Family First’s Jane Foreman says revelations that Victoria’s taxpayer-funded Treaty body is advertising its incoming chief executive role on a salary package of up to $470,000 — and pitched at just under $500,000 in the job ad — more than the state’s Deputy Premier earns, prove exactly why Family First opposed this process from the start: Victorians rejected this kind of costly, divisive bureaucracy at the ballot box, and Labor pushed ahead with it regardless.
Mrs Foreman says the Herald Sun’s revelation that Gellung Warl, the Treaty body established by the Carroll Labor Government to oversee the rollout of Victoria’s Treaty, is offering its incoming chief executive up to $470,000 — eclipsing the $451,000 salary of Deputy Premier and Minister for Treaty and First Peoples Gabrielle Williams — shows exactly what Victorians are being asked to fund for a process most of them never asked for.
The role is Gellung Warl’s second interim chief executive appointment in as many months, with Daniel Miller stepping in on a $400,000 package after predecessor Elly Patira received $467,000 plus superannuation before returning to the Essential Services Commission. Insiders have told the Herald Sun the revolving door at the top reflects deeper problems inside the fledgling organisation.
“Victorians voted No to the Voice at the 2023 referendum precisely because they didn’t want a new layer of taxpayer-funded, race-based bureaucracy,” said Mrs Foreman. “Labor ignored that result, signed Australia’s first state Treaty anyway, and now we learn the price tag — half a million dollars for one chief executive, sitting on top of a revolving door of interim bosses who’ve already banked hundreds of thousands more between them.”
“Victorian families are being told there’s no money to ease their cost of living, while this government hands out pay packets bigger than the Deputy Premier’s to run a body most Victorians never voted for,” said Mrs Foreman. “You cannot look struggling mums and dads in the eye and tell them to do more with less while writing cheques like this for Treaty bureaucracy. This is exactly the kind of pointless, divisive spending Family First warned Victorians about.”
Family First is calling on Premier Ben Carroll and Ms Williams to publicly justify Gellung Warl’s salary structure, freeze any further executive appointments pending a full value-for-money review, and give Victorians a genuine say on the future of Treaty funding rather than proceeding on the say of an unelected body.
Mrs Foreman says the CEO salary revelation is further proof Victoria needs Family First’s genuinely independent voice holding this government to account in the Legislative Council after November — because Labor has shown, again, that it will keep spending taxpayers’ money on ideology the public never endorsed.
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