Ruben Burke

And I think on that as well, sometimes there can be seen to be just a focus on the kind of the more traumatic sides about the history of First Peoples.

And obviously it is important that all Victorians can better understand the true impact of colonisation.

But it's also about celebrating black excellence too.

It's about every school kid in Victoria should understand the significance of the aquaculture system down at Budgeabim.

and they should understand the significance of people like Nagara's grandfather and great-grandfather and all the work of First Peoples in progressing outcomes across this whole state.

We want to make sure we're celebrating Aboriginal history as well as part of that process.

To me, there's two really key components.

One is they've spoken about the importance of closing the gap, and we recognise the importance of that too, and that's why we've drawn so heavily from the work of the Productivity Commission.

If I was going to say who knows best about what might need to change for closing the gap, it's First Peoples and a Productivity Commission that has done an in-depth review into what needs to change, and so we're delivering on those things from the closing the gap review.

And also just to note that this has happened.

There's going to be a treaty error and we need to make sure we can use that to best benefit for all Victorians and to get better outcomes.

But it's something that's going to be there and we're happy to work with all sides of government to make that work as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Yeah, and we often talk a lot about how Victoria is leading the way in a national perspective, but we're just catching up with the rest of the globe.

Like, Commonwealth countries have had these treaty processes in place for a long, long time now.

So it really is important to see this from a global perspective.

I think that our community will be the measures of success and hopefully we see our communities continue to thrive and see the ability to actually take control of our own lives and actually thrive in our own communities and have our culture be really strong.

That's what we're looking for and we want to make sure that we have all of our community participating and involved in these processes and that'll be, from my perspective, the true measure of success.

I think a key issue we've faced in a lot of these spaces is that so often what success looks like is dictated by external measures, where government are deciding that these are the measures of success.

And now we're entering into a process where we as First Peoples will be able to determine what we think success looks like and measure that against our own ideas, which is really important.

Our pleasure.