Treaty & Immigration

Treaty and immigration are issues where people can feel strongly. This is where I stand, and why.

Treaty

Better outcomes, better value
Accountability for governments

The Statewide Treaty Act 2025 passed the Victorian Parliament in October 2025 and became law on 13 November 2025. It is Australia’s first Treaty, enacted in legislation, between a state government and First Peoples.

Treaty makes the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria permanent, with an accountability body and a truth-telling body alongside it. Treaty works within our existing democratic system and does not limit Parliament’s power to make laws.

As an economist working in public policy, I support Treaty and will oppose any effort to repeal it.

Working in the federalism space, I’ve seen successive governments across the country fail to make progress towards closing the gap in living standards between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. We’ve spent billions of public dollars on poorly designed, ineffective programs, with little accountability on governments.

Treaty works to correct that. It gives First Peoples a say in how the programs that affect them are run, and co-designing programs with the people they affect is a method proven to deliver better outcomes and better use of public funding. And it places accountability on the government of the day to deliver on its promises.

The argument against Treaty is that we don’t need more bureaucracy, we need action. But there’s been plenty of action over the years without much progress. What’s been lacking is a way to hold governments to account for how public money is spent. Repealing Treaty means more of the same: less accountability and more wasted money.

Immigration

The full picture
Our story as a nation

Immigration isn’t a state responsibility, but there are flow-on effects for state policy.

Our economy as it’s currently structured relies on immigration. Reducing our immigration intake without discussing our economic structure would carry real costs. For example: We already have a shortage of GPs and the number of Australian students studying this stream of medicine is falling. Getting timely healthcare relies on doctors migrating here to meet our need.

I understand the frustration that’s out there. Many of us were told that if we lived our lives a certain way we’d be provided for and be prosperous; however, for many people that hasn’t happened. The cause of this is not migrants, the problem is a system has stopped investing in us.

If we want to curb immigration, we need to invest in our domestic workforce:

Making TAFE better quality and more accessible.
Working with universities to be less reliant on international student fees.
Making early childhood education and care more accessible and higher quality, so parents can afford to return to work and feel confident doing so.
Investing in our public schools to educate the next generation of workers.
Putting the right workplace protections in place to stop employers replacing domestic workers with cheaper immigrant labour.

Without these measures, cutting immigration would take our economy backwards and result in a lower standard of living for everyone.

Putting the economics to one side, today, 32 per cent of people living here were born overseas. In the 1890s, just before we became a nation, it was around 30 per cent. It fell to around 10 per cent in the 1940s, but since the 1970s it’s always been at least 20 per cent.

The argument that the people arriving are different, and that we feel uncomfortable around them, is nothing new. We saw it with the waves of Greek and Italian migrants after the Second World War. In the 1980s–90s there were concerns about the Vietnamese. Today, there’s a banh mi bakery on every second corner.

Discomfort about difference is a natural reaction, and there’s nothing wrong with feeling it. It’s what we do with it that counts. As Australians, we learn over time that these people aren’t so different from us after all, and that we can live side by side. We’ve done it time and time again, and we’ll keep doing it.

That’s what it is to be an Australian. This is our story.