What we’re seeing in Western Australia right now is the most egregious attack on the family home in our nation’s history. It is the dream of almost every Australian to own their own home and have the right to be sovereign in that territory of their home. It’s summed up in perhaps our most popular cultural movie, The Castle. As Darryl Kerrigan says, ‘A man’s home is his castle’—except, now, in Western Australia.
Let me be very clear: this legislation in Western Australia applies to any block of land over 1,100 square metres. That’s a quarter of an acre. I don’t know exactly the specifications of Mr Kerrigan’s block in the movie The Castle, but it looked to be about a quarter of an acre block. He and his family would be captured by this legislation, which, effectively, tells him he couldn’t build that shed, which he probably didn’t have council approval for anyway—he couldn’t do anything—in his backyard because the regulations under this legislation say that activities involving the removal of up to 20 kilograms of material require an Aboriginal cultural heritage survey—20 kilograms. You can’t take more than 20 kilograms in your suitcase at the airport. That’s what it is. It’s a suitcase full of dirt. You move that amount of dirt, and you’re captured by this legislation. Your rights as a freehold landowner in this country have been totally traduced by the Western Australian Labor government. All we’re asking from this federal government is to rule this out, to rule that out so that the homeowners of this country and this nation can sleep at night knowing that they won’t have their castle taken away from them, like the Western Australian Labor government has done over the past few months.
I want to respond directly to Senator Sterle, who raised some questions earlier. He is claiming, somehow, that the Liberal and National parties in Australia voted for all of these requirements, which are the ones I have read out plus many others. That’s not the case. That’s not what happened. Senator Sterle tried to claim some kind of ignorance, and I must say he did so quite successfully, because he obviously doesn’t understand the details of this legislation. The legislation itself did not have these requirements about 20 kilograms of material and 1,100 square metres of land being captured. It simply set up a new framework for cultural heritage in response to the Juukan Gorge incident. The detailed issues that we have raised here that go to the heart of taking away people’s rights in their home happened under regulation by the minister after the passage of the legislation. They weren’t subject to the parliament or the scrutiny of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly. Now, of course, that’s a matter for them in Western Australia, and there’s a backlash brewing over there, which I think and hope will succeed in seeking change, but here in this place we do have our own parallel process under the minister for environment designing a new framework for Aboriginal cultural heritage. All we are asking is for this government to rule that out, for Labor senators to say they don’t support that. The very clear thing here for Labor senators, especially those from Western Australia, is do they support people on more than 1,100 square metres of land having to go and pay thousands of dollars—tens of thousands of dollars, we were told, sometimes—before they do basic things to their own property? It’s a very simple question, and it’s a live one, given the reforms that are being pursued in this place.
Senator Sterle also mentioned that somehow there had been all this consultation, and he mentioned the mining industry. That’s great, isn’t it? That’s fantastic. I’m as big a supporter of the mining industry as any other, but this is not about them. The mining industry can deal with this. It’s not an issue for them. They can afford to pay the cultural heritage surveys, and there’s no doubt many of these mining companies just supported it because they thought this was the easiest path for them. Good luck to them. But we should also here, in this place, be defending the people who just want to pay their mortgage, who just want to own a home. I’m a bit surprised that the Labor Party seem to only be caring about the interests of the mining companies here. Senator Sterle said, ‘The mining companies support it, so it’s all sweet.’ This affects a lot more than just the mining industry. What about the basic and hard-working homeowners of this nation and putting them at ease? They’re already suffering under massive increases in interest rates. They are struggling to pay their mortgages. They don’t need another thing to keep them awake at night, and the Australian Labor Party could help here by ruling any of these ridiculous restrictions and liens going onto people’s property and by returning to the principle that when you own a freehold parcel of land in this country, you are a king or a queen of that land. It is your right to do what you like with it, and you shouldn’t have governments taking away those rights, like the Western Australia Labor government has.
