This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Malcolm Turnbull’s concerns about the proposed Indigenous voice to parliament could be appeased by watching the Victorian treaty process, newly appointed treaty commissioner Jill Gallagher has said.

Gallagher, a Gunditjmara woman from western Victoria and chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal and Community Controlled Health Organisation, was named commissioner on Wednesday and will oversee the development of an elected representative Indigenous body that will negotiate the terms of a treaty, or several treaties, on behalf of Victoria’s 48,000 Aboriginal people.

It could be considered a test run for the constitutionally-enshrined Indigenous voice proposal that was put forward by the Referendum Council in June and unceremoniously knocked back by Turnbull in October.

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“When you look at what we are trying to do here in Victoria around a pathway to treaty, the representative body is the voice that the Uluru Statement called for but at a state level,” Gallagher told Guardian Australia. “I believe what we’re doing here in Victoria would assist and influence what could happen at the commonwealth level.”

Like many senior Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, Gallagher attended the Referendum Council summit at Uluru and helped shape its recommendations.

She is “quite concerned” by the federal government’s response to those recommendations but focused on the Victorian process.

Whether it is a single treaty covering the whole state or a series of clan or region-based treaties, she said, the agreement has the potential to be life-changing.

“I believe having a voice with the power to make treaties or agreements is very powerful for us as Aboriginal people,” she said. “Having a voice and having the opportunity to negotiate either treaties or treaty is vital to our self-determination.”

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The process sprang out of a statewide forum in February 2016, when the government asked Aboriginal Victorians what self-determination looked like to them and were told it looked like a treaty.

Gallagher said the Andrews government deserved credit for following through on its promise to listen to the voices of Aboriginal people, which is rare enough to be considered remarkable.

South Australian treaty commissioner Roger Thomas credited the Weatherill government with doing the same thing.

It is a key difference between the state treaty processes and the federal government’s response to the referendum council, the Kokatha and Mirning man said. While Victoria and South Australia listened to the wishes of Aboriginal people, the federal government dismissed the outcome of the Uluru dialogues as outside of its terms of reference.

“Personally, as an Aboriginal person in this country, I was disappointed with where the commonwealth has landed on constitutional reform,” Thomas told Guardian Australia.

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“I will say that I think there was a similar set of behaviours politically with this current government to what happened to the same-sex marriage issue. It’s really driven by factional politics at a federal level … I personally think that’s most unfortunate. The people who lose out from that are the voting public and in this instance it’s the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of this country. They deserve more respect and more regard than what they have been handed out.”

Thomas was appointed to his role on 28 February and spent the next six months travelling 11,000km around SA talking to Aboriginal communities about the prospect of a treaty. More than 90% of the people he spoke to said they wanted a treaty.

Unlike Victoria, SA is only looking at clan-based treaties. Expressions of interest opened in July and Thomas hopes the first three treaties, with the Ngarrindjeri, Narungga and Adnyamathanha peoples will be signed by March.

There’s a political imperative at play: SA goes to the polls in March, and state opposition leader Steven Marshall has vowed to scrap the treaty process, declaring treaties “a cruel hoax”.

That could create an unequal position where three groups have secured a contractual treaty agreement with the state, with financial penalties for the latter if it chose to break it, but other groups do not.

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It could also sour the good working relationships that have been built up between government agencies and Aboriginal groups since the process began, Thomas said.

“I’m hoping that it doesn’t get scrapped, whichever party gets it, but if it does what has been built up at the agency level is that good working relationship and I think it would be a tragedy if that was lost,” he said. “It’ll be another one of those broken promises.”

Thomas said the SA experience could be a model for other states and territories, but he cautioned against other governments trying to negotiate a treaty on a “disrespectful” political timeline.

“In SA we have really been served a very tight timeframe and that is not the way to do it,” he said. “It shouldn’t be driven by politics … Just have it as a timeframe that is there to be respectful to Aboriginal people and do it in an honest and thorough way.”

Victoria also has a state election looming in March. Aboriginal affairs minister Natalie Hutchins has previously said she is pushing to lock in a model for the representative body and the treaty negotiations before then in order to shelter the process from a potential change in government.

Gallagher will take a leave of absence from her other roles during the 18-month contract.