It is with great pride that I stand here this afternoon and rise to speak on the Statewide Treaty Bill 2025. I would like to begin my contribution with an acknowledgement of the traditional owners right across this great state that we call home, particularly those in the gallery today. This is a moment of tremendous pride that you must be feeling, and I have to assure you that we on this side of the house feel it, and I feel it standing before you.
I am going to be going home to my hometown, which is in northern New South Wales, for Christmas this year, and that is where the Bundjalung people come from, I think we call it, up on the Tweed Coast. The town that I grew up in was a very sleepy beachside village, a little bit like that town we watched in the show called SeaChange. But now you need a couple – well, a bit more than a couple – of million dollars to live there, thanks to the Hemsworth family, to go and live up there on the north coast. But the town that I grew up in was deeply, deeply racist. There were the people that looked like me, and then there were the others who lived on the other side of town. That side of town is still filled with some of our beautiful Indigenous First Peoples, and the side of town that I am talking about, that folks up in Kingscliff will know, was in Fingal Head, which is a place that continues to flood up on the north coast. So every time there is a flood, our First Nations and Indigenous communities get wiped out there on the lower floodplains.
I have not said this here in the house before, and I have not asked permission to speak about it, but I think I will, because I think that my cousin will be filled with a tremendous amount of pride. My cousin met his wife when he was 14 years old, and they fell in love at school. They got married at about 19 or 20 and now have three beautiful – but very full-on – young boys. I cannot wait to go home this Christmas and tell them about treaty, that we have done it and that I got to speak on it here in this place – and about the importance of it.
As I said, I grew up in a really racist town, and some of the debate and the comments that I have heard here in this place have really cast my mind and reflections back to what it was like growing up in Kingscliff and the kinds of intellectual reasons people would give for refusing to help, assist and enable First Peoples and Indigenous communities there on the north coast to make a step forward – to create a much more inclusive community and town. So many of those reasons, I realise, were really just intellectual racism. I have heard that yesterday and today – well, not today, because they have decided not to speak any further on it, but particularly yesterday – in some of those arguments put forward here in this place.
What I cannot wait to go home and tell my cousin’s three boys is that we did it here in this state, and that this process kicked off all the way back in 2019 with the establishment of the First Peoples’ Assembly. I have to acknowledge the tremendous and incredible work over all of these years. It has been such a journey to get us here – almost 10 years to get us here – and I acknowledge the incredible work over all this time and that these people have helped pave the path forward to get us to this moment in time.
We also had the Yoorrook Justice Commission, the first truth-telling commission in Australia, whose work detailed the long history of injustice that has been caused here in Victoria as a result of colonisation. Members before me have made incredible contributions about that type of colonisation.
Many people might not realise that our state governments and our parliaments are much older than our federal government, because before Federation we were colonial governments, and those governments did in fact engage in so many of these injustices. It was our state governments that perpetuated the stolen generations, both here in Victoria and across the country. Whilst we cannot change the past, we can at least acknowledge the future and the pathway that we want to walk together on. This is not just a symbolic treaty that we are speaking on here today. This treaty will give Aboriginal Victorians a real say in how their services are run. It will make a real and profound change to the way they are represented in these services. This treaty is not some new or radical concept, as those on the other side have tried to talk about.
This treaty is going to make a huge difference. It will be such an important part of Victoria’s history, and I am so proud and so glad to sit with colleagues on this side of the house that want to be on the right side of history. I cannot wait to go home at Christmas to tell my family, my friends and my cousin and his three young boys, because this will mean something to them. They will understand exactly why this is important, and although they live in New South Wales, they will know that Victoria is again leading the nation in doing the right thing in fighting for equality and for a fairer and more just Victoria. I wholeheartedly commend this bill to the house.
