I urge every Australian, especially the people of Victoria, to read what follows and understand the profound consequences of a so-called treaty.

This is not symbolic. It is serious, it is permanent, and it is coming.

Victorians must be informed of what lies ahead, and every other state must take heed: what is happening in Victoria could soon happen to you.

Premier Jacinta Allan’s attempt on July 27, 2025, to downplay Victoria’s escalating treaty expenditure would have been laughable if not so contemptuous.

When pressed by reporters about the Herald Sun’s estimate of $382 million spent on treaty negotiations, Allan dismissed comments and referred to a much higher figure estimated by the Institute of Public Affairs, claiming it was ‘a cherry-picked analysis from the conservative Liberal Party-aligned thinktank’ presenting all concerns as politically motivated.

A government truly confident in the moral and fiscal integrity of its actions would have no hesitation in standing behind its strategic outlay, whether it’s $350 million or $382 million.

The very fact it avoids owning the figure speaks volumes. That the Allan government instead chose to bicker over politics exposes its strategy: divert scrutiny from the staggering sum itself and turn the public conversation into a petty debate over semantics. This is not accountability, it is evasion dressed as indignation – and it is all happening in Australia’s most debt-ridden state amid collapsing infrastructure, crime, and crumbling public services.

Premier Allan declared:

‘We’ve been on a long and steady journey towards treaty here in Victoria … this is all about being on a process, and on a long and steady pathway, to have in place in Victoria a new, practical framework for how we not just listen to Indigenous Victorians but involve them in the decisions … that directly affect them.’

But nowhere is it explained how this ‘practical framework’ will ‘listen’ to, represent, or incorporate the voices of non-Indigenous Victorians – the vast majority of the population.

If the government cannot govern Indigenous citizens without a racially exclusive advisory body, then by that logic it cannot govern non-Indigenous citizens either without a comparable mechanism. The implication is clear: this government believes it is incapable of governing for all Victorians. On that point, at least, the evidence speaks for itself.

The Premier’s remarks expose not only a lack of fiscal transparency but a profound moral disregard: defending a politically charged vanity project while the state decays. Hers is an attempt to deflect public outrage with bureaucratic spin and fails Victorians with deception masquerading as governance.

This is not a rounding error. It is a deliberate effort to recast monumental waste as minor bookkeeping. Both figures, $350 million and $382 million, reveal a massive financial commitment to a treaty process that has delivered neither treaty nor substance. No binding agreement has been reached, no democratic mandate secured, and no coherent cultural consensus formed. Yet hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into committees, advisory bodies, bureaucratic salaries, promotional campaigns, and ceremonial initiatives.

To blame the messenger while admitting the message is mostly accurate is an act of slippery political cowardice. It is also a tacit admission that voters would be justifiably outraged if only they were paying close enough attention.

But it really is far worse.

The real cost

The $350 million figure quoted above is merely the price tag of the process to date.

Ongoing payments to the entrenched Aboriginal Industry, drafting legislation masquerading as a treaty, and all the related costs (which will no doubt be justified by the mantra of Yoorrook’s advice) could add another $200 million to the cost in the next two to three years – and that is before we even get to the treaty itself, for the publicly disclosed cost of the process is merely the administrative prelude. The true fiscal weight lies ahead.

While the Allan government speaks only in vague terms of ‘truth’. ‘healing’, and ‘shared future’ the real implications are unmistakable: the treaty process opens the door to billions of dollars in compensation, channelled through mechanisms of racial preference and permanent financial obligation. These include:

• Land transfers or returns, either through direct handover of Crown land or strategic co-management of national parks and reserves;
• Ongoing financial payments, to individuals or Aboriginal collectives, with no sunset clause;
• Revenue sharing, diverting income from natural resources such as minerals, water rights, and Crown land rents;
• Creation of autonomous governance structures, such as Aboriginal parliaments or commissions, funded indefinitely from the public purse;
• Racially differentiated public service entitlements, including priority access to housing, healthcare, employment schemes, and education support.

This is not a symbolic process. It is a multi-tiered fiscal commitment grounded in race, not need.

The scale of extraction proposed, when aggregated over time, represents one of the largest wealth transfers in Australian history, with no corresponding surrender of claim, legal finality, or guarantee of closure. Treaty, in this context, becomes not an instrument of reconciliation but a framework for perpetual entitlement. The cost is not just financial, it is constitutional, cultural, and democratic.

What will be the cost? We will not know nor have input. There is no doubt that the First Peoples’ Assembly will extract an enormous toll. It will not matter to the Allan government with its crushing debt level projected to hit a staggering $200 billion by 2028. The treaty and its cost will be dismissed as a rounding error.

Put simply this could end up costing Victorians billions.

Jacinta Allan, political creation and legatee of the Andrews government, is hell-bent on delivering a racially absurd, fiscally ruinous, and democratically perverse agenda. And now it’s too late. Victorians lose – and lose big.

Deception in a single word, ‘treaty’

The Victorian ‘treaty’ with Aboriginal peoples is not a treaty in any sense of the law or meaning of the word. A treaty, in its true and legal sense, is a binding agreement between sovereign nations subscribing to and abiding by international law. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) defines a treaty as ‘an international agreement concluded between States in written form and governed by international law’.

Victoria is not a sovereign state. Nor is any Aboriginal group recognised as a sovereign polity under international law. They possess no defined territory, no diplomatic recognition, and no legal standing under the Montevideo Convention (1933) criteria for statehood. More pertinently, under Australian law, there never has been an Aboriginal ‘nation’. What is now unfolding in Victoria cannot, by any credible standard, be called a treaty. It is legislative theatre masquerading as international diplomacy. Rather, what the Allan government proposes is an agreement codified through Victorian legislation: a binding law within a single sovereign legal system. Once enacted, it is not a diplomatic accord but a domestic statute, enforceable in Victorian courts and binding on both the state’s parliament and people.

Most absurd of all is the role of the First Peoples’ Assembly, a body created entirely by an Act of the Victorian Parliament. The Victorian government is negotiating with an entity of its own invention, agreeing with itself, legislating the outcome, and then dressing it up as a treaty. Only a government with utter contempt for the intelligence of its citizens could expect anyone to believe this farce.

The process has created an impossible absurdity, presented to the public as a legitimate political process. The Aboriginal negotiating body asserts a doctrine of self-determination and denies the sovereignty of the Victorian state, while simultaneously existing only through an Act of that same Parliament. It is a creature of statute claiming independence from its creator. The government, in turn, binds itself by law to this performative arrangement – legislating terms with a body that disavows the very system enacting them. It is not self-determination, and it is not sovereignty. It is political malfeasance, delivered as a fallacious treaty.

Neither treaty nor agreement

Even if we abandon the illusion of ‘treaty’ and acknowledge this process for what it truly is, a political negotiation, the arrangement collapses under legal scrutiny. At the core of any binding agreement, whether in contract or diplomacy, lies consideration: a mutual exchange of value.

In this proposed treaty, the Victorian State offers money, land access, institutional permanence, and political recognition. In return, Aboriginal groups surrender … nothing! They retain Native Title, concede no territory, relinquish no claims, and offer no binding obligations. The transaction is entirely one-sided. It lacks reciprocity, and therefore, lacks legitimacy. This is not a treaty, nor a genuine agreement. It is a unilateral transfer of wealth and power, masked in the language of reconciliation but devoid of legal or ethical equivalence.

Absurdity on stilts

Jacinta Allan ignored the democratic reality that 55.3 per cent of Victorians voted ‘No’ to the Voice. Undeterred, she pressed ahead with the treaty process, a campaign she boasts is ‘led by, shaped by and driven by Aboriginal Victorians’ and claims is part of a uniquely Victorian ‘reconciliation agenda’ conveniently detached from the failed federal Voice referendum.

This is not leadership, it is contempt.

The First Peoples’ Assembly was established in 2019. The official Victorian government website, operated by the Department of Premier and Cabinet under its First Peoples – State Relations portfolio:

The First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria is the independent and democratically elected body to represent Traditional Owners of Country and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Victoria.

The First Peoples’ Assembly and is widely presented in the press as the democratically elected and independent representative body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Victoria. However, this claims collapses under even the most cursory scrutiny.

Elected seats

In the 2023 treaty election, just over 4,200 votes were cast from an estimated 45,000 eligible Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Victorians, representing a participation rate of under 10 per cent of the voting-age population. This turnout falls far short of accepted democratic standards and severely undermines the First Peoples’ Assembly’s claim to legitimacy and representation. The First Peoples’ Assembly’s electoral roll is entirely separate from the general public electoral system, and allows voters to self-identify without rigorous verification.

Unelected seats

Of the 33 total seats in the First Peoples’ Assembly, 10 [or 30 per cent] were not elected at all, but appointed to Traditional Owner groups. These groups claim to represent language-based ‘nations’, but many such languages are extinct, reconstructed, or shared across unrelated groups. There is no constitutional basis to treat linguistic descent as a proxy for legal title, nor has evidence been tabled to show that these appointees have the free, prior, and informed consent of all the clans or descendants they purport to represent.

Representation is simply asserted, not earned.

Reserved seats are allocated either to groups with formal legal recognition, through Native Title, the Traditional Owner Settlement Act, or Aboriginal Heritage Actor to groups approved via an internal First Peoples’ Assembly pathway. In both cases, the right to appoint a representative rests on cultural assertions, not legal title or electoral mandate. The First Peoples’ Assembly itself sets the criteria, evaluates applications, and votes on whether to admit new reserved-seat holders, creating a closed, self-referential system of identity and power.

The system assumes internal unity and community consensus, yet no process exists to confirm that the appointee genuinely represents the full range of families or descendants associated with the claimed group. There is no public election, no obligation to conduct consultation, and no safeguard against internal dispute. The presumption of legitimacy is conferred by institutional recognition, not by the people themselves.

The system collapses under the weight of a single objection. If one elder or descendant disputes the right of the appointed representative to speak on behalf of the group such authority evaporates. At the time of first contact, the British found no polity, no state, and no negotiable authority to treat with. Tribes moved, dissolved, reformed. A group present one day was gone the next, replaced by another laying claim to the same land. The First Peoples’ Assembly replicates this instability in modern form, formalising disputes into governance.

The basis of these appointments is often a claimed linguistic or cultural identity. Yet many such languages are extinct or revived through academic reconstruction. Boundaries are approximate, affiliations are fluid, and group identity is often asserted rather than documented. To treat these as coherent nation-states with stable leadership is an anachronism, an effort to impose modern political structure onto a fragmented and pre-political social landscape.

Complete lack of independence

In the 2023 election for the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, fewer than one-third of available seats were contested, a damning statistic that alone calls into question the legitimacy of the body’s representative mandate. Even more concerning, the electoral process was not overseen by the independent Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), the statutory authority responsible for ensuring electoral integrity in Australia. Nor does it appear that the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) had any involvement.

Instead, the First Peoples’ Assembly conducted its own election, establishing and policing its own procedures, eligibility criteria, and voter registration. This, in my opinion, is a blatant conflict of interest that strips the process of independent oversight and public confidence.

Not only did this allow the body to shape the rules of its own constitution, but it also meant that no meaningful verification of voters occurred. Unlike standard Australian elections where eligibility is cross-checked against the electoral roll, participants in the First Peoples’ Assembly’s process were not tested against any independent register or identification standard, thus enabling unverified voting and undermining the legitimacy of turnout figures. The result is a body that is neither transparently elected nor democratically accountable.

A representative institution cannot function as both candidate and referee. Such a closed and self-regulated process is more akin to internal appointment than democratic selection – an exercise in self-legitimisation masquerading as public consent.

The First Peoples’ Assembly speaks with neither authority nor mandate, yet purports to negotiate binding arrangements on behalf of all Aboriginal people in Victoria and, indirectly, on behalf of every Victorian taxpayer. A democratic process without competition, oversight, or verification is no democracy at all. It is the kind of stage-managed theatre one expects in authoritarian or single-party states, not in a liberal democracy.

No democracy 

The First Peoples’ Assembly that now claims the moral authority to negotiate land, laws, and benefits on behalf of Aboriginal people, and by implication all Victorians, was elected by fewer people than a suburban council ward.

To describe this arrangement as a democratic institution is not merely inaccurate, it is a bizarre perversion of democratic principle. The government has vested treaty-making power, control of public funds, and policy advisory authority in a body that was elected by a tiny fraction of those it claims to represent, with no real opposition, no broad public scrutiny, and no mandate.

This is not democratic representation, it is the manufacture of consent by grotesque procedural theatre. Worse still, the First Peoples’ Assembly will be entrenched permanently in legislation, not as a temporary transitional body, but as a perpetual representative and advisory institution, accountable to no wider electorate. Its budget is funded by taxpayers. Its members are installed with lifetime prestige. And its authority will be used to negotiate binding treaties and make decisions that affect all Victorians forever, without ever having earned even minimal democratic endorsement.

If democracy means anything, it must mean more than self-appointed activists electing each other in a closed loop of institutional perversion.

In the recent Quadrant article $50 Million Worth of Myths and Legends, I exposed the collapse of traditional clan society in colonial Victoria, a collapse driven principally by disease and internal dynamics, including the widespread commodification of Aboriginal women by their own elders. This confronting reality was never going to be acknowledged by the Yoorrook Commission, whose mission is not to recount history, but to replace it with a politically curated mythology. What the Commission delivers is not history, but hagiography – not a black armband, but a full black sleeve, stitched with grievance and worn to obscure the truth.

The Yoorrook Commission is the keystone of the treaty process. Without a narrative of original sin, there can be no inherited guilt and without guilt, no justification for reparations. Without it, Victoria has no moral or legal liability.

Modern Native Title claims [in particular the egregious Millewa–Mallee Native Title determination where the Allan government gave exclusive ownership of a land area the size of Lebanon to less than 60 people] and racial reparations regimes increasingly rest on the notion that distant descent alone can justify present-day entitlements including land, funding, status, and influence irrespective of cultural continuity, personal injury, or historical connection. This transformation of identity into a tool of political and economic leverage marks a collapse of moral coherence.

Today, individuals who may possess only a sliver of Aboriginal ancestry, often tracing back to a single ancestor five or six generations ago, are granted standing to claim rights and compensation in the name of ‘First Peoples.’ Yet these same individuals may have lived entirely within mainstream Australian society, culturally indistinct from the general population, and fully integrated into the colonial and post-colonial state. Their connection is not one of tradition or law but of blood diluted by time and distance.

Worse still, these claims are often paired with references to colonial atrocities that occurred hundreds of kilometres away, against clans with whom the claimant’s ancestors had no connection. Massacres are treated as pan-Aboriginal suffering, despite the fundamental truth that Aboriginal society was not unified. It was clan-based, competitive, and often violently antagonistic. The reality is that inter-tribal warfare, revenge killings, and enslavement defined Aboriginal life for millennia prior to European arrival. One clan’s obliteration by settlers no more entitles another to compensation than does the death of a rival in battle.

This selective memory is now institutionalised through land councils, treaty negotiations, and Native Title law. The fiction of unity replaces the reality of fragmentation. The myth of timeless culture conceals the abandonment, extinction, or absorption of languages, practices, and territories. Most of those claiming Native Title today are not returning to a system of law – they are inventing one, retrofitting ancestral myths to justify modern benefit.

It is an insult to the idea of justice. True victims, those who experienced dispossession, violence, or legal discrimination, deserve redress. But distant descendants, generations removed, claiming spiritual or cultural suffering by inheritance, do not. To do so is to transform tragedy into entitlement and convert identity into currency.

No Victorian roots required

The Victorian treaty process purports to be a response to historic dispossession of Aboriginal peoples from their lands in Victoria. Yet the proposed framework of the First Peoples’ Assembly inexplicably and offensively includes Torres Strait Islanders and Aboriginal people with no ancestral connection to Victoria. There is no public data, no ancestry requirement, and no transparency as to how many enrolees are actually descended from dispossessed Victorian clans or if ever dispossessed at all.

The process has been opened to any self-identified Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander living in Victoria, effectively transforming it into a pan-Indigenous entitlement scheme that divorces reparations from place, history, and causation.

Many Aboriginal people living in Victoria today descend from families who migrated from New South Wales – particularly during the mid-20th Century, when employment, mission closures, and state policy drove large-scale movement. These individuals, while culturally and ancestrally connected to lands outside Victoria, are now included in the class of beneficiaries for a treaty purportedly compensating dispossession within Victoria.

How can a Torres Strait Islander, whose people were never dispossessed who now happens to live in Victoria be compensated for dispossession in Victoria? How can an Aboriginal person with descent from clans in Queensland, New South Wales, or the Northern Territory claim reparations for land they never held, lost, or even occupied here?

This is not restitution. It is a racial entitlement program, where ancestry from anywhere, combined with residency in Victoria, is enough to unlock permanent benefits.

The process has metastasised into something unrecognisable – a taxpayer-funded mechanism of racial redistribution, severed from history, evidence, and justice. All this will be statutorily enshrined, racially exclusive, unaccountable to the broader population, and immune from external scrutiny. Through it, a small, self-selecting body now speaks for all Aboriginal people in Victoria and determines who will benefit from treaty, reparations, land return, and legal authority, without consent from the electorate, without a mandate from the purportedly dispossessed.

Profound inversion

The treaty process and all associated claims rest on the premise of compensatory justice, a standard that demands proof, causation, and fairness. Where this standard is abandoned, any resulting benefits cease to be just and descend into racial entitlement of the most repugnant kind.

In any coherent legal system of compensatory justice, claimants must satisfy basic requirements:

• they must demonstrate that harm occurred
• that it was caused by the party from whom compensation is sought
• that the harm was unjust or unlawful
• that they themselves did not contribute to the loss through abandonment, consent, or voluntary conduct

These are not arbitrary legal formalities. They are the essential foundations of fairness. Without such thresholds, the entire notion of justice collapses into grievance without proof, liability without cause, and entitlement without injury. Yet in Victoria’s treaty framework, these requirements have been not only discarded but actively inverted. No specific proof of dispossession is required. Affiliation with a language group suffices. No causation is needed. The Crown’s liability is presumed by historical mood.

Voluntary agency is erased 

Even if Aboriginal people chose to live on missions, abandon customs, intermarry, or pursue settler life, their descendants, real and purported, are included. No personal injury need be shown. Group identity alone secures entitlement.

This is not justice. It is the architecture of political mythology, where victimhood is assumed, intermediaries are rewarded, and the only qualification is the ability to inherit a racial label. It establishes a closed, racialised economy of redress, unlimited by law, untested by fact, and sustained by ancestral symbolism.

The treaty process and its associated claims rest on the premise of compensatory justice, a principle that requires demonstrable harm, causation, and equitable intent. When this standard is abandoned, what follows is no longer justice but a racial entitlement system devoid of merit, decency, or legal integrity. It is not redress; it is racial preference of the most repugnant and indefensible kind.

How can anyone, 150 years later, based on nothing more than vague, very distant descent, seriously claim entitlement to compensation for events they never experienced? It’s an insult to the very notion of compensatory justice. There is no moral or legal foundation for such claims just opportunism weaponising ancestry.

No mandate

The Allan government continually advances its race-based treaty and reparations agenda with the backing of just one in four voters. Labor’s primary vote hovers around 25 per cent, yet it governs with legislative authority over almost irreversible cultural and financial outcomes including land returns, racial entitlements, and institutional division with no democratic authority for such radical change.

Another quarter of Victoria’s the population, knowingly or not, enabled this outcome by voting for minor parties whose preferences flowed to Labor. That leaves half the electorate either opposed or politically outnumbered, bound by a process they never chose and to which they never consented.

This is what democracy has become. It is imposed compliance through electoral arithmetic. A government with a minority mandate using borrowed power to enshrine race into law, funnel public wealth into unaccountable bodies, and entrench a grievance economy for generations.

It is not governance by mandate. It is wilful blindness to the will of the majority, and a brazen, hostile betrayal of the 55.3 per cent of Victorians who voted No to race-based vanity politics. This is not leadership. It is ideological arrogance, imposed against the clear judgment of the people.

And morally, it is those who voted for this, directly or by blind preference, who should foot the bill. The billions in public debt, division, and dysfunction that this process will unleash are not the product of reconciliation, but of political incompetence, wilful ignorance, and political class indulgence. However, our democracy means the pain is shared even by those who oppose it.

One last chance

The last remaining hope of arresting this downward spiral lies in the removal of its architect, the Allan government. With further treaty legislation expected after 2025 and the next state election not due until November 2026, the window for reversal is narrow but real. While many components of the treaty framework will likely be legislated or initiated by then, the full implementation, including institutional infrastructure and compensation mechanisms will take years, bogged down in bureaucracy, negotiation, and administrative chaos.

The only path to correction is political: the Allan government must go. No reform is possible while it remains in power. This should not be considered a political matter of Labor vs Liberal. Rather, it will be the rejection of a government that has descended into absurdity.

Robert Hill is a former Federal Police officer with a deep interest in Australian history and a serious concern about its ongoing misrepresentation