Colleen Harkin on The Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia – 28 October 2025

In this interview, Colleen Harkin on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia contextualises and disseminates the findings of the IPA’s research into the Victorian treaty.

All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research

Rita Panahi:

… look like. Joining me now for more on this is News Corp Senior Writer, Patrick Carlyon, and Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, Colleen Harkin. Colleen, I’ll start with you. Victorians rejected The Voice. What the Prime Minister assured them was a very modest amendment. When did we vote for a state-based voice and treaty? And this is anything but modest. The scope of this legislation is wide and we are already seeing signs of it, even without this legislation, like this hospital example of racial division and preferential treatment for one race over others.

Colleen Harkin:

It’s alarming, Rita. The Geylang wall authority that is been set up, we have about 1% of Aboriginals in Victoria and only 7% of those who could vote voted to set up this authority, which means that we’ve got literally about 3,000 people who have voted to change the very substance of everything about Victoria. It has authority to make substantial rules about everything from access to services to education. It has the potential for different laws for people of different heritage. It even opens the opportunity for treaties within treaties within treaties. So in my suburb, in my area of Bayside, might have different treaties to where somebody else lives.

It undermines absolutely everything about the country that we are, the establishment of the rule of law. All of the things that have made us a great and prosperous society are being completely diminished. As Victorians learn about it, increasingly they are unhappy with it. We already voted no to The Voice. And as they learn, 61% of Victorians at the moment have already said, “We don’t want any of this. We do not want to be divided by race.”

Rita Panahi:

Patrick, where is the Coalition? I wrote about this in last Friday’s Herald Sun. They say they will repeal this legislation if they win, but they’re not campaigning on it. How are they not campaigning on this enormously consequential issue? Are they actually terrified of being electable? I genuinely don’t understand. When they saw what happened with The Voice and they know the scope of this treaty and state-based voice is so broad, it impacts every Victorian, and if you speak to someone like Lana Calaris, a barrister, member of the Victorian Barr, she calls it a government within a government and a largely unaccountable government.

Patrick Carlyon:

Look, it upends everything about government. And you look at the numbers that Colleen was talking about, I think it’s got 37% approval of the treaty in Victoria. It came about by stealth. No one really understands it. That’s a big part of the problem. It’s such an abstraction that overlays the form of government that we have that no one fully understands it enough. And I think the Coalition, they should be going hard on this. This is safe ground. This is wrong. It’s about ideology. It’s not about realities. It’s about putting one group of people ahead of everybody else. It affects you on so many levels. This is not right. This cannot be right. And there is no support for it. You want to see them going very hard.

Rita Panahi:

If it’s got 37% support right now, I think that’s largely because so many people don’t know anything about it.

Patrick Carlyon:

They don’t get it.

Rita Panahi:

Because the Coalition has said barely a thing. They’re too gutless to tackle this beyond saying, “We don’t support it,” and that’s it. And it’s just been rammed through and it’s going to become law very shortly. It’s already got through one house and it’ll go through the other this week. Now, to a terrifying home invasion in the Melbourne suburb of Clyde, which saw a family forced to defend their home after teen thugs smashed through their front door. Have a look at this. It’s something like a scene from a movie.

Nine News Presenter:

Chased back into their home by armed thugs, a family of six slams the front door just in time. Frantic and terrified, one teenage son arms himself with a cricket stump as his grandfather yells through the window. The boys’ parents cutting their feet on the broken glass trying to defend their home, frustrated the wannabe intruders wave a knife and walk away.

Reynold Ephraim:

I just still want to believe it’s a dream. I had a bad dream.

Nine News Presenter:

The horrific wake-up call came around 3:00 this morning as the masked boys tried to kick their way in. They shattered the glass and peered through the blinds, but then left within seconds. It was only when dad Reynold went to see what was happening that they doubled back, rushing at the residents as they scrambled to get back inside.

Reynold Ephraim:

The whole family is shattered and scared.

Rita Panahi:

Colleen, that’s the fifth time their home has been targeted, twice this year. Not surprisingly, they’re now considering moving. Victorians, Melburnians shouldn’t have to live like this.

Colleen Harkin:

Not at all. I can’t imagine anything much more frightening than being at home in your own bed peacefully sleeping and having something like that happen to you once, let alone multiple times. The trouble here, Rita, is where would they move to where they can be assured of it not happening again? Our crime states are out of control. 18% increase in the last 12 months. Victorians don’t feel safe. And Jacinta Allan, just telling us that we are safe doesn’t cut it.

Rita Panahi:

Well, even the ABEC admits, Patrick, Victoria is in the midst of a record-breaking crime wave. The crims seem to have no fear of consequences. They don’t seem to fear the cops or the courts.

Patrick Carlyon:

We’re seeing footage like this every day where you see gangs with machetes, and it’s got to the point it’s ridiculous where Melburnians don’t feel safe in their homes at 3:00 a.m. They don’t feel safe in the CBD. They don’t feel safe in shopping centres. They don’t feel safe at sporting events because we’re seeing these kids who don’t care about the consequences running amok with machetes. It is out of control and the perception of safety has really suffered. You talk to people at work or wherever, people are scared. They are genuinely scared because these policies which put ideology ahead of reality have actually endangered our wellbeing in such a way over a pronounced period of time. It really has got out of control.

Rita Panahi:

And it’s interesting what we were talking about earlier with the treaty and the state-based voice, whether that will impact things like tightening bail laws. Because, again, the activism there was coming from a particular area and there was a lot of disquiet when finally Jacinta Allan said, “We’re going to tighten bail laws.” And you wonder if there was a state-based voice whether they would go ahead with something like that, especially if they were consulting and told, don’t do that. I think there is just so much more to that legislation that needs to be discussed.

But now let’s go to Queensland. A wealthy Queensland businessman known as the Coffee King has said acknowledgement of country ceremonies should also recognise migrants. And he’s developed his own revised version. Phil DiBella told the Courier Mail, “My acknowledgement is to both. It starts with the traditional custodians then flows to the migrants who came here to make Australia what it is and what it will be, and politicians are starting to copy me.” DiBella also took aim at welcome to country ceremonies, which must be performed by an Indigenous elder. Questioning why they were necessary, he said, “I’ve contributed over $30 million in tax so far, so I don’t need to be welcomed to my own country.”

Patrick, I do like that last statement, I agree wholeheartedly, but I don’t know if I want to add to this contentious practise. Would it be better just to get rid of it rather than extend it?

Patrick Carlyon:

Absolutely. Everyone is over acknowledgement of country. It’s a mouthful just to say. You see corporate meetings now where it’s box ticking, where every manager stands up, feels like they have to give the acknowledgement to country. It’s ridiculous. It’s lost its meaning. It’s lost any symbolism. And I thought that was interesting talking what he says about the welcome to country. I’ll be interested to hear what the wider community feels because that’s embedded itself in massive public events, occasionally hijack them. But I think there’s probably an acceptance of that in a way that there’s not for acknowledgement of country.

Rita Panahi:

Well, Marshal Angton promised us, Colleen, that if The Voice was defeated, there will be no more welcome to countries possibly because no one would want to perform them. But it hasn’t stopped, has it?

Patrick Carlyon:

No, it hasn’t stopped, unfortunately. I think most Australians, regardless of what their own ethnic heritage is, resent them. Because if you look back in history, all the Italians, the Greeks, the Irish, the Polish who all came and established the Snowy Mountain Scheme, which was a huge game-changer in Australian history, since then in the 70s, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Indians, we all belong in this one country. And I don’t want to be welcomed to my own country. I’ve actually sat in Zooms with bureaucrats who have done an acknowledgement to country and I’ve been sitting in my own lounge room. We don’t need it when people, again, 56% of Australians have said that they don’t want it. It’s divisive.

Rita Panahi:

Well, I think we’re going to be stuck with it, particularly in this state, for a while longer. Now, let’s go to revelations that the Climate Change Minister, Chris Bowen, was warned that there would likely be further significant increase in retail electricity prices if the Albanese government is to reach its key 2030 climate target. And Colleen, we’ve learned this from these newly released documents that Bowen’s department tried to keep secret.

Colleen Harkin:

There’s no surprise that he’s tried to keep this a secret because they don’t want people to know the truth that this is the core reason of the exponential increase in our energy costs and the lack of energy security for our nation. We’re in this bizarre vortex of a world where we dig up our coal and we give it to China so that they can create the solar panels that we buy back. And in 12 days, China puts out more emissions than we do in one year. So we’re in this stupid land, really. It is crazy what we are doing. And so it’s no secret. It’s no surprise that they want to keep this information secret from the public.

Rita Panahi:

And we really don’t, again, have a choice there, Patrick, because we’ve got Labour that has embraced net-zero wholeheartedly. We know where the Greens lie on this. They’re on the extreme position. And then you’ve got the coalition who we know possibly the majority of their MPs don’t believe in this.

Patrick Carlyon:

Yes.

Rita Panahi:

But they’re all also signed up to net-zero. So as a voter, who do you vote for if you question this?

Patrick Carlyon:

Coalition state and federal are too busy fighting with themselves to actually tackle the big issue here. And the big issue, you can talk about net-zero and targets and all the rest, abstractions, people care most about their power bills.

Rita Panahi:

Absolutely.

Patrick Carlyon:

They’ve gone through the roof and this advice showing that power bill is going to continue to escalate because of this silly policy, you can see why Chris Bowen wanted to keep it hidden. I would like to think it’s going to become more and more untenable politically as time goes on because the power bills, it is all about the hip pocket and people are being smashed.

Rita Panahi:

During a cost of living crisis, it is a top issue and it’s going to be a top issue [inaudible 00:11:56].

Colleen Harkin:

Rita, one other thing with this is that people never talk about the fact that solar panels have a lifespan. So this is not a sunk cost that is, once it’s done, it’s finished. They have to be replaced…

Rita Panahi:

Oh, yeah.

Colleen Harkin:

… give or take every 15 years, and that doesn’t get spoken about either.

Rita Panahi:

If you’re lucky, 15 years, if they last that long. Now, I want to stay with another Queensland story with the Premier there, David Crisafulli, coming under fire for repeatedly refusing to confirm whether the state’s redefinition of the term woman as a adult female human, pretty much what the dictionary says, whether that includes transgender women.

Colleen, I don’t know why David Crisafulli declined to answer this question. It’s not a difficult one. The answer is quite clearly no.

Colleen Harkin:

I agree. I was pleased to see when Queensland changed the definition again from the previous Minister for Women. I don’t know why we had these ministers for women when they can’t define what a woman is.

Rita Panahi:

She finally did and now it’s supposedly a controversy and her leader can’t answer a question definitively. I mean, it just makes a mockery of the definition change if you don’t actually know what it means. Before you go, I want to just play this light-hearted moment from Parliament’s first day back yesterday where the Chamber, both sides, burst out laughing when Speaker Milton Dick claimed there were many intelligent people in the room.

Milton Dick:

I don’t know why this is so difficult. When people are asking questions, don’t interject. There’s a lot of intelligent people here. [inaudible 00:13:32]. Well, in the gallery there is.

Rita Panahi:

Yes, Patrick. Perhaps in the gallery. Perhaps in the gallery.

Patrick Carlyon:

That’s right. Look, I think more Australians should watch question time. It’s better than The Block. It can get a bit dull and a bit tedious at times. But you see real drama playing out and we should be more across what actually happens.

Rita Panahi:

It does. And I don’t like moments like that. Colleen Harkin, Patrick Carlyon, thank you so much for…

This transcript with Colleen Harkin on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia has been edited for clarity.