The Argument Is, We Are Excluded from the Argument
Peter Hansen
All we ask is that they [the government] listen. The first bloke who came out here stole all the land. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty here. We will not be talking about reconciliation here, we are talking about a treaty. There was a song that Yunupingu sang back in the 80s about a treaty. Bob Hawke said, Yeah! We’ll put it on the table. What table, and what year? Bob Hawke’s got one foot in the grave.
The other thing too I am against them saying, We must educate Aboriginals. Listen, we have got European intervention, uninvited guests, thieves, the Queen’s thieves, it started with Captain Cook.
And you listen! They came around and said the only way to go ahead is education – that Aboriginal people have to get educated. Listen! I said to them, We’ve had you for two hundred and fifteen years. We’ve had Aboriginals here for sixty thousand years. I said, Hey! They were not sick. They did not have any diabetes. They did not have anything. I said, You give me back those two hundred years. These people are dying, and you cannot find enough dollars in the machines to keep them alive. And I said, The other thing is, you want them to learn your culture? No. We want them to learn our culture completely before we come over to the white man’s culture.
Our culture lasted sixty thousand years, and this one is only two hundred years. So we do not want to learn their culture until they have learnt ours over there. You come over to this [white man’s] culture when you are good and ready. Look at Africa, they have got the blacks from the bush that decided they wanted to go to town and be somebody. Okay! Good on them. The bush blacks who are there. Well! It should happen here too. Aboriginal people who want to go to town and get educated, you go for it, but leave the traditional Aboriginal there and let him do what he has been doing for sixty thousand years. He never had a fridge or anything. They speared a kangaroo and hung it up and that is their fridge. They eat it in a day or two and they are off again hunting. They did not get sick. They were all slim and trim. Not one overweight Aboriginal for sixty thousand years. In less than fifty years they went to people who can hardly walk, they are in wheelchairs, they are dying, throwing away lives. And guess what? The whites know all this but they are not going to change anything – they want them to die like this because they are in the road. Nothing is coming their way, nothing is happening.
Tracker Tilmouth
Anyone who is a student of history will understand that if you do not have an economic framework and a commercial framework, then your political framework does not work either.
And if you do not have those two things then you are on the brink of extinction, you are on the brink of being a historical part of Australian history, rather than operating within a modern concept. Unless you have got the economic processes to back your political agenda, then you become assimilated and you become a footnote at the end of the day as we all become Australian. The biggest gift that the white blokes can give you is that we all become Australians, that we are all equal although some people are more equal than others. That is why the political arguments about funding [budget cuts and the threat of closing down communities and organisations], and the current arguments about the amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act and so forth, are because we did not have the political and economic processes to protect our culture and our traditions.52 We were not able to contribute to the economy in a meaningful way. In fact, we are seen by many non-Aboriginal people as part of the problem, rather than the solution.
So this is becoming more and more acute and more evident as we look at the economics of Aboriginal activities today, [where] we fall well short of the maintenance, the cultural and political maintenance of our society, because our economic maintenance is not available to support it. We are now forced to go into work [programs], you are now forced to go into education, you are now forced to go into training and whilst that all bodes well long term, that does not reflect the current political processes that Aboriginal people enter into, and the cultural processes that flow from those political processes.
The argument is, we are excluded from the argument. We are excluded all the time because we have never been exposed to the full-blown commercial processes that the African countries were exposed to. They were exposed to commercial vandalism by Europe. We are no different. We are a conquered people and we have got no comeback in relation to how we deal with a sovereign power.
The sovereign power is the occupier of this country, the British. How do we deal with it? How do we deal with it is not from turning inwards, but to expand outwards to take care of our own business. The reason we have been afraid to do that is because we have been told it is white man’s business. And so we have been put in the fairytale stories, Jack climbed up the candlestick, all that sort of stuff, Mary had a little lamb. We are stuck in there, the blackfellas own this country, in amongst the nursery rhymes. We have got a book on us, of nursery rhymes. We have not been allowed to participate. We are not allowed to participate, not only in what affects us, but what affects our nation.
We are getting this recognition idea now. Oh! We aren’t recognised. Of course you are not recognised because you are in the what you call those books, you are in the fairytales. You do not recognise fairytales do you? Who are you? You are a fairytale. You used to own the country. They do not have to say it anymore, they know it. And you have not woken up. You are still there bowing and scraping. Patrick [Dodson] wants to go out and hug people and people want to hug Patrick.
I do not want to hug. I want to make sure that when the bank manager sees me down the street, and when he goes to his Rotary Club or to his council meeting, he is not going to make adverse findings against me because I contribute x to his bank. That is what I want. I want to be able to say you are there because I gave you access. There is a quid pro quo. There is a price on the wellhead in the oil and gas. There is a price on your mining, on your royalties. We have got to have a property-right argument, where we go to statutory royalties. The Commonwealth and state can collect the royalties but they will pay us. We do not need to collect. And they will pay us accordingly and it will pay us to have houses, health and education, not from our royalties, from their royalties as part of the treaty. If you do not like that, do not go mining, we will give it to the Chinese. Let’s get a real debate going. Forget Andrew Forrest, and being nice and everything else. He is looking after the blokes who are getting a cup of tea and a sandwich as a fucking act of parliament from it. You help some of the other people. That is the argument you have got. You have got to build that fortress, economic fortress, commercial fortress. If you do not like that get out of the road because you are going to be found wanting very quickly.
I go through a process and look at a problem and then I try and work back to the root cause of the problem. Then I set out to try and resolve that problem. I work it out and I say the first problem we have got is we have been excluded. Why have we been excluded? Because you do not like mining because you are black. Yes, I do not like mining. You do not like gas because you are black. Yes, I cannot see how that affects me, righto. Right! What else can we take off you? You do not like cattle because you like the land. And you like the land so we are going to do an IPA for you, an Indigenous Protected Area.53 We are going to give those to the Department of Environment and Energy. They now own half your country. You cannot do anything without the department telling you what to do. So you cannot do anything. You are fucked. If you want to own land in Central Australia, make sure you are good mates with those people. Straight up. I will say that in a public meeting if they want me to.
Because everything is locked up with IPAs. You cannot even go and scratch your arse without their approval, so do not tell me you have got land rights. It is a different land rights than what I went to the CLC to get. A different set of land rights, now it is all about hugging everybody and making beanies. So we have all lost the plot. Someone has followed a lunatic – made his own culture – from the Pitjantjatjara lands, followed him off with his fairies. I reckon the rest should go with them. Tangentyere Council, Congress, please leave. Go find somewhere else to go. Don’t annoy us, we are building an economy.
Tracker Tilmouth
You want to know what we’re reconciling about? It is a distraction, it is there on purpose, to distract you – this group over here from what those people over there are doing. It is the same as the push to have Aboriginal recognition in the Constitution. Where do they go to consult about having the recognition of Aboriginal people included in the Constitution? They go to to East Arnhem Land. Now they call them east-coast corn-feds for a purpose. You put a tie on them, and put a good bit of war paint on them, and they make out they can talk English. They all wear glasses and look down and say [they are] doctor this and doctor that. They have got the worst-run community in the world. Yirrkala has got the highest level of child abuse and everything else than any other community in the Northern Territory. They have got more drunks. Three million dollars a year for the last thirty years and they have got nothing to show for that other than a house. So when you want something done, what do you do? You go to Garma [Festival]. What is Garma? The nigger’s picnic. And they are trying to get me there to make a statement and every time I am booked I have been sick on purpose – couldn’t fly.
They wanted me to talk last time, in 2013. They wanted me to take on Jenny Macklin for them. I said, Hang on a minute: do I look that fucking stupid? Do I turn up and be an idiot for these wankers? I said, No, I’m not going. And then they turn up with Tony Abbott anyway.
We have had football carnivals and Dreamtime at the G, and the Long Walk and everything else.54 Now we have got this idea that we should be recognised in the Constitution. Now that is all well and good, but the question that I ask and everyone else asks is, What happens after we have been recognised? Where now brown cow? Where do we go from there?
And yes, Can we go anywhere from there? This is the other question. The situation is that there is no plan. There is a whole range of policies from this new federal government based purely on straight-out economics, but you cannot develop an economic model for Aboriginal people that is alien to the social structure that you are dealing with. The economic model has to be sustainable, but it has also to be culturally sustainable. If people do not know why they are doing something they are not going to do it. No one turns up and digs out weeds for the sake of digging out weeds unless there is an economic return to them. There is no debate about a sustainable economic model. That is what is stopping everybody at the moment. Instead, you have got a hundred-miles-an-hour car that says assimilation: it is called recognition.
You have got to put it into the context of where we are going and why we are doing it, and these are the economic benefits, and these are the cultural benefits, of why you are doing it. Now that does not exclude any industry. Any industry can be part of the process, whether it is mining, horticulture, agriculture, whether it is tourism, retail or carbon trading. At the moment we are spending a lot of money on truancy programs in schools. If people are so in tune with the education system, why are they not sending their kids to school? If they are so in tune with the social systems that are currently running on communities, why are they not turning up for work? They are not. No one is doing anything. You have got a whole range of white blokes racing around to make sure they do the work and then fill out the submissions for the next year’s funding, and to what benefit to the community? None. Just maintaining the status quo.
Now you can go hunting and gathering, you can do that for a while. The income from hunting and gathering has an esoteric value, because people put values on it from their own cultural perspective, and whitefellas do the same thing. If you are protecting a certain species of bird, this is a plus for some of the greener groups but their position is not going to be replaced by you. So you say to these people, Righto! Why are we protecting this bird? Why are we not doing mining? And this is where the quandary is within the group. We say, Righto! We are doing mining because it gives us an economic benefit or financial benefit but is it sustainable? No it is not. Is it culturally sustainable? No, it is totally against anything you culturally understand.
Now if you want to be imitation white blokes and drive around in uniforms and drive trucks and do everything else then off you go, but you have got to understand that what you are doing has nothing to do with Aboriginal culture as such. There is an employment process, yes. There is an economic benefit, yes. There is a short gain, financial gain, but what is the long-term plan, because mines do run out. Nothing is forever. When mines run out of resources, what happens to the environmental aspect of it when you are finished with them? What are you left with? These are the questions you have to factor in, and a lot of Aboriginal people, because of their poverty, are saying, Let’s click now, and think about that later. Very few people are saying, Hang on a minute, we have got sacred sites there, we need to protect them. We have got environmental concerns, we need to protect them. We have got all these other issues about the cash society that we have got to deal with.
We have got a lot of money coming in and this money can be a plus or a minus, but when you are looking at the amount of drugs, grog and everything else, you wonder, Why do I want to go mining and wipe myself and my community out? This is the question, a lot of Aboriginal people are sitting down and saying it is not all benefit for us, especially in Western Australia. So you have this debate, and it has to be part of the delivery point with the recognition of Aboriginal people in the Constitution, which I do not think is a good thing because I think the Constitution has got nothing to do with you. It was written without you, and this idea of being recognised by a document, that was drawn up to exclude you, is a bit of a misnomer.
So you have to ask yourself what does the Constitution bring, what is recognition in the Constitution going to bring to the debate? Are we going to be nice to each other? Yes. Are we going to be kinder to each other? Yes. This will happen until there is a dispute over resources. When there is a dispute over resources or resources get scarce, what is the argument then? Who will have the upper hand? Native title property rights, or the government? If you have the High Court versus the government, then you will need to be extremely careful of the modelling, and the modelling too will be extremely difficult, because you really want the model that says we want understanding of Aboriginal ways and processes of production which we do not have, even though we say that we understand them.
If you ask any Aboriginal person, or if you go to any public forums, you will have Aboriginal people saying, We are doing alright because we understand we are doing alright. We are accepted by the white people so we must be doing alright. But the question is, if the deal is so good why are you in the situation you are in? Why are all the social indicators where they are? You have to be very careful about how you model the rate and cost of production for goods that have been consumed by the wider society.
Mining is one of those areas. You dig out the iron ore. Why do you want to dig up iron ore? Because you have to sell it to China. What is China doing with it? China is making steel and sending it back in terms of washing machines, cars and everything else, back to Australia. Even the white blokes have not worked it out yet. How the hell do you think the blacks are going to work it out? You wiped out the manufacturing base in Australia. You have wiped out everything, and instead of us selling iron ore we should have been selling steel. So we have these arguments that are difficult within white society, and now we are transposing them into a resource development argument in black society, and that has never been tackled.
We have always had this argument that we will educate people. Yes, you can educate people, and that is wonderful. Every Aboriginal kid should have an education or access to education. The question is how do you get them to school? How do you get them educated? Is education going to bring you better footballers, which is the aim of Clontarf [Foundation]? Will Clontarf use football to bring you better education? Every good footballer I know, the reason why they were good footballers is because they did not go to school, they played footy all day, honing their skills. I think with the exception of Adam Goodes who has thought a lot about all this, the rest of them are pretty dim about this debate.
So you ask the question, what does the model look like? The model is very hard to define and you cannot do that straight off the top because each area is different, although the principles are the same. It has got to be economically sustainable and that means commercial. It has got to be environmentally sustainable and it has got to be culturally sustainable because if you do not have the culture in the back of it, then you do not have a model. When we set up Centrefarm we did that type of modelling, and when we set up the Aboriginal Carbon Fund we used the same modelling. But it is a long history, and it cannot be done overnight, and you do not go and throw the baby out with the bathwater because you want to be recognised in the Constitution. The Constitution is going to be there forever and you do not have to rush that now.
I have thought very hard about the social structures and this is why I am leaning towards a socialist structure. This is why I lean towards the Israeli kibbutz model. It is something you can grab hold of because it deals with social structures as well as cultural norms. It allows you to look at something that other people have done out of necessity, as they had to survive. They had to survive both culturally and economically. They did it with less land, less water, more people. They had to feed each other and they had to make money as well. You look at that and it is the closest thing I can see to the model which I am talking about.
There are too many people out there doing all sorts of things. There is a whole raft of government agencies that have got their silos and their pill boxes and everything else, and are saying, we want to do this, we want to do that, but we do not want you doing it on our patch, because that is worth an income to us. It is our controlling influence.
You can lease out a block of land and have someone come in and commercially develop it and they will do that for a time but at some stage they are going to want to leave and divest themselves of it, and they are going to hand it to an Aboriginal organisation, but how does the Aboriginal organisation pick that project up? You only have to look at the pastoral industry when the government bought the Aboriginal cattle stations. Here is the model, boom. You hit the brick wall every time. Like dropping eggs. There was no sustainable model underneath it.
I try and avoid the urban centres because the urban centre is where you want to be sure that you do not fuck up the invites to the barbecues. You want to be socially acceptable. There is a lot of exercise placed in that area, to be socially acceptable, to be invited to barbecues with the in-crowd, whoever they may be. The arguments in Darwin are a lot more refined than Alice Springs. In Alice Springs you have a cultural clash from day one, and you have people with problems, social problems with alcohol and everything else. You see that every day of the week in the north, but in Darwin this is swept away, it is all hidden. You can go to Casuarina and not be molested over your pork soup, whereas try and do that in Alice and there is an argument. Darwin is a different place to Alice Springs, but Darwin also has its places where you can hide if you want to. It is a place where you can sit and decide which areas of the debate you want to be involved in.
There is nothing much else going on in Darwin. You have employment programs down in Inpex, where you have the Larrakia Nation, but what happens when they finish building Inpex? Darwin is a nice place to be but you do not want to get too serious about Darwin. It is not the place to get serious.
Every year you get political commentators asked to do speeches in parliament and everywhere else, and their stories always are: We failed and we do not know why we failed in Aboriginal affairs. We fell over and we do not know why we fell over, but we fell over. It is very costly.
Tracker Tilmouth
I have always had this ability to sit back and work out the situation I am in, and then know how to manoeuvre out of it, or manoeuvre to a better place. It is like the debate in the eastern states at the moment with Aboriginal people, how with the demise of Charlie Perkins in 2000 and the vacuum that left, no one has been able to fill it. The debate is noise rather than substance, and what we are getting is the people who are trying to be leaders but who do so without authority. You have got to give them a bit of credit because the Dodson brothers, Patrick and Mick to a certain extent, Mick not so much, Patrick has his role, or perceived role of father of reconciliation. That is wonderful for the whites, nothing better than hugging a big bloke that has got a big white beard: I have been blessed. There is a lot of blessing going on.
But the debate has been missed. You have only got to look at Utopia, John Pilger’s 2013 documentary [about Aboriginal Australia] to see how much it has been missed. You are getting people continuously wanting to be blessed, Warren Snowdon wanting to be blessed by the blacks for representing them for twenty-seven years without producing anything. That is a classic, absolute classic. That interview [in Utopia] summed up Warren Snowdon’s political contributions in about five minutes, there was not much to talk about. You can have good intentions but unless you can deliver, forget it, do not even mention it.
You deliver, but it is extremely hard to quantify what exactly you delivered. Do you measure land rights as a delivery process? Do you quantify the question of access and everything else? Now the significance of the Land Rights Act is based on Part IV, which is the mining section. You take that out of the Land Rights Act and it is not worth reading because there is only a couple of pages left. So you understand where the Land Rights Act was actually going, what Gough Whitlam was thinking. It was access to mining, it brought mining companies to Aboriginal land, without our having a veto.
So you go through this process, and when you look at what has been delivered in land rights, the big question that still lies unanswered is not the acquisition of land rights, but the enjoyment of land rights. How do you enjoy being where you are? Do you enjoy living at Papunya? Do you enjoy living at Yuendumu? Do you enjoy living on a remote community? If so, how do you enjoy it? If you enjoy land rights why are you not back home? Why are you hanging around Alice Springs? Why are you in Tennant Creek? Why are you in Katherine? Why are you in Darwin? So the question is very clearly about the enjoyment of land rights. It is not just land rights, it is a question of sovereignty, it is a question of native title rights, property rights, these questions have not been dealt with. So land rights by itself is a bit over the top, but I have to deal with land rights because that is the field I have worked in.
Warren Snowdon has to live with what he delivered. He has to live with what he has not delivered. When Warren Snowdon leaves politics he will say, well what was that all about? Whereas you have got people like [Daryl] Melham, because he is Lebanese, Melham will live and breathe Aboriginal affairs forever. Melham, you can always have a discussion with Melham about Aboriginal affairs and rights. He is a very good man, Melham. Martin Ferguson is a deliverer. Ferguson will deliver, no matter how it is. If he says something, he will deliver. Laurie Brereton will deliver, because Laurie Brereton will stand by you.
One thing about the politicians that I know, the Labor ones, was that it used to be funny that I would be a mate of Laurie Brereton and he was extreme right, but I am his mate. People could not work out that connection and still can’t. But Brereton has a very sharp mind. He knows how to play the political game better than anyone else in terms of factions. He is a very good man but we were on opposite sides of the fence.
Tracker Tilmouth
We will be talking about treaty at the end of the day under a renegotiated process. What we have got to work out is what if someone agrees. We are alright at the moment while everyone is dozing, and saying fuck off. We can all be heroes. The minute someone agrees with us we are fucked. We need to understand that we do not have a plan to go to that deals with the mining industry up-front, no more negotiated outcomes, it is all statutory royalties. You do not have to prove your native title, you get a property right and you get a statutory royalty, and fifty per cent of that statutory royalty goes into an investment fund held by the state native title representative body.
You can set up structures but at the end of the day you have to come back to what your economic situation is in relation to remote communities. What have you got? Forget about the welfare. Forget about inherent rights. Forget about unemployment and CDEP, and everything else that has been funding you. You have to come back to the argument about what you have that somebody else wants. The answer is, there is not much. I went through this argument with the Territory Government about resourcing infrastructure for horticulture, and the areas that are going to provide economic benefits should they put the infrastructure in. Now, there is not much outside of Ti Tree and Ali Curung, Willowra, Utopia, and there is not much north of Tennant Creek. There is a bit south of Tennant Creek. There is nothing in Tennant Creek. In the northern region, Elliott is alright, Mataranka and Larrimah are alright. There is nothing at Ngukurr. There’s a little bit of potential at Port Keats [Wadeye]. There is really nothing, nothing whatsoever north of that other than the Douglas-Daly and this area is owned by the white blokes, not owned by the blacks. And there is nothing out at Ord River Stage 2 or 3 in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. It is buggered. It is being closed. So when you have all these arguments about where the infrastructure should or should not go, the economics of it, then the Aboriginal community has to be really thinking outside the box.
Aboriginal people had better be aware of this – because of the lack of finances the infrastructure has to have a degree of rationality to it. You cannot just put in electricity grids for the sake of it anymore. You have got to have a commercial outlook. So communities that do not have large aquifers, or an industry, or a tourism process, will now probably not be looked after in such a way [as they have previously expected], and will probably go back to diesel and not be a part of the grid. Aboriginal communities will end up with two or three classes of resource development. You are going to have the ones that will be able to survive using horticulture and having investors. You are going to have some who will have mining and not much of it. You have got to remember there are not many mines in the Northern Territory as such.
So when you get this argument about how to fund the infrastructure and the benefit for us, it is a hard lesson that we are about to learn, that it is good to have property rights, but having property rights for the sake of property rights you can end up with an economic burden. It could be a negative, instead of a plus. And this is the essence of the Mount Allans of the world, the Yuendumus of the world, to a certain extent Mount Liebig and Kintore, maybe Papunya, the Haasts Bluffs of the world, being left behind because of the lack of water underneath. Whereas the Larambas, the Willowras, Alkara, Utopia, the Woodgreens, the Ali Curungs and Neutral Junction, these places north and north-west of Alice Springs [which are all Aboriginal communities of hundreds of people or more] have huge potential for economic development, and Mungara south of Tennant Creek and the Karlantijpa and Kalampurllpa north of Tennant Creek. These will have long-term economic outcomes.
And they will be very lucrative because they will have opportunities for jobs and training, employment and everything else. So you are going to end up with a population shift, with for instance Ti Tree becoming a service centre for the horticulture industry. All the fruit packing and all that sort of stuff will be at Ti Tree. So you will not have dislocation, but people chasing jobs within their language region and moving, in this case, from Utopia across to Ti Tree, or across to Six Mile. Or moving from Aileron across to Woodgreen. This kind of movement of people will take place.
Now the hardest thing to emphasise in relation to native title is property rights, because you want the enjoyment of property rights, and there isn’t any enjoyment. There isn’t any enjoyment other than a cultural enjoyment, which is like outstation development, you can have an outstation but it gets awfully boring watching the sun go down on a whole mob of old motor cars and doing nothing else. It is good for the old blokes, they love it all because they are back with the scrub, but the kids are gone. Kids are all headed to Alice or wherever, Tennant Creek, or Katherine. So the arguments that you must have will be all about what happens after you get property rights.
And this is why the Noel Pearson discussion is extremely interesting. I may not always agree with him but it is still very interesting and he has some good points. What happens to the people who have and the people who have not? This is the argument that the land councils had with mining royalties. Those with royalties received a certain amount of benefits and those without got fuck all. This is still the case today. So these are the long-term arguments that are going to befall the Aboriginal community and probably tear it apart quicker than it did with the American Indians, because their treaties in America are so different to each other. And not only that, one recognises minerals while the other one doesn’t. You can do gambling in one, or you have a tax haven in another one, and can therefore run a casino, but in others you can’t. And it stops and starts at the fence. This is the argument about some of them, similar to up in Alaska and in the northern parts of Canada, where their arguments were that some people had millions and millions of dollars, and the crew down the road didn’t get anything.
This is where the planning has got to be – how do you underwrite the enjoyment of native title property rights when a lot of people are going to miss out? A lot of people are going to be saying, Well! That was a good exercise. I’ve got property rights but that’s all I got. Now what does that mean in real terms? And the truth is, fuck all. It does not matter which title you put on it, you can put a land claim title on it, you can put a native title claim on it, you can do a property-right title on it, it does not change the nature of the land that you have [as your traditional country]. It may offer an economic opportunity for the non-Indigenous community, or it may not. You may be able to trade with an external process, the mining industry for instance, or the oil and gas industry. If you do not find oil or gas on your country it’s, Oh! Well! Thanks for the exercise. That is unfortunately the lot of Aboriginal people in the near future. Some people are going to end up with a lot of money while other people are going to end up with nothing.
This happens right across the Land Rights Act process. You get the Warlpiri in the Tanami, where three out of the five Warlpiri groups get a lot of money [from mining royalties], and the other two Warlpiri groups get nothing. And they are all Warlpiri, but their country is different. The Bootu Creek [manganese mine] exercise is another example where a certain number of clans in the Warumungu tribe get a lot of money while the rest who are also Warumungu do not get anything.
People are trying to re-establish themselves as tribal groups, but you have this discourse happening that splits the community because of the finances. You have to really explain to people that they are going to have a situation where there isn’t going to be any money. There will not be any money, and for every cent you make you are going to have to really, really try hard. It is property rights versus native title versus land rights process and you are going to find that like the Waanyi [in the Gulf of Carpentaria] there will be certain groups of Waanyi that are more Waanyi than Waanyi, and certain groups that will benefit. Cook the books. They have lawyers and anthropologists who understand where they are going and bang, all of a sudden you have this so-called group of Aboriginal people that were together until the mine turned up, and now they are split more ways than one.
This will happen, this will happen time and time again. This will happen with the gas stuff in the Gulf if it is not done properly. This is happening in Borroloola with the McArthur River mine. It is happening in Gove with the Gove Agreement. That is a classic example. The process rolls on. So having property rights is not going to be your answer, it is going to be part of the answer, it is going to be a tool. It can be used as leverage but there has to be a lot of thought put into what happens if the High Court says, Yes, you’ve now got property rights. What does it mean? That will be the biggest argument.
This is the reason why all of a sudden Michael Mansell has been trying to get pan-Aboriginality in a seventh state [of Australia]. Now I know that the Warlpiri do not like sharing their country. I know the Eastern Arrernte mob don’t. I definitely understand that the Kaytetye and the Warumungu do not get on in the best of times. So it is going to be amazing. Anyway.
Tracker Tilmouth
I have read Michael Mansell’s idea to create an Aboriginal seventh state. I think his analysis is quite good, but I do not agree with him on the seventh state.55 I do agree on his assessment of the laws and everything else you are going to have, to have agreements or treaties. You have all of these small groups doing their own thing and it is just madness at the moment, because of the way we put it [the Native Title Act] together, where it cancelled the argument about property rights. The legal position is pretty good [on property rights], but there are no legal mechanics for native title property rights. We want the mechanics of it, to run the court case of where now brown cow. What happens then? Do we have a treaty, do we have an idea of what we intend to do, or what we are wanting to do? We will have to deal with all of these sort of arguments.
Winning the court case on the property-right argument is not going to be hard. It is after you win, that you will have to sit down with all of the issues to deal with, which will lead to negotiation, and that can be hard. This is because you have got people who really do not know what they are talking about putting together their weird and wonderful ideas. You have got lawyers and everyone else trying to cut in on the process. It will be a nightmare to say the least.
Anyway, that is what you call a democracy. That is what you call self-determination. That is what you call self-enhancement. That is what you call self-destruction as well. I’ve seen it happen a few times. So the argument with Mansell at the table is going to be very interesting. Once we have got the rights, where do we go? What do we do? That is the billion-dollar question. I bet you he has not thought about how we will do it. He would have had the legal argument. It is the economic arguments that have to be fairly strong and robust.
It is very important for Mansell and people like that to say this is the framework for what we are talking about. Because you know the arguments about land ownership, it is going to be hard to put it forward on a question on property rights. The next part is how will that be transformed into some kind of documentation, call it a treaty, call it whatever you want. How many agreements do you include? Do you include every group as a block in the Northern Territory or do you include what each state government needs, and they will want someone to sign off. It will be like Waitangi in New Zealand, where some Maori agree with it, and some don’t.
I have a little bit of an idea and it is not rocket science. It is about people really. There are those who do not have native title as such, as defined by law at the moment. They do not have continuous occupation and everything else. But their argument is a civil one, so you say, Righto, you were removed and therefore you are restricted in practising your native title. Therefore there should be compensation for you, so the Stolen Generation and people like that would have an argument for compensation. They may not get native title property rights but they get compensation, and then that moves the next crew along to those who can prove native title. And what sort of reform should the property rights take in relation to mining and pastoralism and land use in general? These are people who can prove native title under any circumstance. So it can be quite difficult, and then there are other categories as well. That will be the kind of arguments they will have to put forward and what categories people fit into, just like the Maori had to do with the Waitangi Treaty with those that could prove who they were and what they owned, and those who could not.
There will have to be some really tough decisions. If you cannot tell us your country, and you cannot say, See that over there, that’s the Dreaming track, or this is that, or that, or that. You know, walking along you see this scrub and start looking for spear points, axes or whatever is on the ground, and you say those areas are sacred sites because someone camped there, that is not right. People camped everywhere. You know when you are walking through the scrub, and there is a waterhole or something and you camp there or around there, and then you moved on, that is not a sacred site, it is just a camping area. It all adds to arguments you get over in New South Wales, a bit of Queensland and South Australia, even the Western Australian side too. You have got to have this treaty argument pretty well thrashed out internally by the blacks, not putting it on now, but saying to people, Look, you can’t practise your native title because, through no fault of yours, you were removed, you never went back, your parents never took you back and you lost your language, therefore you lost your songs, you lost your Dreaming, you lost everything. And it is going to be extremely hard to get all that back because not all of it is documented. And then you cannot practise your native title right. It was not your fault but you were removed and there is a compensatory argument that you can follow up.
They have got no choice even if the High Court rules one way or another on property rights. If you have got property rights, there are criteria on what property rights mean. They [Australian governments] are not going to give you blanket property rights, they will set criteria for it. This is the argument, and that is why Mansell is thinking, where do we go?
The argument on property rights is going to be won easily. But the definition of criteria that follows is the difficult thing to deal with. It will be won easily because it is already stated in the Wik and Mabo High Court decisions. It is already there in the statutory docs. It is a matter of the High Court reading it out. The hardest thing we have got is working out who fits into what categories.
The lawyers we have are not flash, let’s be honest, and that is why they say we have not got an argument. We have lawyers that can see a lot of money with native title and the negotiations that flow from it. This property-rights argument takes out the negotiations. You do not have a negotiation anymore, you have just got a property right. That means when anyone mines in your country you get a statutory royalty. And you get the sacred sites protected. You do not have a veto, you have a veto on sacred sites and areas like that, and areas of significance, but you do not have a veto other than that. You end up with the situation where you get a property right which is a bit like the Land Rights Act, where you do not have a veto, but you may have an argument about access and equity, and access gives you the ability to earn royalties.
There is an agreed royalty, an agreement royalty and then there is a statutory royalty. So that is how you do it and how it will probably be done. You do not have any negotiations, or not extensive ones. You are going to get rid of hundreds of native title lawyers that are sitting there and working off the Aboriginal community at the moment. Your statutory royalty would not be a negotiated royalty. Everyone gets the same royalty. It is the same whether it is in Queensland, Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria or Western Australia or Tassie. What is at stake here is that the Crown owns the minerals. You can take the mineral licence if you want, but you have got to have a big army to do it. That is what my discussion with Mansell would be about. Not about winning the native title argument on property rights, but what you do afterwards.
52. In 2014, the Abbott government had planned to amend section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate on the grounds of race, colour or ethnicity. The changes would have made it unlawful to vilify or intimidate others on similar grounds, but with broad exemptions.
53. The Indigenous Protected Areas initiative is a federal program that aims to supports Indigenous communities to manage nominated areas for conservation, and support the integration of Indigenous ecological and cultural knowledge into management practices. Aboriginal land tied up in this government-controlled initiative is dependent on annual federal funding to train and employ Indigenous rangers.
54. Dreamtime at the G is an annual Australian Rules football match between Essendon and Richmond recognising the contribution of Aboriginal players to the sport. The Long Walk is a walk prior to the game pioneered in 2004 by former champion Aboriginal AFL footballer Michael Long.
55. Michael Mansell’s book Treaty and Statehood: Aboriginal Self-determination (The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2016) discusses whether democracy, treaty, self-determination or a seventh-state model holds the best solution to issues that remain between Aboriginal peoples and the nation of Australia. He concludes that the seventh state offers the most progressive suggestion. This can be easily implemented through the Australian Constitution, where Chapter VI provides for new states, to which existing states can surrender parts of their territory, without the need for a referendum. Mansell’s book explains the model and how it could work, and he believes it will offer real hope for Aboriginal aspirations, preservation of communities, languages and culture.