Two years ago today, Victorians spoke clearly. We voted to be equal and to be one people, and we voted ‘No’ to racial division in our Constitution.

So, it is not without a sense of irony that, two years to the very day, the Victorian Parliament will debate new treaty laws which will divide us permanently by race, this time at a state level.

Under the Statewide Treaty Bill 2025, the government will set up a new body called Gellung Warl. While it is being sold as merely advisory, Victorians should be warned – the treaty will function as a Voice on steroids, creating a separate and parallel parliament based on race.

In the same way that the Voice was proposed to permanently lobby the government, Gellung Warl will have unlimited access to ministers. They will be required to consult it before introducing legislation and may in turn be summoned before it for questioning.

Ignore its dictates, and you will be called a racist. Any politician that refuses to act on its demands will be made to explain themselves to the parliament and press packs. As the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said of the Voice in 2022, it would be a ‘brave government’ that ignored the Voice.

The body will have the power to make ‘substantive rules’ affecting Indigenous Victorians. These rules will function as de facto legislation and will mean the law applies differently to Victorians based solely on their race.

Only Indigenous Victorians will vote for Gellung Warl’s members. That means some Victorians will effectively have two votes for who represents them: one for Parliament, one for Gellung Warl. Meanwhile, everywhere else will only get one. This means that while the body will control the parliament and be paid for by all Victorians, it will only be accountable to some.

All this will ensure that our democracy is transformed into a two-tier system based solely on ancestry.

This is exactly what Victorians rejected in October 2023. When asked whether they supported a race-based body entering the Constitution, Victorians said ‘No’, with 54 per cent voting against it.

Even the area where Premier Allan sits said ‘No’. Her state seat of Bendigo East is contained within the federal district of Bendigo, which recorded a 59 per cent ‘No’ vote; even higher than the statewide result. In pursuing a treaty anyway, the Premier is acting as though she knows better than the very people she claims to represent.

This has been lost on the Premier, who has suggested the fundamental difference between her government’s treaty and the Voice is that it is ‘not changing the Victorian constitution’, as if that was the reason Victorians rejected the Voice.

But the Voice wasn’t rejected because of a legal detail or constitutional nitpicking. It was rejected because of a simple reason: Victorians believe we are all equal. And a body that grants special privileges to some people based on their race betrays that core value.

This truth is confirmed by two separate studies of the referendum result.

After the referendum, a survey of more than 3,500 Australians commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance, found that 70 per cent of ‘No’ voters did so because of their belief the Voice would divide Australians.

Similarly, a study from the Australian National University of over 4,200 Australians reported that 66.1 per cent of ‘No’ voters identified racial division as ‘very important’ in their decision to vote ‘No’.

These two studies show clearly what Victorians already know to be true: we do not want to be divided by race in our laws.

It was not hatred, but love of fairness that defeated the Voice. It was the fundamental truth that a race-based body would drive a wedge between us – a prospect voters recognised and rejected in favour of unity.

But the Premier’s treaty will rip that principle to shreds. Our state will become a place where a person’s race determines how much say they have in government. Under this system, it will absolutely matter what you look like, who your parents were, and where you fit on the binary of ‘colonised’ and ‘coloniser’.

Victorians have already made it clear that they want equality and not division, and a future where each Victorian has an equal voice in our state’s governance.

Instead of learning from the referendum result, the Premier has chosen to ignore Victorians who voted for unity over separation.

Margaret Chambers is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs