On the afternoon of 13 November 2025, at Government House in Melbourne, Premier Jacinta Allan and the First Peoples' Assembly's co-chairs, Ngarra Murray and Rueben Berg, signed a document no Australian government had produced before: a treaty. Minutes later, Governor Margaret Gardner gave the enabling legislation royal assent in the same room. A month after that, on 12 December, the agreement was marked with a free public ceremony at John Cain Arena. Nine years after the Andrews government first promised a "pathway to treaty," and just over two years after a national referendum on a far narrower proposal — a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament — was defeated in every state, Victoria had done what the Commonwealth could not: put its name to a negotiated settlement with First Peoples and write it into law.
That contrast is the story of this topic. Victoria's process survived the 2023 Voice referendum's collapse when several other state treaty processes stalled or reversed, because it spent nearly a decade building the institutions a treaty needs — an elected assembly, an independent umpire, a truth commission, a funding agreement — before it tried to sign anything. It has now created a permanent, taxpayer-funded representative body with real statutory powers: one elected by a small fraction of the people it speaks for, negotiated substantially in closed sessions, and never put to a state-wide public vote of any kind. Both of those sentences are true. This is an account of how Victoria got here, on whose evidence, and what remains unresolved.
A decade of building the machinery of treaty
In June 2018, the Andrews government passed the Advancing the Treaty Process with Aboriginal Victorians Act 2018, accurately described at the time as Australia's first treaty legislation (Parliament of Victoria, Advancing the Treaty Process with Aboriginal Victorians Act 2018, commenced 1-Aug-2018). Rather than legislating a treaty outright, the Act committed the state to build the scaffolding first: a representative Aboriginal body to negotiate for First Peoples, a Treaty Authority to act as an independent umpire, a Treaty Negotiation Framework setting the rules of engagement, and a Self-Determination Fund the state could not simply withdraw.
The First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria was first elected in 2019 and re-elected in an expanded form in June 2023, when 22 of its 32 seats were filled by a direct vote of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Victorians (First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria, 2023 Assembly election results, Jun-2023). Parliament passed the Treaty Authority and Other Treaty Elements Act 2022 in August 2022, and in December 2023 the Authority's five inaugural members — all First Peoples, agreed jointly by the Assembly and the government — were sworn in (Parliament of Victoria, Treaty Authority and Other Treaty Elements Act 2022, Aug-2022; Victorian Government & First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria, Treaty Authority appointments announcement, 6-Dec-2023). The Self-Determination Fund Agreement, signed in October 2022, committed a minimum of $65 million over three years, administered by the Assembly independently of the state (Self-Determination Fund Agreement, State of Victoria and First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria, 20-Oct-2022).
Running in parallel was the Yoorrook Justice Commission — Australia's first formal truth-telling body with the powers of a royal commission, established by letters patent under the Inquiries Act 2014 on 12 May 2021 (Governor of Victoria, Letters Patent — Yoorrook Justice Commission, 12-May-2021) — tasked with building an official record of systemic injustice against First Peoples since colonisation and recommending reform. It reported in stages: an interim report on child protection and criminal justice, Yoorrook for Justice, tabled 5 September 2023 with 46 recommendations, then final reports, Yoorrook for Transformation and Truth be Told, tabled 1 July 2025 with a further 100 recommendations after hearing from more than 9,000 First Peoples across 65 hearing days (Yoorrook Justice Commission, Yoorrook for Justice, 5-Sep-2023; Truth be Told and Yoorrook for Transformation, 1-Jul-2025).
Statewide treaty negotiations proper — distinct from the institution-building that preceded them — opened with a ceremony at Darebin Parklands on 21 November 2024 and ran through 2025 as talks between the Assembly's negotiation delegation and the Minister for Treaty and First Peoples, Natalie Hutchins, punctuated by joint statements (Victorian Government & First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria, Joint Statements on Treaty Negotiations, 2025). The Statewide Treaty Bill passed the Legislative Assembly 54–27 on 16 October 2025 and the Legislative Council 21–16 on 30 October 2025, before receiving royal assent alongside the signing ceremony on 13 November (Parliament of Victoria, Statewide Treaty Act 2025, Hansard voting record, Oct-2025). Under the Act, the Assembly becomes the decision-making arm of a permanent structure, Gellung Warl, alongside a truth-telling arm (Nyerna Yoorrook Telkuna) and an accountability arm (Nginma Ngainga Wara), fully operational from 1 May 2026.
The strongest case
A patient, sequenced answer to an injustice no party disputes
The underlying wrong is not contested by any party in Victorian politics. Yoorrook's finding that colonisation in Victoria involved mass killings, disease, child removal and the "near-complete physical destruction" of First Peoples draws on the same historical record cited by the Victorian Parliament's own 1997 apology, which passed with the support of every party then in the chamber (Yoorrook Justice Commission, Truth be Told, 1-Jul-2025). Self-determination — the principle that people should have a genuine say in decisions affecting them — is not a fringe idea; it sits in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Australia has endorsed, and in the plain observation that policies designed for Aboriginal Victorians without their input have a long record of failing them, visible in the statistics set out below.
Victoria's answer to the Voice referendum's failure is that it never staked everything on one national, take-it-or-leave-it question. It built the machinery first — an elected body, an independent umpire, a funding agreement giving First Peoples a bargaining position that did not depend on a minister's goodwill — and only negotiated a treaty once those checks existed. That sequencing helps explain why Victoria's process did not collapse when the Voice referendum failed in October 2023: political support here was built over years and across the aisle, not manufactured in a single national campaign. A negotiated, legislated treaty policed by an independent umpire is also a more durable form of self-determination than a body that exists at ministerial discretion, because unlike an advisory council, it cannot be dissolved by press release.
The evidence
One statistic frames why the government argues this matters beyond symbolism. As of 2020-21, Aboriginal children made up around 30 per cent of Victoria's out-of-home-care population while representing under one per cent of the state's population — a gap the Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services has tracked for years without it closing (approx.; Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services, Community Services; Victorian Government Aboriginal Affairs Report, 2024). Yoorrook's hearings into child protection and criminal justice produced 46 recommendations in 2023; the government accepted 28 in full or in principle, is still considering 15, and rejected three as requiring reopened legislation (Victorian Government, Response to Yoorrook for Justice Recommendations, 2023-24) — a response that is engaged, but selective.
The cost figures are genuinely contested, which is itself part of the evidence. The Victorian Government has confirmed $326.7 million spent supporting the treaty process through state budgets since 2020-21; earlier media reporting, drawing on a longer time frame back to 2016, put the figure at around $382 million, and the government has declined to confirm or deny that wider number (approx.; AAP FactCheck, Oct-2025). Looking forward, the Act's own forward estimates allocate roughly $71 million in 2027-28 and $72.1 million in 2028-29 to fund Gellung Warl, rising 2.5 per cent a year after that — a recurring commitment set by the current Parliament that binds budgets of parliaments not yet elected (approx.; Statewide Treaty Act 2025, financial provisions, as confirmed to AAP FactCheck, Oct-2025).
The critique
Start with consent, the sharpest edge of this topic after the Voice referendum. The Assembly now holds statutory powers — including a role in confirming or denying who counts as Aboriginal for legal purposes, and a requirement that every bill introduced to Parliament carry a statement of treaty compatibility recording whether it was consulted — that no other body in Australian government holds. Yet only around 10 per cent of the roughly 45,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Victorians eligible to vote appear to have cast a ballot in the June 2023 election that filled 22 of the Assembly's 32 seats (approx.; First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria, 2023 Assembly election results, Jun-2023). No non-Indigenous Victorian voted at all, by design; but the low turnout within its own electorate is a real legitimacy question for a body that has moved from an advisory forum to a permanent lawmaking check in two elections. Nor is the concern confined to outside critics: independent senator and former Assembly member Lidia Thorpe has argued publicly that the treaty does not reflect the free, prior and informed consent of all 38 First Peoples language groups in Victoria — a critique from inside the movement, not outside it.
Then there is transparency. Much of the substantive negotiation through 2025 happened in closed weekly sessions between the government and the Assembly's delegation, with the public record limited to periodic joint statements rather than published transcripts or minutes. The Institute of Public Affairs, a free-market think tank and a clearly interested critic of the process, argues the legislation carries broad exemptions from Victoria's Freedom of Information Act; whatever one makes of the IPA's wider framing, the underlying point — that Victorians have limited ability to independently inspect how their government reached an agreement of this scale — is a fair description of the process as it ran.
Finally, there is the mandate that must outlast one Parliament. Bipartisan support for the treaty process held for years after the 2018 Act — itself part of the government's strongest case — and broke in January 2024, when the Liberal-National Coalition withdrew support and pledged to repeal the legislation if elected in November 2026, meaning the "permanent" body Parliament has just created faces a real prospect of being unwound by an ordinary legislative majority within a year of reaching full operation. Unlike the Voice, which asked all Australians directly and was rejected, the Statewide Treaty was never put to a referendum, a plebiscite or any state-wide vote of Victorians as a whole; its mandate rests entirely on the parliamentary majority that passed it — a lower bar than the one the Commonwealth set for itself in 2023 and then failed to clear.
Victoria answered the question the nation refused to ask — then never put its own answer to a vote.
None of this makes the settlement illegitimate. Treaties are ordinarily negotiated by elected and appointed representatives, not decided by referendum, and Victoria's Parliament — elected by every Victorian — voted the enabling Act into law by a clear majority in both houses. But the ordinary tests this masthead applies to other large, permanent spending and governance decisions — public visibility of negotiation, a demonstrated voter mandate, cross-party durability — were, on the state's own record, weaker here than the scale of what was created.
The risk to the future
A permanent body built on a fragile political mandate
The most immediate risk is political. A Coalition pledge to repeal the Act if it wins in November 2026 means a body Parliament designed to be permanent now faces a real prospect of being unwound by ordinary legislative majority within a year of reaching full operation on 1 May 2026. Even short of repeal, a hostile incoming government could starve it of the cooperation a negotiated relationship depends on. Victoria's process survived the Voice referendum precisely because it had broad, patient, cross-party support built over nearly a decade; if that support does not hold through a single change of government, the state risks the instability the slow, sequenced approach was designed to avoid.
The second risk is a gap between institution-building and outcomes. A decade and several hundred million dollars have built the machinery of self-determination — an Assembly, an Authority, a truth commission, now a treaty — but the disadvantage that machinery exists to redress, most visibly the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in Victoria's child-protection system that Yoorrook documented, has not measurably narrowed on the Productivity Commission's own reporting. Whether Gellung Warl's powers convert institutional maturity into outcomes that Aboriginal Victorians and the wider public can see and check on a reasonable timetable is the test this process has built up to, but has not yet had to sit.