This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Victoria is one step closer to signing a treaty with Aboriginal people after legislation to create the framework for the treaty process passed the lower house on Thursday.

It is the first time legislation committing to treaty negotiations has ever been considered by an Australian parliament.

The legislation passed with the support of the Greens after the Aboriginal affairs minister, Natalie Hutchins, proposed amendments that went some way towards addressing concerns raised by Gunnai-Gunditjmara woman and Northcote MP Lidia Thorpe.

Thorpe proposed additional amendments on the floor of parliament, particularly demanding an acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty by the state of Victoria, but they were not adopted.

The historic vote comes a week before hearings are due to begin in a parliamentary committee on the proposal for constitutional recognition of Indigenous people outlined in the Uluru Statement, which was substantially rejected by the Turnbull government in October.

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The Victorian Greens wrote to Hutchins on Wednesday confirming they had accepted her revised amendments on the advancing the treaty process with Aboriginal Victorians bill 2018.

The legislation will create the framework to establish the Aboriginal representative body, which has been described as a prototype Indigenous voice model to elevate the concerns of Aboriginal Victorians. That in turn will help establish the process for the negotiation of a treaty, or several treaties, between Aboriginal people and the state of Victoria.

Other states and territories are also moving to negotiate a treaty, with the Northern Territory is set to sign a memorandum of understanding with all four territory lands councils on Friday. The signing will take place at Barunga, where the former prime minister Bob Hawke famously promised to deliver a treaty in 1988 and then reneged.

The Western Australian Aboriginal affairs minister, Ben Wyatt, announced on Thursday that he would begin a two-year consultation process to establish an Independent Office for Aboriginal People, which would give Aboriginal people a voice to parliament comparable to the nationally proposed voice to parliament.



South Australian treaty negotiations have been shelved by the Marshall government.

Indigenous Greens MP Lidia Thorpe says she may oppose treaty legislation Read more

The amendments to the Victorian legislation were moved in response to concerns raised by Thorpe, the only Aboriginal person in Victorian parliament, who said she was concerned about a lack of engagement with elders; a potential sidelining of Victorian traditional owners in favour of government-appointed people on the representative body; and the failure of the legislation to explicitly acknowledge the sovereignty of Aboriginal clans in Victoria.

The latter remains a significant concern for Thorpe, who said in parliament on Thursday that she was disappointed the government had decided against including a firm acknowledgement in the legislation that traditional owners in Victoria retained sovereignty over their lands.

“Treaties are between two sovereigns, and to talk about treaty or to go ahead with treaty negotiations and not actually recognise that Aboriginal people are the sovereign people of this land, then I think that’s one of the major failures of this legislation,” Thorpe told Guardian Australia. “If we can’t start by addressing sovereignty, then that’s a joke.”

The reference to Aboriginal sovereignty in the bill is currently confined to the preamble, which states that: “Victorian traditional owners maintain that their sovereignty has never been ceded.”

A year on, the key goal of Uluru statement remains elusive Read more

Thorpe argued for that to be amended to represent an express acknowledgement by government that the sovereignty of Aboriginal clans in Victoria is not and has never been ceded. She said the treaty process risks losing the support of Aboriginal people if sovereignty is not emphatically asserted.

“We need to ensure that any treaty process does not cede sovereignty, particularly when there’s a federal process happening,” Thorpe said. “There could be a better deal on the table federally.”

Hutchins said amendments proposed by Thorpe that would determine who could vote on the membership of the Aboriginal representative body were too narrow and impinged upon self-determination, saying it was for the 30,000 Aboriginal people in Victoria to determine the make-up of the body and who was allowed to vote.

“Aboriginal Victorians will continue to be at the centre of this process, every step of the way,” Hutchins said after the vote.

On Tuesday she announced a $700,000 grants scheme to fund greater community consultation and treaty circle talks with Aboriginal Victorians. She has also supported a Greens proposal to establish an elders council, which would work with the Treaty Commission, as part of negotiations to secure Greens support.

The Coalition does not support the treaty process and did not vote for the legislation.

The opposition leader, Matthew Guy, said on Wednesday that he was opposed to a state-based treaty and that “a national approach would be a much better way to go”.