MATTERS OF URGENCY – Native Title

What an embarrassing contribution we’ve just heard. We’re meant to be talking about the native title system and its desperate need for reform—and it clearly does need lots of change, especially for Aboriginal people, who it’s meant to benefit—but instead we’ve had a government senator come in
here and attack the opposition about nuclear power. I don’t want to do that, but I’ll just quickly say: if nuclear power is somehow an inhibitor to the tourism industry, can someone explain to me the French? Can someone explain to me why Paris is the most visited town by tourists in the world? I’m sure many Labor senators like to spend the cold winters here in Australia over there in the European summer, happily using 70-per-cent nuclear-powered air conditioning in their apartments on the Champs-Elysees. The clear thing we need here is cheap power for our country, and that will help all industries, including the tourism sector. One of the factors that has limited tourism on Great Keppel Island has been a lack of reliable power. They have needed to use diesel gen sets. It’s a dirty form of power, both for carbon emissions and from a more general pollutant perspective. It’s also very expensive. They need cheaper power, and wind and solar ain’t going to cut it. There have been lots of people planning to do wind and solar on Great Keppel Island, but it’s not enough to
run a resort or a modern tourism venture. They need proper power that can last all day. But I actually didn’t want to talk too much about that in the limited time I have. The main reason we need a focus on the native title system is that it has failed the promise that it provided to Indigenous people of this country. It’s a good thing that the rights of Indigenous people have been recognised though the Native Title Act, but at the moment those rights are not able to be fully captured by Indigenous people, because of the restrictions placed on the system. We now have a generation of experience of native title—it’s been in existence for 30 years—and the biggest winners have been lawyers. The legal industry have laughed their way all the way to the bank over those three decades, and poor and often desperate Indigenous communities have been left behind. We have to give Indigenous people more agency and more opportunity to take the economic benefits that
are provided by having a right of property. Instead, we continually see people in this chamber saying that they support Indigenous rights, but whenever an Indigenous community has the temerity to want to exercise those rights—to develop an agricultural district, to build a dam, a mine or a factory, to expand fishing opportunities—the same people in this place who say they endorse Indigenous rights are the ones saying they can’t do it. This was most starkly demonstrated in the saga over the Adani Carmichael mine. The Wangan and Jagalingou people voted 294 to one in favour of the Adani mine, yet we still had people, particularly from the Greens and sometimes from the Labor Party, coming in here and saying, ‘No, no, no; the Indigenous people can’t have this
mine,’ even though it was approved 294 to one at the authorisation meeting under the Native Title Act. Thankfully those forces didn’t win, and thankfully that mine is operating. The project employs 2,000 Queenslanders, including many hundreds of Indigenous people, and they’re very happy with it. Greens senators are welcome to come and check it out. They were up there a lot when it was being proposed, but you don’t see them much anymore, now that the mine is operating and providing opportunity. Too often around our country, native title corporations are restricted in what they can do. They often cannot invest in entrepreneurial endeavours. What we need is to have a
system which allows Indigenous people to build their own businesses to take care of their own futures so they’re not tied like indentured servants to a government run scheme that, as I say, that is leeched on by the legal profession. We have to give them that agency, and it needs reform.
So I welcome this motion being brought forward to bring a spotlight to these issues. We are now seeing again, I think, the abuse of the native title system on behalf of legal interests, where it’s being extended, as we mentioned before, to areas like Great Keppel Island, where it was not intended to go. There are clearly areas of our country where native title rights exist, and our focus should remain on getting those rights working for people across the country rather than seeking to use and abuse this system for political purposes and, once again, only benefit lawyers, not the people on the ground.