Native title: a sell-out of land rights
Wiradjuri woman JENNY MUNRO, chair of the Metropolitan Local Land Council, spoke to the Network of Women Students of Australia conference at the University of Western Sydney on June 30 — the day that Senator Brian Harradine announced that he would allow Howard's 10-point plan to pass through the Senate.
She shared a panel with Kathy Malera-Bandjalan, who is campaigning to stop gold mining in Malera-Bandjalan country near Grafton, before leading an anti-racism march into Penrith. The following transcription of her remarks was prepared by Zohl de Ishtar.
I was told this morning that that wonderful, God-fearing man from Tasmania has decided that he is going to sleep with the devil. Nothing has changed. That's how it has been for Aboriginal people in this country for the past 200 years. Our rights, our voice, doesn't matter. Your laws are the laws that count. Your ways are the ways that count. That's all that matters.
We're hearing all this racist language coming out of the devil from the north, and everyone is jumping up and down, "Oh, Australia is a racist country". Australia has been a racist country for 200 years! There's nothing new about Pauline.
We're not enough to be a threat politically, economically. We will never have enough numbers to be able to force the changes that need to be forced in this country.
Because we don't have enough people of our own to do it, we knew we had to convince white Australians that they were the ones who would make the changes. But that hasn't worked. There's not enough convinced. You get people like Pauline, Harradine and the worst of them all, John Howard.
It's ridiculous. Aboriginal people have been a part of this land since time immemorial. We've been here long enough for anyone to acknowledge that we have rights because of that tenure. But genocide is the intention of the politicians, the movers and shakers in this country. They want nothing less than the complete death — removal — of Aboriginal Australia, because it makes their guilt a lot easier to live with if we're not around.
Twenty years we've been working for recognition of our rights to land, recognition of our rights to sovereignty, the recognition of our rights to self-determination. When I started in 1972, it was about land rights. The land rights debate — what happened to that, do you know?
What's happened is that the land rights debate has been coopted by other things — like native title. The whole language has changed from land rights to a legislative response to Mabo and native title legislation. The negotiation of the native title bill was a sell-out of immense proportion. It was a sell-out of land rights legislation.
Remember when they were negotiating the Mabo bill? There was the Cape York Land Council, Kimberley Land Council, Central Land Council, Northern Land Council. When they negotiated the native title legislation, we got the 10% versus the 90% deal.
Those land councils went in with the Keating government and negotiated away the rights of 90% of the rest of us. They decided that they had the right to sell out all the eastern seaboard tribes, where most of the population is, so that they could have some sort of protection on their land.
They didn't discuss it with Aboriginal people as an entirety. They only met with isolated groups. We had a conference in Canberra that brought together Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from across Australia for the first time during the native title debate. The policies and mood of the conference were the rejection the native title legislation in its entirety and to seek and assert our sovereignty internationally.
While we were meeting in Canberra, there was a series of secret meetings in Adelaide of the so-called spokespersons. What happened was that Aboriginal groups that didn't like the way the vote went, because they were defeated in that vote, went off and negotiated with the government.
No mandate was given to those so-called leaders. They were created by the media, by the government. They are not leaders of Aboriginal people. They are creations of the political machine that runs this country. They articulate well what the majority of white people want, not what Aboriginal people want.
The leaders of Aboriginal people come through blood lines. If you haven't got a right to talk about country, then you don't do it. It's a killing offence in our law.
I'm a Wiradjuri woman. My people never relinquished their sovereignty, and to this day they still say they are sovereign. They are the owners of their land. Nobody has the right to come onto their country and say what can and can't be done.
And what are these people finding out now? Their sell-out did them no good at all. They're finding out you can not trust politicians.
The tragedy is that it's taken white Australia 200 years to achieve maturity enough to be able to have some sort of debate on these issues. What's even more tragic is that half of white Australia isn't mature enough yet to have that rational debate.
Doesn't anybody have a little voice in their heads saying, "Hang on a minute, this shit ain't right"? Because it's a scream in my head. How long? How much more do we have to take? How much suffering do Aboriginal people have to endure?
There was a movement during the early 1970s that galvanised this whole country — the Vietnam moratorium, the Springboks — and that moved a whole generation of young people. I'd like to see that repeated with this generation of young people. Because that is the type of support that Aboriginal people really need in this country. Numerically we are never going to be a threat in this country. So that's where you come in. And that's what we need — the support of the wider sections of the community.