Victorian Coalition vows to scrap Australia’s first statewide treaty with First Nations peoples if it wins government

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

As Victorian parliament’s lower house begins debate on the statewide treaty bill on Tuesday, the opposition leader, Brad Battin, and the Coalition spokesperson for Aboriginal affairs, Melina Bath, announced their plan to repeal the agreement.

The Coalition already withdrew its support for the treaty process after the failure of the 2023 referendum to change Australia’s constitution to create a federal voice to parliament.

But on Tuesday Bath said: “Not only do we oppose treaty that’s passing the lower house today, we will repeal that within the first 100 days.”

She said the opposition did not believe treaty was the best way to deliver better outcomes for Aboriginal Victorians and it would instead establish a new government department – called First Nations Victoria – to report to parliament and oversee progress on Closing the Gap targets.

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Bath told reporters an advisory body would sit within the department, which would be the responsibility of just one government minister.

“There needs to be a single minister responsible for service delivery, for funding and for policy direction that is embedded with community understanding and advice,” she said.

Under the Coalition’s proposal, the advisory body would not be elected, as is the case with Victoria’s First Peoples’ Assembly, which under the treaty bill would become a permanent representative body to provide advice to government, under a new statutory corporation called Gellung Warl.

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

The premier, Jacinta Allan, said the Coalition’s announcement was “divisive” and would “rip apart” more than a decade’s worth of work by Victorian First Peoples.

“They’ve said to the Victorian community, that their first priority if they should have the privilege of holding government is not to build the future, it’s to tear it down – tear down something that has been worked on not just for the last 10 years that we have been working on this, but for decades,” Allan said.

The Victorian Greens leader, Ellen Sandell, reaffirmed the party’s support for the treaty bill and also accused the Liberals of sowing division.

“It’s deeply disrespectful that the Liberals have turned their backs on this history-making moment and on Aboriginal Victorians who have been working for years on treaty,” she said.

“To use 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 for government they are.”

Once the bill passes parliament, as expected with the support of the Greens and other progressive crossbenchers, the government and the assembly will formally sign the treaty agreement. This will make Victoria the first state in the country to acquit voice, treaty and truth – the three pillars of reform requested in the 2017 Uluru statement from the heart.