home | news l

Germaine Greer slams "cynical" plan to extinguish Aboriginal land rights

11 November 1997 - Dr Germaine Greer spoke out yesterday against an Australian Government plan which will leave most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples without any meaningful rights to their ancestral lands.

Dr Greer joined Aboriginal leader Aden Ridgeway, Australian poet John Kinsella and representatives of several international human rights groups at a press conference in London to protest against the controversial Native Title Amendment Bill.

This Bill, which could become law by the end of the year, will leave most indigenous people unable to so much as influence the use of their lands; some will be unable even to claim their lands in the first place.

Dr Greer dismissed the Government's justification for the Bill - that indigenous rights threaten the economy - as "a very cynical attempt to exploit the ignorance of Aboriginal rights that besets the average Australian."

She said, "I believe that Australians are the most egalitarian and generous people on earth. But they are being frightened out of their own nature by an unscrupulous distortion of the facts."

Aden Ridgeway, director of the New South Wales Land Council, said that the Bill was a "clear breach of international standards dealing with human rights." He argued that the legislation was short-sighted and that only negotiated agreements would guarantee economic development.

"Indigenous rights cannot be legislated away. They will exist in the future and it is up to the government, miners and farmers to sit down and talk with Aboriginal people. We can settle these issues by negotiation so that our rights can sit side by side."

The Bill will effectively wipe out Australia's recent progress on indigenous rights - progress which has been fiercely resisted by the powerful mining and farming industries. The formal land rights processes which the Bill will dismantle were only set up in 1993.

The very existence of indigenous land rights was only legally recognised in 1992 when the High Court made its historic Mabo decision. Before this, courts had always upheld the legal fiction of "terra nullius" - that Australia was a land belonging to no-one when it was colonized.

Aden Ridgeway said, "The Mabo decision legally recognized our right to be considered as part of the Australian equation. We have waited 200 years for that to occur and its something that we're not prepared to give up."

Scottish MP Micheal Connarty and representatives of Amnesty International, Survival International and Anti-Slavery International and the TUC also spoke out at the press conference.

The conference confirmed that international concern about the Bill has been growing since President Nelson Mandela first brought it to the world's attention at the Commonwealth summit in Edinburgh.

As poet John Kinsella warned the Australian Government, in a new work written especially for the occasion, "Now the world is watching."

This media release is from the National Indigenous Working Group on Native Title (NIWG)

Further information: native title issues page - includes news index and external links

|| click to go to the top of this page