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The fork in Queensland’s path to treaty gets wider all the way to election day
By Matt Dennien
It was a blip in a big week in Queensland parliament. But, some six months on from dumping its glowing support for laws on a path to treaty, the LNP was forced to pick a side again.
One Nation’s sole state MP, Mackay region-based Steve Andrew, brought forward a motion to repeal the laws, upon which the Labor majority swiftly condemned his party and the LNP for “turning their backs” on First Nations Queenslanders.
Opposition Leader David Crisafulli has made clear he would cut off Queensland’s already years-long path to treaty if elected in October. “That process will end.”Credit: Matt Dennien
After a brief debate – with Andrew and the three Katter’s Australian Party MPs on one side, and Labor MPs led by Treaty Minister Leeanne Enoch on the other – the motion was voted up by the government and Greens.
A common case of Queensland parliamentary posturing and politicking, but also a subtle shift in the landscape.
Labor has been on the back foot with plans for a lengthy Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, and a separate body to help First Nations prepare for treaty talks, since the LNP pulled the rug out within days of the failed federal Voice vote in October.
But in the week leading up to Andrew’s motion, the laws passed almost exactly one year ago were finally switched on by the government.
Given this triggered a strict timeline for things to be up and running, the work to recruit a five-person inquiry team to wield the powers of a royal commission and 10-person Treaty Institute Council was done first to make sure all was ready to go – sparking public concerns of stalling.
And ready it now is. Accomplished Waanyi and Kalkadoon barrister Joshua Creamer has been named as the inquiry’s chair, with Roslyn Atkinson AO, Cheryl Buchanan, Ivan Ingram and Vonda Malone appointed as its remaining four members.
The group will start work from July 1 and within a month should be handed terms of reference for the initial term of the inquiry, up to three years, looking into the effects of colonisation on First Nations peoples and the “public’s shared understanding of the history of Queensland”.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan fronted her state’s Yoorook Justice Commission – the only formal truth-telling body running nationwide so far – for the first time last week.
Looming over the Queensland landscape is another time frame: it is fewer than six months to the October state election, of which Premier Steven Miles has tried to paint Opposition Leader David Crisafulli as the likely winner.
Maybe that is more a scare tactic than an early admission of defeat.
Should the LNP win, its members have made clear they believe the state’s separate Voice rejection – coupled with earlier internal party pushback – means the Queensland public don’t want to walk our state’s treaty path.
“The LNP can no longer support a path to treaty and will not pursue one if elected to government,” Crisafulli said in October.
In its place were promises of issue-based targets and accountability for ministers, with little explanation of how this might differ to the status quo.
One of the first acts Crisafulli has promised are laws by year’s end that would probably lead to more disproportionately First Nations kids jailed, and perhaps a negative effect on “community safety”, from what little we know of that plan.
In January, as background work on the path to treaty pushed ahead under the new Miles-led Labor government, Crisafulli sharpened his message again.
“That process will end,” he said of the years-long process to even get to an inquiry and treaty institute, challenging Labor to make the state election a “referendum” on them.
“We won’t be wasting any time talking about those issues.”
No time was wasted answering Brisbane Times’ emailed questions about how quickly he would seek to turn off the lights, either.
Maybe no surprise, then, that not one LNP member stood in parliament last week to speak alongside One Nation or KAP before voting with them.