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Leave us alone to fix native title mess, says Clark

By Debra Jopson and Mark Metherell

4 June 2002: The entire method of recognising land rights must be reconsidered because the native title system is too costly, time-consuming and contains too much uncertainty, indigenous leader Geoff Clark said last night.

In a speech marking the 10th anniversary of the High Court's Mabo decision, Mr Clark said governments had produced unworkable legislation and could not find the solutions.

It was up to indigenous people and those involved in rural and mining industries, said Mr Clark, the chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in an Eddie Mabo memorial lecture in Melbourne.

"At the rate we are going, land claims will still be running in the next century. .. It will have cost Aboriginal people, governments, industry, taxpayers, billions of dollars for Aboriginal people to get their traditional lifestyle recognised."

Governments and industry were also getting a bad deal, with a "lose-lose situation" for Aborigines and "those who would otherwise invest in development on Aboriginal lands".

He said the claim by Aboriginal Northern Territory minister, John Ah Kit, that it was hard to find a functional indigenous community in the Territory "could be said about the whole country".

"Communities are crippled by social problems, substance abuse, domestic violence and chronic division and disputation within communities and families."

Mr Clark announced a series of discussion groups to be headed by indigenous leaders such as national treaty working group members Patrick Dodson, Peter Yu and Marcia Langton, and said he had asked Mr Yu, the former Kimberley Land Council head, to lead an ideas team on reforming the way Aborigines were governed at national, regional and local levels.

Anthropologist Professor Marcia Langton would head a team to include Cape York leader Noel Pearson, which would work on ways to reform welfare and to combat substance abuse, Mr Clark said.

ATSIC had also commissioned "the father of reconciliation", Mr Dodson, and a Sydney lawyer, Professor Larissa Behrendt, to develop an agenda for native title and land rights reform, including constitutional change.

In another Mabo memorial lecture yesterday, the Democrats' deputy leader, Aden Ridgeway, said all 600 outstanding native title claims should be "fast-tracked for immediate resolution".

However, the president of the Native Title Tribunal, Graeme Neate said: "To those who argue that native title has delivered little if
anything to indigenous Australians I offer this challenge - ask those people whose native title has been recognised, or who have
negotiated agreements in relation to projects, what their experience has been."

The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Philip Ruddock, declared the Mabo decision "a turning point in relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians" but rejected the idea of turning June 3 into a national holiday. "I think there would be a lot of resistance," he said.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

Land one piece of the puzzle

By Galarrwuy Yunupingu

3 June 2002: Attending the recent ceremonies for late, great Bunidj elder - the "Kakadu Man" - Big Bill Neidjie, I've been thinking of his legacy, and that of other indigenous heroes who led the hard-won battle for land and native title. Along with Big Bill, other giants of our movement include Eddie Mabo, Vincent Lingiari and my own father, Mungurrawuy Yunupingu.

Like the Kakadu Man, my father was a giant in more ways than one. In the early 1960s he and the leaders of the 12 Yolgnu clans were faced with the imposition of a huge bauxite mine on their country without their permission or even consultation. That event led to the recognition of traditional land rights in the Northern Territory in 1976.

Along the way to the establishment of land rights, my father and his clansmen fought and lost a battle in the NT Supreme Court, where Justice Blackburn famously invoked the doctrine of terra nullius. While the NT won land rights in 1976, for the rest of Australia it took another 16 years before the legal lie of terra nullius was successfully challenged, when Mabo took his fight for Murray Island to the High Court and won in 1992. That was only 10 years ago today. The Meriam people finished the legal battle started by the Yolgnu in 1961; and Australian law finally recognised native title.

The question I'm constantly asked is whether the recognition of our traditional rights to land has made things "better" for our people. I'm also asked how the "dysfunction" of Aboriginal communities can be reconciled with the great advances we have made in the recognition of our rights.

If my father were still alive today he would give short shrift to those who seem to be arguing that the recognition of our law and our links to land and sea has somehow further disadvantaged our people. He would think that no people could be more disadvantaged than the Yolgnu when they had to watch, powerlessly, as bulldozers tore down sacred trees and built a huge mine on their former hunting grounds. And having lived through those times - when I could not vote and was only educated through the charity of missionaries - I challenge anyone to say that we were better off before our rights were recognised.

But I've never believed in rights for rights' sake. It is not the acquisition or recognition of our rights that is important, but the enjoyment of those rights. We're still struggling for that enjoyment today, and constant attacks from successive governments during the past 20 years have made that enjoyment appear elusive and unattainable, as each day we start the battle again simply to retain what has been won.

There are many good news stories about what Aboriginal people are doing with their native title and land rights.

In the Northern Territory, we are proud of achievements such as the Alice Springs to Darwin railway corridor - negotiated under both land rights and native title regimes. We're proud of the fact that 30 per cent of available land in the Top End is under mineral exploration, and equally proud that traditional owners of other land have decided against that particular form of development. At last, we're able to decide, on our own terms, what happens on our land.

On a community level - through innovative use of Western and Aboriginal knowledge - we have developed employment and career options in land management. We're now busy networking those rangers to provide support to each other and share their unique knowledge with the world.

But it is hard to find the resources to build upon these successes when the other pieces of the puzzle are not in place. Land rights (and native title rights) are only one part of the set of rights that must be established and enjoyed.

As the Commonwealth Grants Commission highlighted last year, adequate funding is simply not getting through to provide health, housing and education of a decent standard. There are also many other social problems which stem from poverty: substance abuse, family violence and despair.

INDIGENOUS leaders are hard-pressed to deal with these systemic and structural problems when - again and again - we are forced back into the same arenas to fight to retain the rights we have gained. The experience of the emasculation of the Native Title Act was bitter for many of us, and in the NT, once the cradle of land rights, we have been dealing with successive "reviews" of land rights for the past five years.

But the efforts of John Howard, Philip Ruddock and their ilk to squander the opportunity for justice and reconciliation will not prevail. Though the cards have not fallen in our favour, we must press on with using those native title rights we have established and with securing further rights. We are working to build sustainable economic futures through better management and use of the resources on our lands and seas.

As a saltwater person, I look to the seas as the next frontier for the establishment, recognition and ultimately enjoyment and use of our rights. Notwithstanding recent legal losses, I have the utmost confidence that we will achieve that goal in my lifetime.

Today as I think of my father, Big Bill Neidjie, Vincent Lingiari and of the island man Eddie Mabo, I'm determined that we won't disgrace their great legacy in a war of attrition, self-blame and shame with the small of spirit.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu is chairman of the Northern Land Council in the Northern Territory.

Source: The Australian

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