Remember how the fact-checkers said the Voice to Parliament didn’t confer “special rights”?

That the Voice was just a polite invitation and it didn’t carry any powers or have anything to do with reparations?

Well, despite the resounding defeat of the Voice, the activists have kept pushing and now Victoria is on the brink of implementing a Treaty thanks to their version of the Voice, the First Peoples’ Assembly.

Details of the treaty have been reported by The Age and, what do you know, everything ADVANCE’s Fair Australia campaign said is coming true.

The Age reports:

Treaty legislation drafted by the Allan government and seen by this masthead reveals that elected members of the First Peoples’ Assembly will have extraordinary access to government, with power to make representations to the cabinet, individual ministers, departmental secretaries and both houses of parliament and conduct briefings with the Victoria Police chief commissioner and state-funded service providers.

I don’t know about you, but I’d say “extraordinary access to government” sounds pretty close to the textbook definition of special rights.

The “power” to conduct briefings with Police leaders and state public servants sounds pretty special too.

That’s not all though.

Cabinet meetings attended by representatives of the Assembly will be conducted at least twice a year and bound by confidentiality. The Assembly will address a joint sitting of both houses of parliament once a year and at any time can report to either house and relevant ministers about matters that affect First Peoples.

So a separate body, defined by race, gets to attend confidential cabinet meetings and address the Parliament.

No-one else in Victoria has these rights. This is straightforward racial division.

Victoria is setting up an entirely separate legal and governing structure for Indigenous Australians and granting special rights, based on race, to access the centres of power.

This is precisely what Australians overwhelmingly rejected in October 2023.

And it validates every concern millions of Australians had about what a body like this would look like.

The government insists this is all completely fine because there’s a provision that the Treaty cannot limit the power of the Victorian parliament to make laws and otherwise conduct its business.

We’ll see how well that stands up in the cold light of day.

Importantly, though, not only does it entrench division, it upholds and affirms the victimhood narrative that has held back Indigenous Australians for so long. Far from empowering these communities, it ties them more to activist-led crusades and government handouts.

It bears repeating that no one denies Indigenous Australians were treated poorly and violently in the past.

But it is not the past. It is now. There is now nothing stopping any Australian of any race participating in the economy, building a life for themselves and their families, and succeeding.

To the extent that there is, a race-blind support system based on need and not race is sufficient to help those in need.

Instead, our governments are led by the nose by city-based activists towards racial grievance and feel-good paternalistic policy making that ends up dividing us all.

It’s absurd, it’s ugly, and it must be rejected.

The legislation is expected to be introduced into the Victorian Parliament during their next sitting.

Make no mistake: ADVANCE’s campaign against the Victorian Treaty will not let up, so sign up now.