Steve Price: Jacinta Allan’s Voice plan will racially divide our broke state
Jacinta Allan is creating a system that will treat one group of Victorians differently to another, and sending a very clear signal that group will be richly compensated. Whether the rest of us like it or not.
Opinion
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Victoria is about to be divided along racial lines in a radical push from a group of grasping activists.
Ignoring the will of over 54 per cent of Victorians who voted NO at the federal Voice referendum, Jacinta Allan – with 17 months to run on her time in office – is determined to grant a state version of the Voice.
As the Herald Sun reported yesterday, the Allan government will introduce new legislation for a statewide Treaty to the Victorian Parliament after the winter break.
The Labor government confirmed a new Statewide Treaty Bill had been drafted behind the scenes, and will make the First People’s Assembly permanent.
And we’ve already had a taste of the driving motivation and what we can expect.
On the steps of state parliament on June 18, a bloke named Travis Lovett, armed with a message stick and an animal skin cloak draped over his shoulders, completed what was called a symbolic truth telling walk. It covered 500km from Portland in the west of the state.
As reported in the National Indigenous Times – a tabloid insert carried monthly in the Herald Sun – the walk ended at Parliament because that was “a symbol of more than 150 years of discriminatory laws against First Nations people”.
Lovett, speaking to a small group of supporters who turned out for the completion of his walk, started his speech by saying his first steps on the walk were taken with “the weight of history pressing through the soles of my shoes and the voices of my people whispering, urging, steadying me forward”.
Lovett talks about invasion and starting the walk in Portland where “colonisation took its first breath”.
He continued: “We moved from massacre sites hidden beneath the paddocks and plaques, to suburban bus stops where our children waited in school uniforms stitched with the legacy of exclusion.”
Clearly his speech was setting us up for what we started to learn this week and gives us a glimpse of where all of this is headed.
Lovett talked about crossing over (unnamed) bridges across (unnamed) rivers on his walk that once ran red and followed footpaths through towns where “our people were once forbidden to linger after sunset”.
He further talked about sacred trees cut down to build carparks, again without referencing where these sacred trees were or the car parks located.
Feel like you are being set up here? You well and truly are.
A Yoorrook Justice Commission report released this week with the status of a Royal Commission has already prompted 16 ministerial apologies and claims it exposed billions of dollars earnt by governments from traditional owners’ land and water that was not shared with First Peoples.
That’s shorthand for “the evil colonisers stole our land and water and we are here to get it back”.
Lovett told his supporters outside Parliament, referencing this Commission, that “this is not symbolic it’s a reckoning, it’s a commitment to change – structural, legal, cultural”.
He finished his address with this: “We are here to say the silence ends here. The time of not knowing, of choosing not to know, is over.”
Sounds like some sort of threat to me.
Well, let me tell you a few things you need to know. This Voice to State Parliament had its beginnings back in 2018 with something called the First Peoples’ Assembly set up by none other than then-premier Daniel Andrews.
It already operates like a separate parliament, has 33 members who are elected by Indigenous Victorians only who are each paid annual salaries of $96,946.
This assembly also oversees something called the Self Determination Fund. Set up in 2022 with $65m of taxpayers’ money, it has bankrolled Treaty negotiations and paid for the Yoorrook Justice Commission over the past four years.
And what did we get for our $65m? We got a final report that dropped this week, with 100 recommendations to the Allan government including calls for Indigenous Victorians to be offered special tax relief and cash compensation and to have land handed back to them to make up for the impact of colonisation.
This Andrews-inspired so-called truth telling inquiry backed by his successor Jacinta Allan also demands the government acknowledge responsibility for the wrongs of its predecessors and offer a formal apology. It also talks of financial benefits for injustice which happened during a colonial invasion and occupation of First People’s territories.
What we are left with here, despite the overwhelming vote of the Victorian public against the Voice, is a state-based version inserted by stealth, funded richly by legislation sponsored by former Premier Dan Andrews.
It gets worse, with Premier Allan talking in circles this week claiming the Voice was about changing the Australian constitution, and that was not what she was doing.
What she is doing is setting up an already broke state to treat one group of Victorians differently to another, and sending a very clear signal that group is to be compensated with a range of benefits including land rights, water rights, financial compensation and seats inside parliament elected by Victorians only with Indigenous blood.
This Yoorrook outfit has also included in its 100 recommendations some extraordinary demands around education that clearly serve as an example of treating us as a state of tribes, not Victorians.
They want indigenous children to be allowed to not attend school, be excluded even from being able to be expelled or suspended for doing the wrong thing.
They want alleged massacre sites – of which they claim there are 50 – to be signposted and churches forced to hand back land to people they claim are the traditional owners.
That in a nutshell is where we are headed, whether you like it or not.
Dislikes
— A new raft of speed cameras mobile and fixed aimed at vehicles in 40km/h zones.
— Jacina Allan being crowned as the highest paid State Premier in Australia after a three percent pay rise.
— Dog owners thinking because its cold they can take large animals inside cafes while waiting for takeaway coffee.
Likes
— The hero Dad who leapt from a Disney cruise ship at sea to rescue his five- year-old daughter saving her and himself.
— The classy exit from our TV screens of my old show The Project last Friday.
— New bakery at 364 Malvern Rd in Prahran where bread pies and quiches all made in house.
Originally published as Steve Price: Jacinta Allan’s Voice plan will racially divide our broke state
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