David Scrimgeour
In the contemporary Australian political climate, many of the democratic gains of the 20th century are being undermined — even Indigenous land rights.
The struggle for Indigenous land rights has resulted in a wide recognition of the importance of Indigenous people's attachment to the land, and at least in more remote areas this has been accompanied by legal recognition. There have always been commercial interests opposed to Indigenous land rights, and currently these interests represent a genuine threat to the continuing status of these rights.
Land rights legislation introduced by the Whitlam ALP government in the early 1970s benefited Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory, but land rights was deemed to be a state responsibility in other parts of Australia. The election promise of the ALP before the election of the Bob Hawke government, to introduce national land rights legislation, was jettisoned as a result of states' rights advocates, as well as mining and pastoral interests.
However, commencing with the freehold title handed over to the Pitjantjatjarra and Yankuntjatjarra people by the South Australian government, gradually state governments yielded to Indigenous activism and popular pressure, and introduced legislation awarding Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders varying degrees of rights over their traditional lands.
The culmination of this movement was the High Court's 1992 Mabo decision, which renounced terra nullius as a legal fiction and introduced the concept of "native title". The native title system is highly legalistic and has significant limitations but at least it provides, at a national level, recognition of Indigenous people's prior and continuing connection to land.
Despite this, Indigenous Australians still don't have land rights security. Increasingly, there are calls for land rights legislation to be rolled back. The corporate-financed, right-wing think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), recently published papers promoting the concept of individual ownership of land rather than communal land title, and repeated editorials and opinion pieces in the Murdoch press have supported this concept.
According to this line of thinking, continuing Indigenous disadvantage is proof that land rights is a flawed concept, and therefore the way to address Indigenous disadvantage is to encourage Indigenous people in remote areas to individually own their own homes.
Such arguments are simplistic in the extreme, and ignore several salient facts, including that land rights legislation on its own was never deemed sufficient to address Indigenous disadvantage.
Many studies have shown that successive governments have failed to provide sufficient resources to address Indigenous disadvantage in areas such as health and education. The housing problems in remote areas are much more related to inadequate housing stock and infrastructure for ongoing maintenance than questions of ownership, and the costs of building houses in remote areas compared to the average income of Indigenous people living in these areas make the concept of house purchase unrealistic.
Despite the inadequacy of the arguments, the Prime Minister has parroted the CIS and Murdoch line on Indigenous home ownership. Recently, the Coalition government, in association with the Northern Territory ALP government, proposed changes to the NT land rights legislation that would allow lease-holding on Aboriginal land. The danger of these changes is that they represent the thin edge of the wedge of privatisation of Aboriginal land.
On a different tack, the South Australian ALP government has recently used problems on the Pitjantjatjarra and Yankuntjatjarra lands to introduce legislative amendments that not only deal with governance issues, but introduce by stealth changes that give the government more control over land use decisions.
A just and sustainable future for Indigenous Australians is unlikely to be achieved by a weakening of the already limited rights of Indigenous people to their lands. The claim that such changes will address Indigenous disadvantage is a distraction from the real issue — that Indigenous people continue to be denied their rights. Privatising Indigenous land will ultimately result in further exploitation of Indigenous people, and exploitation of their land for short-term profit, rather than allowing the people to maintain their attachment and care of the land.
The campaign to roll back land rights should be opposed. Instead of policies that benefit corporate rather than Indigenous interests, commonwealth and state governments should be developing policies that recognise the importance of land to Indigenous Australians, and the importance of Indigenous Australians to this land. Ultimately, this is only likely to happen when we have a treaty between Indigenous Australians and the Australian government.
[David Scrimgeour is a member of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 9, 2005.
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