Jana Stewart (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today as a proud Mutthi Mutthi and Wamba Wamba woman and as a Victorian to speak about the nation-leading work that is happening in my home state on the path to treaty, truth and justice. Victoria has led the way. We established Yoorrook, Australia's first truth-telling commission, led by First Peoples. After four years, its work is done. The truth is now on the public record. We now have a shared history of the state of Victoria, and what a wonderful thing that is.

Let me be really clear: that work didn't just happen magically. It wasn't luck, and it certainly wasn't fast. It's the result of decades of tireless advocacy by First Peoples in Victoria. It is the result of communities demanding justice long before governments were willing to hear it and of a Labor government choosing to act, not just with words but with law.

There's a truth some people still don't know or choose not to see. Victoria was not just touched by the stolen generations; it helped to create them. Victoria was one of the first jurisdictions to pass laws that gave the state the power to remove Aboriginal children from their families—children taken not for protection but for assimilation, taken without cause, without consent and without return. These weren't isolated incidents; it was government policy. Whole communities were torn apart, culture was deliberately severed, and families were left searching for their children across decades, even to this day. That is a part of our legacy in Victoria, and it's a chapter we cannot look away from.

The economic cost of this injustice has been profound. Generations of Aboriginal Victorians were denied access to land, education, fair wages and the opportunity to build wealth like every other Australian. Children removed from their families lost not only their culture and connection but a chance of any economic security. The Yoorrook Justice Commission has made clear that the impacts of dispossession are ongoing and reflected today in income gaps, in housing insecurity, and in reduced opportunities. Justice must include repair, not just social but economic. The trauma of those removals lives on in memory, in policy and in the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care today.

Just weeks ago, Victoria marked a historic milestone with the conclusion of the Yoorrook Justice Commission, which has now placed these truths on the public record. Our task is to face them not with defensiveness but with honesty, humility and action. Yoorrook's work was deep, forensic and uncompromising. Over four years, it heard from thousands, it reviewed thousands of documents, and it delivered two landmark reports—one setting the public record straight and the other laying out a blueprint for transformation. It found what our communities have long known—that the experiences of Aboriginal Victorians amount to genocide—and it made clear that truth must come before justice.

But Yoorrook didn't just document the past; it designed a way forward. With a hundred recommendations across land, health, housing, education and justice, it calls for deep reform and a genuine rebalancing of power. That work now falls to government, to the First Peoples' Assembly, to treaty and to all Victorians, because, in Victoria, treaty is not just a hope; it's a legal process backed by legislation set in motion by the Advancing the Treaty Process with Aboriginal Victorians Act 2018 led by the First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria—a democratic representative body for our people.

The assembly has already established a treaty authority, an independent body grounded in First Nations law and cultural authority. It has built the architecture for negotiation, dispute resolution and accountability, and it has done so not by asking for power but by exercising it. That's what makes Victoria's approach different. It's not just consultation but co-design. It's not symbolic gestures but structural change. It's not temporary programs but a generational shift. This is no accident; it is a result of First Peoples organising for decades. It's a result of our elders, who never, ever stop pushing, but it is also the product of a Labor government willing to legislate for truth, for justice and for treaty.