bill to assent, following years of prior consultation through the Treaty Advancement Committee. Its repeal took a single sitting day, arriving as amendments buried inside a bill about Olympic venue authorities, passed under urgency and without the portfolio committee scrutiny and public submission process the original Act had gone through. The inquiry's own chair made repeated requests — reportedly six — for an urgent meeting with the Premier, the responsible minister or the department before the bill was introduced, and received none; he and his fellow members learned their appointments had ended from the same public broadcast as everyone else (Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, public statements, Nov-2024, approx.). A government elected on a clear promise did not need to ambush the body it was closing to keep that promise.
The substitution of funding types matters too. The $10 million a year Labor legislated for treaty-making was a standing statutory commitment, guaranteed for the life of the process regardless of which party held office. What replaced it is an ordinary budget allocation: the government's 2025-26 Budget provided $167.6 million across the whole Women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships and Multiculturalism portfolio, and its 2026-27 Budget added $73 million for 21 community infrastructure projects under a Closing the Gap Priorities Fund (Queensland Budget 2025-26 and 2026-27, Service Delivery Statements, approx.). Both are real, and larger in raw dollars than the treaty commitment they replaced. Neither is legislated. A future Cabinet can reduce, redirect or cut either line without repealing an Act of Parliament — precisely the flexibility a truth-telling and treaty process was designed to remove from day-to-day politics in the first place.
The inquiry set up to run for three years operated for five months, and its own chair learned it had been abolished from a parliamentary livestream.
Reaction split along a predictable line, but not uniformly. The Australian Human Rights Commission's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Katie Kiss, called the repeal "extremely disrespectful and harmful" and "a divisive and unilateral decision to deny our people the chance to share their stories", and wrote to the Premier urging him to reconsider (Australian Human Rights Commission, media release, Dec-2024). The Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council took a more measured position, describing the repeal as "a bitter pill to swallow" while explicitly recognising it as a kept election commitment, and calling on the government to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations on what replaced it (QAIHC, statement, Nov-2024). That range of response — from unambiguous condemnation to conditional acceptance — is itself part of the record, and a fair account should not flatten it into a single verdict.
The consequences for reconciliation
Queensland is now the only state to have legislated a treaty and truth-telling process and then repealed it in full, rather than pausing, reviewing or narrowing it. The original Treaty Advancement Committee process had recommended truth-telling as a foundation for treaty negotiations, not as a substitute for practical service funding — the two tracks were designed to run together. The Crisafulli government's position collapses that distinction: funding for tangible programs continues and, on the figures above, has grown, but the structured, state-sanctioned process for recording history — the part communities were specifically invited to trust — no longer exists in any form.
That has a cost beyond the inquiry itself. People who gave evidence did so on the understanding it would feed a three-year process with support structures built around it; instead, their accounts sit in the state archives, attached to an inquiry that never finished its work. Any future Queensland government — of either party — that wants to attempt a truth-telling process again now does so with direct, recent proof that such a process can be ended inside a single term, without notice, mid-hearing. That is a harder case to make to communities a second time, regardless of who is in office when it is made.
The risk to the future
An abrupt ending makes the next attempt harder to trust, not easier
The core risk here is not that a newly elected government revisited a predecessor's legislation — oppositions are entitled to campaign against a policy and govern accordingly, and the electoral mandate for this decision is real. The risk is precedent: a formally established, statutory truth-telling process was closed within five months of starting, with no consultation with the body it abolished, its unfinished work archived rather than completed. Redirected funding for housing, health and employment is genuine and, on the figures cited above, larger than what it replaced — but it answers a different question to the one the inquiry was created to answer, and it is not legislated, so it can be wound back by the next Cabinet decision as easily as the treaty process itself was. If reconciliation in Queensland depends, eventually, on some future government being trusted to run a truth-telling process through to completion, this repeal is the evidence the next attempt will have to overcome.