In this interview, Margaret Chambers on Credlin – Sky News Australia contextualises and disseminates the findings of the IPA’s research into the Victorian treaty.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research
Peta Credlin:
Welcome back. Still to Come, what we can expect as the showdown looms for the Coalition party room in Canberra next week over net-zero. But now on to the Institute of Public Affairs poll released today, which found that a majority of Victorians reject the Alan Government’s proposed treaty with Aboriginal groups. The surveys revealed that support collapsed even further when voters were informed about the powers of the proposed body Gellongwile. The findings mirror the sentiment behind the recent voice referendum, revealing continuing strong opposition to any policy seen to divide Australians by race.
Margaret Chambers is the research fellow at the IPA who has done this research, and she joins me now to discuss this. We were talking off in the break, this legislation has landed, it’s incredibly complex, but the more that Australia Victorians start to learn what’s really in it, the more they are hardening up their opposition to this race-based treaty.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think the thing here, Peta, is that we’ve actually had a referendum on this already, and when Victorians were asked whether or not they supported a race-based body being inserted into the Constitution, 54% said no. So we actually already know that’s where Victorians stand, and the polling just confirms that. So what we see is actually, from the outset, 37% of Victorians, only 37% support the treaty, whereas 21% are unsure, that 42 oppose it from the beginning. But then when more and more detail comes out, you see that support start to fall off quite dramatically to the point where 61% of Victorians oppose it when it uses the bill’s own language to describe what treaty making will mean for Victorians.
Peta Credlin:
And remind me how long the bill is.
Margaret Chambers:
The bill’s about 260 pages long.
Peta Credlin:
Wow.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, so it’s enormously dense. And the more you shake this bill, the more problematic provisions come out of it. And I think time will tell just how terrible it is for Victoria. We already know that it will establish this race-based body that will function as a third… Sorry, as an additional Chamber of Parliament that’s entirely based on race. So its membership will be reserved for Aboriginal Victorians. And it results in this frankly disturbing situation where if you’re over the age of 18 and you’re Aboriginal, you’ll actually have a double vote for who represents you in Parliament, because that’s how the voting eligibility is set up. So we already know that Victorians reject race-based division, they don’t want this. And yeah, this is just a policy proposal to further that end.
Peta Credlin:
What concerns me too is, if you look at the statistics, only about 1% of Victorians identify as Aboriginal, and of that 1%, about seven, so less than 10% actually voted for the first people’s assembly. That assembly will morph into this race-based chamber of the Parliament, if we can call it that. So it’s 7% of 1% are going to have this double vote.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, that’s exactly right, Peta. It’s not a representative body. I think to say anything to that effect would just be a lie. This is an elitist body to represent a very small minority of Victorians, and it’s not what Victorians want. They don’t support that sort of thing.
Peta Credlin:
What we’ve seen so often in Victoria, whether it was a sister dying, whether it was the ability to have a late-term abortion or abortion, basically on demand right up until birth, gender ID, self-ID laws, it starts in Victoria. Victoria is the Petri dish, and then this gets rolled out in every other state, which we have seen. People inside labour say to me, “We want to get this up in Victoria. We’ll make sure it doesn’t scare the horses, at least for the first couple of years. And then that will be used as the template to put it out in other states.” Do you think that’s right?
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. We’ve seen that time and time again where unfortunately Victoria is the test case. It’s like a cauldron of hatred and poor judgement for the rest of Australia, like an inspiration point. And we’ve already seen proposals to this effect in New South Wales and South Australia where they’re considering rolling out similar things. But I mean, we saw this earlier this year with anti-discrimination laws and reforms that basically… well, it’s wrong to call them reforms because it was a step backwards that made hateful speech illegal in Victoria, and that was… It spread to the rest of the states and territories. So I think it’s exactly the same with the treaty, we will see this spread.
Peta Credlin:
And the VicLibs have said they’ll oppose the legislation. Where do they stand if they were to win government next year?
Margaret Chambers:
So the VicLibs have said that they’ll repeal it within the first a hundred days of being elected, if they get elected. But I think what this polling shows is this is a real opportunity for the liberal party in Victoria, because what we see from the polling is that 79% of Libs already oppose the treaty. They’re locked into opposing it. So they won’t lose votes if they go hard on this issue. But interestingly, what we also see is that it’s an opportunity to win votes off of labour because-
Peta Credlin:
Oh, you mean to campaign on it. Not just to oppose, to campaign on it.
Margaret Chambers:
Exactly right, to make it an election issue. Because when labour voters find out more about the treaty, the support actually tanks among them as well. So it’s an opportunity to actually win votes off of labour voters.
Peta Credlin:
Wouldn’t it be nice if that is something sensible in a campaigning sense? That’s good advice, Margaret, thank you.
Margaret Chambers:
Thank you.
Peta Credlin:
Margaret Chambers there from the IP-
This transcript with Margaret Chambers on Credlin – Sky News Australia has been edited for clarity.
