First Nations Treaty is on the ballot

Victoria's statewide Treaty is carried by the Statewide Treaty Act 2025, which passed with Labor and Greens support and created Gellung Warl, the body that houses the First Peoples' Assembly alongside truth-telling and accountability functions. It is the first treaty of its kind in Australia, and it is now the subject of a repeal pledge from both parties on the right.¹

The Liberals committed to legislating repeal within the first 100 days of government, a shadow cabinet decision announced on 14 October 2025. Their replacement is a new government department, First Nations Victoria, reporting to Parliament on Closing the Gap and separate from the First Peoples' Assembly. The Parliamentary Budget Office later confirmed the opposition's claim that repeal saves around $1bn over a decade. One Nation has made the same pledge and goes further, promising to abolish Gellung Warl outright.¹

What the polling found

A YouGov poll of roughly 4,000 respondents, fielded shortly before Ben Carroll replaced Jacinta Allan as premier, found 40% support for the Treaty against 32% opposition. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believed the Coalition's 100-day repeal pledge was a One Nation policy rather than a Liberal one.²

The poll's geographic split is the sharpest result. In Kew, Caulfield, Sandringham, Brighton, Malvern and Hawthorn — the Liberal-held seats of the inner and middle south-east, including the Opposition Leader's own seat — more than 60% of respondents said a politician making Treaty repeal a first-order priority was out of touch.²

All six are decided on margins under 8.1%: Kew is held on 4.0%, Caulfield on 2.1%, Hawthorn on 1.7%, Sandringham on 5.0%, Brighton on 5.1% and Malvern on 8.1%. Hawthorn is already being contested by a Climate 200 independent. On a uniform swing of 8.9 points — the same statewide change applied to every seat — every one of them would be in play.

Treaty repeal called out of touch: 60%+²

The wedge that cuts the wrong way

A cultural wedge issue normally works by consolidating a party's own vote and costing it nothing where it was never going to win. Treaty repeal does the opposite in Victoria, at least on this evidence. The seats where it is most popular with One Nation's base are rural and outer-suburban seats the Coalition already holds or is already winning on other issues. The seats where it polls worst are the inner and middle-suburban seats that decide whether the Liberals form government at all.

The wedge appears to cost the Coalition in the close inner-metro Liberal seats while playing as a One Nation-branded policy elsewhere. Labor and the Greens defend the Treaty.²

Liberal-held seats where Treaty repeal polled as out of touch
Seat | Margin (after preferences) | Repeal called out of touch
Hawthorn | 1.7% | 60%+
Caulfield | 2.1% | 60%+
Kew | 4.0% | 60%+
Sandringham | 5.0% | 60%+
Brighton | 5.1% | 60%+
Malvern | 8.1% | 60%+²

The pledge and the party

The repeal commitment was announced in October 2025, under a different Liberal leader, and has been carried into the 2026 campaign. At One Nation's campaign launch on 3 October 2026, Pickering and Hanson presented scrapping the Treaty as a funding source for law-and-order spending, alongside the Suburban Rail Loop. The government dismissed the launch and said it would not be making any deals with the party.³

Where a policy is associated with a minor party rather than the opposition, it does not necessarily deliver the opposition the votes of people who support it, and it does carry the cost of the voters who do not. The repeal petition sponsored by One Nation's Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell in the Legislative Council attracted 579 signatures.⁴

What is still open

YouGov's projection from the same poll had 33 of 88 lower-house seats changing hands, the most volatile since 1992, with a break-up of Coalition 39, One Nation 17 and the Greens holding. Those numbers come from the same fieldwork as the Treaty findings: an MRP — a model that estimates every seat from one poll — is a model of a hypothetical, not a count, and it was fielded before the change of premier.²

The evidence supports three statements rather than a seat tally. Treaty repeal polls below support for the Treaty statewide; it is strongest with a party other than the one proposing it; and it polls worst among the voters whose seats decide the majority. Whether that is enough to cost the Coalition a seat is a question the vote will answer on 28 November.