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Australia's debate over Aboriginal land rights

Red Harrison
Reporting from Sydney

1 December 1997 - This week marks a new stage in the most politically divisive issue Australians have faced for many years. A bill introduced into the Senate - the upper house of the Australian parliament - is intended to settle the question of who owns Australia - who owns the land that people use for farming and mining. Is it the Aborigines, or descendants of the white settlers who arrived two hundred years ago? Red Harrison in Sydney says the debate is dividing Australians bitterly.

One might have thought that any dispute about land ownership could have been resolved long ago, but the first settlers from Britain in 1788 imagined there was nothing to be resolved. They assumed that all land, the whole of Australia, was there for the taking - even though Aborigines had preceded them by about 40,000.

This legal fiction - that Australia belonged to no one until white men arrived - lasted until just four years ago when the High Court decided that Aborigines had the right to claim what it called Native Title over Crown land or anywhere that was not freehold.

Native Title is simply a traditional right or custom that includes hunting, fishing, living on the land or perhaps using it for tribal ceremonies. It does not cover the cities or residential suburbs so this dispute is about the great mass of the outback.

And it is a great mass. Nearly half of Australia is rented from the state - for farming or mining - under agreements called pastoral leases.

Last year in a separate judgement the High Court ruled that Native Title could co-exist with pastoral leases. Now farmers and mining companies don't necessary want to share their land. They don't want to wake up to find a tribe of Aborigines camped on the doorstep claiming equal rights to decide how the land should be used.

But the government can't prevent them doing this without itself breaking the law against racial discrimination; a law which says everyone must be treated equally.

There's also the question of financial compensation that might have to paid to aborigines denied a claim. The legislation in the Senate aims to find a compromise that will please everyone. But it is incredibly complex and it will - the Prime Minister John Howard admits - make it harder for Aborigines to claim their rights. In other words, it will remove some of their equality.

This is the point that is driving many people and organisations to claim this is the most important moral issue Australians have ever faced. And there seems to be nowhere to stand between the two sides blazing away from opposite sides of the battlefield - to appeal even for a moment to suspend the unedifying rounds of bickering and bigotry.

Some of the ammunition - if we can go on with that analogy for a moment - is deeply hurtful.

One Aboriginal leader, for example, described John Howard and his team as racist scum. Incredibly, Mr Howard believes most Australians are fed up with this debate. There's been too much publicity, he says, and people want the whole thing to be fixed up and out of the way.

These are not, in my view, the sharpest or most intelligent observations, because the truth - and it's obvious every day in newspapers, on television and radio - is that many people might be confused, but everyone from the Governor-General to the proverbial man-in-the-street has an opinion.

The Governor-General, who is the Queen's representative and normally above political debate, has spoken firmly in support of Aborigines. The head of the Roman Catholic church in Australia says the government's attitude could produce a nasty racist general election.

John Howard dismisses these criticisms as biased or ignorant of what his government is trying to do.

Among all the anger and tumult there's a sense - because the land in dispute is mostly in the outback - that this battle is also pitting the people of the cities against the people of the bush.

The Senate debate could last for months. Any hope that white and black Australians might look to the future with common aspirations of tolerance and equality seem much very further away than that.

This article is from BBC News Online

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