The Minister for Equality was among the many Victorian government ministers to stand on the steps of the Victorian Parliament House on 18 June 2025 to welcome the arrival of the so-called Walk for Truth. There is every chance that the Minister, Vicki Ward, had no idea how big her job had just become.

For she too, stood in the smoke and cheered on the Yoorrook Royal Commissioners as they handed over their four-year, $55-million report into ‘truth-telling’. Truth Be Told was tabled in the Victorian Parliament on 1 July, 2025.

The Yoorrook Royal Commission had little to do with the truth, and everything to do with rewriting Victoria’s history through the eyes of Aboriginal activists who see racism in everything, and the elevation of indigenous people above all others as the new measure of ‘equality’. In many ways, it doesn’t matter what the Yoorrook Royal Commission recommends – because its recommendations are based on race and not need. It asserts that the colour of one’s skin is more important than any other life factor.

And so it is that Vicki Ward’s job – if she does it properly – has become perhaps the most powerful in Victoria – for it is all Victorians she is supposed to represent.

On that June day, people standing higher than the Yoorrook Commissioners on the steps of the Parliament were asked to step down so that they were standing below them: ‘It’s disrespectful to the elders to stand higher than them.’

Gone are the days, it would seem, when people can choose what public steps they stand on in Victoria and who it is they choose to respect.

The Yoorrook Truth Telling Commission started in 2021 with its sole purpose to ‘inform’ treaty negotiations between the state of Victoria and the First Peoples’ Assembly. At the Parliament, Yoorrook Commissioner Travis Lovett claimed, ‘Victorians support truth and treaty. They now have the truth, now let’s get the treaty done.’

No one in Victoria has voted for a treaty or rights, power and funding based on race. The Voice referendum told us so in 2023 – and it told us very clearly. Yet on 18 June, Yoorrook’s Commissioners were invited inside the Parliament to Queen’s Hall to give the Premier Jacinta Allan a ‘message stick’ and the Commission findings. Just two weeks earlier, the same Premier refused to speak to thousands of farmers who rallied at Parliament House. The Premier had no time for them. She is only prepared to listen to some and not others.

The government says it will sign a treaty before the state election in November 2026. But the activists want it signed this year.

Since 2015, the Labor government has spent almost $2.5 billion on indigenous-specific funding, $262.6 million in the 2025-2026 State budget alone. This is separate to any federal funding. If ‘the gap’ still exists, the Victorian Premier needs to explain why.

The Whole Truth submission to Yoorrook – originally rejected by the Commissioners – described ‘the truth’ of traditional Aboriginal culture. Theirs was a violent culture that generated its own stolen generations and intergenerational trauma via elder abuse, massacres, cannibalism, sorcery, mutilations, organ theft and infanticide. Victorians should not be blind to this in the revisionist writing of the state’s history that has been called ‘truth telling’.

Yoorrook talks of 50 massacre sites of indigenous by Europeans but makes no mention of their 65,000-year culture of revenge, retribution and massacres.

In short, Yoorrook is creating a cultural fraud leading to a financial fraud – dismantling democracy along the way to separatism.

Yoorrook’s ‘truth’ and treaty will enable cash for culture: a culture that few truly know about including the indigenous people. Instead, they speak of themselves as a mythical and magical people who all but float with the Spirit Gods on high: a messianic, untouchable, intangible culture.

However, elevated claims of knowledge of rivers and land, mystery and spirit must not be used to change history or the future. The so-called ‘connection to country’ is not theirs alone. It is global.

Yoorrook’s 100 recommendations include land handovers, perpetual funding, power at all levels, mutual control, preferential contracts and job elevation. They want control over ‘their land and waters’ and the revenue generated from it. Already local councils are paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of renaming public roads and spaces. Bike paths bear Aboriginal names because indigenous people have been great cyclists for thousands of years, perhaps?

They want separate legal, health and education systems that place more emphasis on ‘culture’ than the provision of the best education possible. Even since 1814 when Governor Macquarie set up a school for Aborigines – education was regarded as the best method to ‘close the gap’. Yet one of Yoorrook’s own recommendations is that indigenous children are excluded from school attendance requirements.

Why would the ‘colonisers’ bother building schools and a future for the indigenous when it was only genocide they wanted? It’s why the Yoorrook claims of genocide are at cross purposes with reality: genocide never happened. Change happened.

It becomes apparent that the bigotry of low expectations is at its peak within the Aboriginal activist industry. It serves their financial and power interests to talk indigenous people down, to treat them as a monolithic socialist blob and to assume they do not exist as capable, successful individuals. For this is what they are.

Despite decrying their treatment since colonisation, the indigenous people had 65,000 years to build cities, systems, governments, commodities, global exchanges, nationhood and equality – and they did not. Today, with a government chequebook in sight, the Yoorrook activists pretend they always had these things. But when the ships arrived in 1788 there was no sight of cities or Sistine Chapels.

Inside Queen’s Hall that day, another conversation was overheard between First Peoples’ Assembly representatives – they spoke to the idea of ‘taking the money’, and ‘f–k ’em’.

Much of the Yoorrook recommendations and treaty ideas to come are inked into Recognition and Settlement Agreements – mini treaties – already secretly signed elsewhere. Few Victorians even know they exist.

The three parties involved in the treaty process love the idea.

On one side is the state government – on the other, the First Peoples’ Assembly or ‘the Voice’ – the two separated by the ‘independent’ Treaty Authority comprising five indigenous people. They consider Aboriginal law and lore equal to the Australian system of law.

While the First Peoples’ Assembly argues it speaks for all indigenous Victorians, fewer than 10 per cent of the 30,000 eligible voters have bothered casting their ballot across elections in 2019 and 2023. Eligible voters include people who don’t live in Victoria, are 15 years old and prisoners.

It mocks our democracy. Currently Victoria’s indigenous population is about 65,000, half of whom live in Melbourne. Watch the number swell as Victoria becomes the aboriginal cherry tree in Australia.

The Equality Minister is going to be busy.