Ruben Burke

And I'm Ruben Burke, proud Greenwich Mara man, and also one of the co-chairs of the First People's Assembly of Victoria.

Yeah, as Nagara said, it's been a very long journey to get us here, across six years of travelling around the whole state, talking with all of our community in every corner of the state, and now to get to this point where it's about to become a reality, to now then think forward to, let's get the action done, let's start getting things done.

Rather than having to talk about treaty, now we can actually activate it.

The first part of the negotiations when we started as the assembly was really to work out what treaty would look like actually here in this state, because there's lots of different models you can go down for treaty making.

And very early on, we made, I think, a really important decision, an agreement with the state that we'd tackle this as a hybrid model.

So we're looking at both statewide treaties, which is the first part of which has gone into the legislation as part of the bill.

And then there's also traditional owner treaties that are happening in parallel.

And so that was, I think, a really key first part of this process to say, we're going to have both.

And that drew from different models across the globe.

And then as we started talking more about the first statewide treaty to say that what we wanted to do is set things up for success and for future conversations.

that if we're going to have further negotiations and further conversations, we need to have a really strong democratically elected traditional owner-led body that can intersect with government in really powerful ways so we can advocate for better outcomes and then also progress future treaty making.

Yeah, so this is the transformation of the Assembly as it is now into this future body.

And it sits within this space we refer to as Gullung Law.

And that's the kind of overarching landscape of treaty making.

So within Gullung Law will still be the First People's Assembly of Victoria as the democratically elected body.

And that's the body that will be able to talk directly to parliament, to address parliament once a year, to meet with cabinet, to meet with ministers, to have relationships with departments about how when government's developing policies that might affect First Peoples, how they intersect and engage with the expertise of First Peoples.

Also within that space of Galangwal will be the Nyingma Nyenyawara, which is the accountability mechanism.

And this is something that's very clearly drawn from the work of the Productivity Commission last year.

They did a big review on closing the gap and what needed to be changed to actually see some closing of those gaps.

And a key thing they identified was there's not a First Peoples-led body that's actually monitoring the government to see how are they performing and giving them recommendations about what to improve.