The Only Protection You Can Afford
Tracker Tilmouth
A hundred and fifty million dollars would give me a bitumen road, in and around Utopia, and an electricity line. And I can employ nine hundred people forever. Or we can keep spending your money at Inpex where you spend three hundred million dollars on that oil and gas thing in Darwin, and employ two hundred and fifty people for twenty years.56
That is an example. I can do all your horticulture forever with one hundred and fifty million dollars. And I need infrastructure. This is nine hundred people who would not be on Centrelink. They will be earning a wage. But you have got to close down the Centrelink, you have got to close down that area from issuing Centrelink payments. We can employ, if we did all our horticultural projects on Ali Curung and back to Ti Tree, nine hundred people.
You would do an all-weather road from Ngukurr on the Roper Highway, and a bridge over the Roper River, and then an all-weather road into Gove. The township of Nhulunbuy is the main commercial and service centre of the Peninsula and is eight hundred kilometres from Darwin, and tourists can come in and out of Gove during the wet season if you have an all-access road. In the dry season you can drive back through Bulman and those places, but you would not do that in the wet because there are too many rivers. There is the Liverpool River, there is the Mainoru River, there is everything over there. Cross once at the Roper, and off you go. All-weather road.
I wanted to say a few things – not about the obtaining of land rights, but in relation to the enjoyment of land rights, and once you establish that enjoyment, the protection of land rights. In the state of Aboriginal society today, the argument is that we can have land rights but the enjoyment of land rights is something else. We rely totally on government subsidies, government funding, whether it’s ranger programs, environmental protection, Indigenous Protected Areas, whatever, whatever, whatever, and we rely totally on the goodwill of the Department of Environment rather than arguing that protection of the bush, and protection of areas of cultural significance, is an economic good, because it maintains the cultural fabric of Aboriginal societies. We have decided that that is too hard so we have gone for the easy thing, and we have gone for a doctrine which is, we will give you any amount of money you like out of the Department of Environment so long as you sign up to Indigenous Protected Areas, and you sign up to a ranger program. There is no guarantee of funding on the ranger program, and the legislative mechanisms on Indigenous Protected Areas is also subject to the government of the day.
By going back to the argument that there is an economic good in the protection of cultural areas and Aboriginal societies, we will not have the flow of people into urban areas for employment, for entertainment, for services and for everything else. We have to go and source services from a central point rather than, and this goes back to the model that Toly Sawenko, myself and a few others did in relation to the Utopia medical services, where you stay in your place and we come and service you. People are a lot more healthy in and around Utopia and the eastern part of Alice Springs than they are anywhere else because you stay on your outstations and the medical staff go around and see you.57
And then you have this argument with the greens, the environmentalists and everybody else saying, Well! You actually belong to us because we bring our political weight to your cause, so let’s forgo the notion of economic development as you see it, and we will make you subservient to our economic philosophies and our politics, and you become part of our movement. This has been the hardest thing that Aboriginal people have had to shake off, a good example is the arguments with environmentalists in relation to Jabiluka.
And this is the situation when you have a look at Nhulunbuy. There is not a program in Nhulunbuy that can stand up and say, I’m economically sustainable, [because these are] totally reliant on the royalties [from mining]. It all looks good but it is all royalty-based and subsidised.
That was one of the reasons that we set up Centrefarm. It was to pick the areas of horticultural sustainability, starting with something very simple. What is horticultural sustainability? How does it manifest itself in relation to Central Australia? When you look at Ali Curung, Ti Tree, Willowra, Utopia, the Finke [Aputula] and those areas, there are large aquifers underneath.58 The Yuendumu aquifer is no good because it is full of uranium so you have to disregard this as supporting an economic program, it has a different argument altogether. So how do we make those places work in terms of economic development? We have to move away from the green agenda because the last thing they want is for us to be out there using what they see as a natural resource, or a finite natural resource. We say it has been recharged time and time again, with monitoring bores on all the aquifers we use that to say, Let’s produce a saleable commodity to a market. Once you have done that and you are partly locked in, it is very difficult for governments to come in and take over your assets, or take over your ability to command a process that sustains you.
That is where the arguments with the Northern Land Council sit. I have explained to the Northern Land Council on more than one occasion that the biggest income contributor to the Territory gross domestic product is not the beef industry or the live export industry, the biggest contributor is the mango farmers and the vegetable blokes out of Katherine and Darwin. They have produced more money for the Northern Territory government than anybody else, and this is shock horror, because we think live-export trade to Indonesia is way up above everything else.
It is catch-up time, or try and catch up time, in places like Mataranka and Larramah where they have good soils and good waters and everything else. They are now starting to be targeted by the Northern Land Council but very slowly, if they are capable of doing it at all. This is not a policy that flows to people easily because there has never been a horticultural land-use debate held by the Northern Land Council with any group anytime, anywhere, any place. We have had the Yirrkala banana plantation, all forty trees, and they provide bananas for the school which is quite good, but there is nothing out in Yugul Mungi, at Ngukurr, and there is bugger all at Port Keats even though there has been a garden there since the Catholic Church has been there. And there is a substantial vegie garden at Daly River, but that is about it. There is nothing, if you go to Peppimenarti, you go to Palumpa, or if you go anywhere else, there is absolutely zero.
So there is no debate by the Northern Land Council or by the land councils on how you protect land from an economic point of view. And the green lobby within the land councils made sure that the debate has been diverted to support their position. So mining is the great target at the moment. We do not have to talk about non-mining issues, we have got our hands full talking about mining issues and royalties. The community is totally distracted from the real issues and has been so for a long time. And when you get this debate about sustainable land rights, you have to remember that, in order to achieve land rights, you should be able to go back and be on your country and enjoy your life, but that is never the case.
You go out there and you have to fight for money for an outstation, you have to fight for money for housing, you have got to fight for money for a road to get there and then once you get there you have to say, Well! What the fuck do I do next? The sunsets are beautiful, but you watch one or two of them and if you are not an axe-murderer in three months there is something wrong with you. So this debate has been put it in the too-hard basket by both politicians and by Aboriginal leaders, but you notice they welcomed the debate about truancy, which is an absolute digression.
When you send someone to school, you have to say what do you want to be? I want to be a CDEP worker. I want to be like my father, I want to wear a good uniform and carry a green garbage bag and paint rocks. That is it. That is the end of the debate. So children say, Well! I really don’t need to go to school for that. The parents say, Well! You don’t really need to go to school to be taught how to pick up garbage. You only need one lesson outside, bend over, grasp rubbish with your hand, put it into a bin. It is very simple. It is not going to take too many lessons to do that. So the debate about truancy and education is a fallacy. It is wonderful to see Aboriginal kids go to school down south, but you know full well that those kids at the end of the day may want to return to their community, and what do they return to? They return to dispossession, alcohol, unemployment, no services, no nothing, and then they head back to the city, and there is a drain from the Aboriginal community of skilled workers. Instead of saying, let’s build the economy in the bush and let’s train people for that economy.
And it is all coming to a head with the closure of Nhulunbuy [bauxite mine]. It is going to come to a head with the closure of Ranger. It has already come to a head in relation to the Jawoyn situation.59 It has definitely arrived in relation to Lhere Artepe [Central Arrernte native title representative body], and the Warlpiri royalty process where while they have a lot of money in the bank, their situation as a community has dissipated. It has had more impact on the Warlpiri leaving their land than anything else. They are claiming that Yuendumu is their country, and no it is not, it is Anmatyerre. It’s Ngalakurlange. It is not Yuendumu. So they get this argument going and when you look at the financial power of GMAAAC [Granites Mine Affected Areas Aboriginal Corporation] for instance, they have invested in all sorts of areas and, all off Warlpiri land. There has been nothing invested on Warlpiri land. There has been no research done on Warlpiri land, on what an economic program might be. They have had mining, they have had a whole range of programs where they tried to have employment for mining, but that have failed dismally. And so the end goal for the Warlpiri nation will probably be the rural ghettos of Lajamanu and Yuendumu, which is all off Warlpiri land, adjacent to but off Warlpiri land.
Alexis Wright: What is the Northern Territory Government doing to develop Aboriginal economic programs? What about the commentators in the media, people like the Australian’s Nicholas Rothwell, who writes about the Northern Territory, and about Noel Pearson, what he’s doing in Cape York – has it had an impact on the Northern Territory?
They are just commentators. They are commentators for as long as they espouse policies that the government sees as appropriate. This is what I mean by the extreme conservative elements in this society, and that is both Labor and Liberal, who suggest that Aboriginal people should be assimilated at all costs. Jenny Macklin had no idea what she was doing, and she still does not have any idea of what she had done. She was aided and abetted by [Mike] Dillon and [Neil] Westbury and people like that who were really failed departmental officers, and [Bob] Beadman who every year makes a speech on why it [government policy] did not work, not why it should have worked. He is a good bloke, Bob, but he has a different opinion to me. I think he says the government policy was a failure, when you read between the lines, he is saying he was a purveyor of government policy and some of that policy emanated from within his own department but it all failed at the end of the day.
We will always get blamed for it. It is: We have come to save you and you don’t want to be saved, and it’s your fault. It is like bushfire victims. We are going to evacuate this area from bushfires but if you do not come it is your fault, you die. That sort of process. That is what happened with Aboriginal people and still happens today. They say: We dictate the policy, you won’t have any input into the policy, but we’ll dictate the policy and this is what we think you should be doing. If you don’t do it then it’s your fault, it’s not our fault. We’ve been there trying to help you. If you read any commentary this is what it is saying, think about what it is saying, not what it said.
Noel Pearson has decided that he is going to dictate an education rescue plan for remote communities but the trouble is they do not want to be rescued. So we have this argument that is floating between the Aboriginal elite and the academic elite as they call themselves. Intellectuals. And it started off with the Dodson brothers. All of a sudden there was a bloke up there who can grow whiskers longer than anyone else and wear bigger hats than most people. And the philosophies that came from those people was this idea of reconciliation, this idea of being friendly to whites, allowing for people who had a hangup on the policies of the past and felt guilt. Dodson was a mobile wailing wall if you like. A place you could go and forgo all your sins by talking to him. He was a priest and still is a priest, and that is what is happening now with Noel Pearson. If your education system failed he can help you revive it, so long as you adopted his policy and paid him a few bob. And this is how Abbott and everybody else is about dollars, so here, We have got a policy on assimilation run by the blacks, for the blacks, to assimilate the blacks. We do not have to do anything. All we have to do is throw money at them.
It is like Borat, the movie Borat, the running of the Jews, they threw money under the door to keep the Jews away. So you have got this situation being played out with Pearson and everybody else. When you think of how you move the Aboriginal community or your own group as an Aboriginal community into not only living on their own land, but protecting their own land, economic programs are the only protection you can afford. The governments do not recognise anything that will not have a contribution to the economy. This is why you allow mining, because you are contributing to the economy and therefore you are protected. Your ability to say no has been vetoed under the Land Rights Act, and yet there are no veto provisions under the Land Rights Act, there is the informed consent provision so that one or two people who object strongly to it can be outvoted, and that is the way the Land Rights Act is written. So the Northern Territory Land Rights Act is a problem for long-term Aboriginal economic sustainability.
It does not facilitate, in fact it goes to the very opposite of where you want to be, but it gives you a starting point, which is an access question. That is all you get out of it. You have the right to refuse access. And it all depends on the lawyer you have on the day. So you look at that and you say, How do I move my community, my Aboriginal community, to a position of economic sustainability? How do I move them to a process that allows and develops an education process, and I do not just mean reading and writing, I mean education in terms of life skills and a whole heap of other stuff that you need to survive?
That is why my brother Willie and I talk quietly to the Israelis about a kibbutz at Pine Hill, on the living area, so we can bring our mob together and we can educate each other on what you need to know to survive, not only your work, work ethics and everything, but how you are contributing to an economy to protect yourself. It is building a fortress and how you do this. Righto, the closest thing, I told my mob, the closest thing I can see to where we need to be is probably a kibbutz-type operation where you have got the whole family group doing certain things and looking after each other, and kids are being looked after and going to school if they need to go to school, people are working, you might not be earning so much money but at least you have got a feed every day. You have got a role. You develop people’s roles and actions that contribute to the community.
This is the discussion we are having behind the scenes in relation to a Pine Hill development. And this is where my problem is with Centrefarm, it is that Centrefarm came over the top and said, Oh! No! We need a commercial operation. No, you do not, we do not need a commercial operation. We do not want any more commercial operations that exclude us from participating. You get this when you are trying to develop a model and there is no model because you have dispossession, massive dispossession, dislocation all throughout Central Australia and everywhere else, and how do you model that? How do you bring those pieces together and what does it look like because you are missing a fair chunk of the jigsaw puzzle, and the jigsaw puzzle’s base is land rights, not land rights on paper, land rights in the mind: This is your land, you have not surrendered it.
That is actually a leap of faith. You have to find a way for people to take it themselves. Yes. You have got to keep saying this to yourself, and the old blokes still have that, when you sit down with Lindsay Bird, Kenny Tilmouth and everybody else, they say, We want our homelands.60 They say homelands. They were very clear what they understand as homelands. We want to develop our homelands, we want to be able to say we own this country. So we have that as an agenda to run in relation to Pine Hill. This has been the discussion to date.
The further north you go, the impact on the Aboriginal community of land rights in Northern Australia has been massive in comparison to Central Australia. The dislocation, the debate, the division in the north is extreme. We thought we had problems bringing groups together in Central Australia. We have nothing with our problems in comparison to the north, and the Territory Government siezes [on this], and it stands out, when you have got five groups in East Arnhem suing each other. You have the Laynhapuy Homelands, you have Gondarra, you have Yirrkala, you have Rirratjingu, you have Gumatj, and they are all going to court with their lawyers and they have been suing each other for all sorts of things.61
The royalty agreement out of Rio [Tinto], the land ownership about Gove, you name it, and on it goes, the misappropriation of funds from Gumatj and a whole range of stuff. And then you get down to Groote Eylandt, it is a bit closer, but there are groups within that that are at each other. You go down to Borroloola, you might as well go to Bosnia. Go to Kakadu. Go to Gascoyne, or go to the Jawoyn [in Katherine]. So it is in this playpen of misrepresentation, dislocation and dispossession, where you have got the Northern Territory government at its best, absolutely slicing and dicing, and they want that type of discourse that is [happening] in Central Australia, à la Alison Anderson and Bess Price as agents of this discourse, because the Territory government needs disruption. It does not need cohesion, it needs to disrupt. This is Labor as well as Liberal. And so when you go north, which I have been doing with the northern mob, it is crazy, it is madness. You have on the edge of the Central Land Council region the proposed Muckaty [nuclear] waste dump owned by one group. Hang on a minute, are you not all Waramungu? You have got the Bootu Creek mine owned by another group. Aren’t you all Waramungu?
These are the policies of the Northern Land Council and the Land Rights Act as they interpret it. That is why with the Land Rights Act and the movement, the government does not really need to attack us, because we attack ourselves through the process they have devised for us. The only way through it is not to attack the Land Rights Act publicly, because that is obvious, they are waiting for you to destroy it yourselves. They have the place mined before you walk there. The obvious way to attack the Land Rights Act is the native title process through the High Court, through testing the ability to exercise your property rights.
That is why the Dodsons are wrong about advocating for recognition in the Constitution.62 It is not our Constitution, it is their Constitution. If you want to be invited to a shit sandwich, off you go. It is not ours, it has nothing to do with us. So we have the stupidity of recognition. What do you recognise? You recognise we own it? If you want to recognise we own it all, give us a treaty. Give us our rights. Give us our property rights. Return the stolen land. Do those sorts of things. Do not talk to us about recognising us because you can do that on a piece of paper, it is not going to mean anything. So you have a dangerous argument coming.
This is why we need strong friends. We really do, and having someone like the CFMEU. It is political power, but it is also financial power, and that is what this government is out to tackle. It is not attacking the CFMEU, it is attacking the hundred and fifty million dollars a week that is being banked by the CFMEU from superannuation with ME Bank and everybody else. They want to get their hands on that money. So you get rid of the unions, you get rid of this, you get rid of that, and that is the agenda.
When I came back to Alice Springs, it was me and Rossy [on the Central Land Council], and then Rossy stayed [in South Australia studying] about two years, three years, and then he went off to be a commissioner for ATSIC. So I ran the circus, it was literally the circus, for that long. All the time when it did not conflict with me at night – which it did, it was a total conflict of theories, processes and politics within me – I thought, hang on a minute, didn’t Lois Bartram read to you at night, just you and your brother, Cry, the Beloved Country, didn’t she teach you politics? Did she not say this is the problem you people have got? We were only kids and she sat us down at night-time, everybody else is in bed, and she was the only one with the electric fan and the torch, and she was reading us, Cry, the Beloved Country, South Africa, Mandela, all that stuff.
But when you sit on the Land Council and you have this conflict, it is an absolute conflict. So what do you do? Do you protect the Land Rights Act, and thereby the Land Council? Do you take on board what the traditional landowners say? Do you try and meet it in the middle or do you try and bend it? The answer is nine times out of ten you try and bend it, and nine times out of ten it breaks. And you are right back where you started, sitting on your arse, and saying, Well! What the fuck did I do that for?
There were people like Wenten Rubuntja, Bruce Breaden, Mick Wagu, on and on the list goes on, the greatest sages of all time. I had the pleasure of sitting at their feet listening to them, even though nine times out of ten they talked about how it is very important for people to stay together, extremely important. The women’s business thing [an annual woman’s ceremony] came out of their discussions. Wenten Rubuntja suggested that. I was the first bloke of the Central Land Council as director to implement that, to fund all the Toyotas, all the vehicles, all the trucks to pick the women up and say to them, You go have your ceremonies, because Wenten said these women are mad because they are not doing their ceremonies, we have to get them to do their ceremonies. He told me off about it. He said that is why they are turning up at the Land Council, they are talking about land but their land is not the issue, they are mad when they talk about land. He said you have to get them to get their ceremonies going so they know where they are. He was being straightforward – the Chief, and that was where that came from. So Coxy [Barbara Cox, former CLC regional co-ordinator] and everybody else, they picked up on it and ran with it, but the original decider was Wenten telling me off because I said to him, Why don’t we set up a women’s council? He said, No, don’t do that, stay within Aboriginal law. We talk about land, and the women talk about ceremonies that they own. Let them do that separately as it always has been. They do it separately. But we have got to look after them. So the Chief did that and I remember Pat Turner turning up from the Department [of Aboriginal Affairs] to talk to the Land Council about setting up a woman’s council within the Land Council. She was held up by senior Central Land Council members from across Central Australia, Dick Leichleitner, Mick Wagu and Breaden and everybody else, who said they were mad, and they should not be talking about land. That night the Chief said to me that you have got to get them to do the ceremonies. He said that is what was missing. They are too much in the mission…Too many kids to look after and not taking time out to do the ceremonies. So there you go. That was Mount Wedge where we had that Land Council meeting.
The Pitjantjatjara Land Council were just forming their women’s council but they went to the extreme, they replaced the men. That is where the confusion is now to where the men are in relation to Ayers Rock and Docker River, Pipalyatjara, Amata, Ernabella, Fregon, Mimili, Officer Creek. And then the Pitjantjatjara society collapsed, or they went from Yankunytjatjara to Pitjantjatjara, or AP [Anangu Pitjantjatjara]. From Yankunytjatjara first, that is all Yankunytjatjara country. Then you had Preteme down there as well – Southern Arrernte, or what we commonly call Luritja, and then that society collapsed because when the Women’s Council was established they brought all their families from Port Augusta into the Pit lands. So the Port Augusta people and everybody else became Pitjantjatjara or Yankunytjatjara.63 Everything crashed. You call a meeting in the Pit lands now and half of Port Augusta is looking at you. So there is no structure in the APY lands anymore. There is no cultural structure. And Vinnie [Vincent Forrester] is just about the senior traditional landowner of Ayers Rock and Bobby Randall. Juta! There you go. So this is what my mad brain thinks of.
Tracker Tilmouth
You have this situation where Abbott is Pontius Pilate and he gets some Aboriginal people who do the crucifixion. I do not expect anything different, but I would like to think that throughout the debate, there is a discussion about the economic sustainability of remote communities. This has been missing from the debate. Always missing. You are automatically welfare-oriented. If an Aboriginal person walks in the door – they are welfare. They are not economic, they are not commercial, they do not fit into any of those categories. They are unemployed, unemployable, untrained and on welfare, and that is what you are when you walk in the door.
I have got a lot more experience in this area of economic sustainability compared to Marcia or Noel. Mundine talks about business a lot. I would like to see what he has actually done because I would like to put my record against his, Marcia’s and Noel’s, and let’s see who has done what for whom, and for how much. Let us see where the results lie. Forget the debate with the white people. Let’s have an Aboriginal debate on the economic sustainability of remote communities and why it should or should not be possible.
My agenda is a lot different to theirs. Mine is based on the assumption that there is an impost. For a start, you cannot have economic development without infrastructure. Infrastructure means electricity, water and good roads. It does not necessarily mean housing. It means jobs for that infrastructure, to maintain it, to build it and do all that is required. So that is the argument that I would pursue.
The Northern Territory government, under the Northern Territory Self-Government Act, has maintained the status quo. The land rights legislation again is Commonwealth legislation, and again, it is a furphy. Both are furphies. The Northern Territory Self-Government Act means yes, you were given self-government on certain conditions.64 With Aboriginal land rights you were given land rights under certain conditions. You do not have the rights. This is why we call it – Aboriginal freehold in brackets. You do not have the rights to freehold, you cannot buy, sell or lease without permission from the minister. It is the same thing with the Northern Territory Government where you cannot make laws and legislation without the Minister for Territories signing off on it – if it is deemed that there is not a clash with Commonwealth laws.
The Northern Territory Self-Government Act failed Aboriginal people by its very nature in prison rates, gaols, health standards, housing, employment. How many examples do you want? There have been reports written every year on the ongoing despair of Aboriginal people. There has never been an enquiry into the amount of money that has been spent on Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and what it has to show for your investment. That was what used to annoy me with Jenny Macklin. All that she said was, We spent a hundred and fifty million. Yeah! But what is the result? What have you got to show for it? Do not tell us what you spent, what have you got? If she talks to women in communities who say that she is doing what they want, show me the women. Tell me how you conversed with them because, Can you speak their language? The answer is no. No, I had a white person telling me what they said. And it is shock horror – it was a white person from Alice Springs! Yes. Even more so, shock horror. Amazing.
Tracker Tilmouth
I will not go to the Garma Festival [in 2014]. I will go and see Galarrwuy Yunupingu some other time. You know after thirty years of royalties and whatever, he was struggling to make ends meet there for a while, and then he got the big deal that they signed with Rio Tinto, the big fifteen million a year for the next twenty years or whatever it was. He has basically split with the Rirratjingu who are arguing about their share of the royalties. This is the saddest part about the whole program, where they have never developed anything that stands alone economically. It has always been underwritten by royalties, and that is a complete waste of money. When they go to Garma, they put those up as programs as though they have generated the money themselves, but they were royalty monies, all subsidised, so there is not real economic development out there.
They have gone into mining a bit, but bauxite mining is impossible at this stage, prices are coming back but it is not great. Otherwise they would have Western Cape York if it was any good.65 Galarrwuy has had advisors over many years, and I do not know if he has got good advice, but there is really nothing you can say for it, the mentality is still the same. The saddest thing is seeing the Rirratjingu and Gumatj arguing over royalties rather than doing like we did, put ours in a bank, and only developing what we need to develop.
They had more advice than we ever had. The Central Land Council started with bugger all, with Centrecorp and everything else, but if we had half the money that these blokes had we would have owned half of the Northern Territory by now. But anyway, that is life. It is a hard one to reconcile, the amount of social problems that you have at Yirrkala or East Arnhem. It is not the flashest place around in terms of social indicators. There are no resources, and you cannot do anything out there. They are trying to harvest buffalo now. Buffalo, for the live export trade.
Tracker Tilmouth
The government is trying to impose a process on Aboriginal communities, and if governments talk loud and long enough about it, the media picks it up and all of a sudden it becomes a media item as well. So people like Tony Jones, who have no experience whatsoever on Aboriginal affairs, only what he has been told, gets this idea that until you have a house with a white picket fence and roses and lawns and everything else, you have not made it in Australia.66 You know Australia has this idea of house ownership but in the current situation, especially in the Northern Territory and elsewhere, a lot of people will never afford their own house. What is the price of a house out at Port Keats for instance? You are looking at a three-bedroom house, with the lands free, and including the sewage and water and everything else hooked up, it will cost you seven hundred and fifty grand. And this is at Woodapulli outstation in the Port Keats area of the Victoria Daly Shire of the Northern Territory. It is Melbourne inner-city prices.
The real cost of a house to Aboriginal communities without any subsidy is probably about nine hundred thousand dollars. So you are out of the market before you start, and this stupid idea of people owning their own house, and going from a CDEP wage to a big bill of between four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars – talk about intergenerational debt. This is multigenerational debt, never to be owned by the Aboriginal community. Those houses then become the property of the real estate agent or the bank from where they got the loan. So the ninety-nine year lease argument and house-buying argument, and all these other stupid ideas, of buying a house to live in a remote community, it just makes you shudder to think what the economic process was for them to come to that position. They clearly do not understand economics. What is the resale value of it? Once you have paid for a brand new house out at Port Keats, what is the resale value once you have bought it? There is no market, simple as that. There should be a value to it, but the value is only as good as the market price, the floor price. If there is no floor price then you have to artificially inflate the floor price and you do that by subsidy. Therefore instead of paying seven hundred thousand for a new house in Port Keats, you pay three hundred thousand. But it is a subsidised exercise so it has got really nothing to do with real economics. That is CDEP economics and that is the problem they have got.
When you listen to Galarrwuy and everybody else talking about land rights, they keep blaming everybody for their position.67 Time and time again they have had opportunities to expand Gove with subdivisions and a whole range of other things, but they have declined the offer. The reason is that most of the land there, where they want to expand, is Rirratjingu anyway. It is not Gumatj. So you have had this ongoing argument about where does the Aboriginal economy start and stop in the remote communities. The answer is there isn’t an economy as such. It is an economy based on a subsidised welfare program and people cannot get their mind past that, even to the extent of food transportation, and a whole range of other stuff.
So when you come to the situation with Gove, you see a lot of money but money that is underwriting programs. You are spending royalties on paying wages rather than reinvesting royalties and getting the wages through economic development. Programs that stand up and are economically viable. So they have gone to a mining company exercise now, calling it the Gumatj Mining Training Centre. Why would you want to train people to mine out at Gove, when there are no more mines? It does not add up. They [Rio Tinto] have got seven years of high grade bauxite left, the rest is rubbish.
It is all over bar the shouting but they go through this facade, signing up new agreements with the blacks, because the minute that they say they are closing the mine, they will have a multi-million dollar bill for rehabilitation. You are getting this perverse argument that the Land Council and the Land Rights Act is stopping them developing. It has got nothing to do with it. They have got all the freedom they like and they can have except for selling the land. They can lease the land, there is a ninety-nine year lease. They can do whatever they like. But, at the end of the day, it remains the property of the Commonwealth. It has a lot to do with Commonwealth policies and both the Liberal and the Labor Party are part of it, and they are not going to change the Land Rights Act, it is going to remain the same.
So the argument that Galarrwuy put out, really it was a very sad attempt by Galarrwuy to say, I’m still the boss and I want to change the Land Rights Act. Unfortunately, no one recognises his leadership anymore. That is what has happened: the leadership has gone. You grieve for the grave, his brother has taken over, and his brother has decided that his future rests with the Northern Land Council. He does not have the political power that Galarrwuy would have had in his young days to keep the Northern Land Council doing what they need to do.
This was all planned as part of the Garma thing. This is why I really do not like going to Garma because they want you there to say, Oh! Tracker was there, this is the opinion, and really that was not my opinion. I was not there, had no role with it and therefore I am not part of the process. It is the same with Rossy. That is the reason Rossy does not want to go. That is the argument that we have got with Garma; yes you will get royalties for ever and a day, but it will not be that much over time, and if you keep paying wages with it you are going to soon run out of money because people will expect to be paid after you have paid them once.
The Gumatj Association has never made any money; they cannot afford anything. There is the Yirrkala School which does not get any money, or hardly gets any money from royalties. So what are you talking about? We go through this bullshit about Garma and cultural appropriateness, and training and teaching and everything else, and where are the school kids? This should be the flashest school in the country. It is paid for by the Northern Territory Government. And people who donate money, are surprised when you tell them this.
56. The Inpex project Bayu-Undan is an offshore gas and condensate field in the Joint Petroleum Development Area of the Timor Sea. Gas will travel via a 502 km pipeline from the Bayu-Undan Field to the Darwin LNG plant in the Northern Territory to be converted to LNG and shipped to market.
57. Tracker is speaking about the Urapuntja Medical Service that services the homelands in the Utopia region of the Northern Territory. Studies have shown that Utopia residents had significantly lower mortality largely due to lower rates of alcohol and related injury, and also significantly lower hospitalisation rates, were less likely to have diabetes, and had a lower average body mass index as reported in 2008 by the Australian Department of Health: R. McDermott, K. O’Dea et al., ‘Beneficial Impact of the Homelands Movement on Health Outcomes in Central Australian Aborigines’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 22, 1998, pp. 543–658.
58. The Great Artesian Basin, for example, is the largest and deepest artesian basin in the world.
59. Allegations of misappropriation of funds within the Jawoyn Association Aboriginal Corporation in Katherine were aired by the ABC’s Four Corners program in October 2013.
60. Lindsay Bird and Kenny Tilmouth are the traditional Ilkewartn and Ywel Anmatyerre landowners of Pine Hill Station, about 150 km north of Alice Springs, as under the Federal Court native title determination in 2009.
61. In January 2015, the Federal Court ruled that the Northern Land Council has the right to determine what percentage of mining royalties it pays to Indigenous clans. The Rirratjingu Aboriginal Corporation challenged the Northern Land Council’s distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in mining royalties from Rio Tinto’s Gove bauxite mine and alumina refinery and, according to news reports in 2014, have wanted to break away from the Northern Land Council and form their own land council. The Rirratjingu believed that they should have received half the mining royalties available instead of the majority, approximately 73 per cent, being given to the Gumatj clan, which is Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s group in Arnhem Land. See Chapter 2, ‘Signing on the Line’, in Paul Toohey and Daniel Hartley-Allen, ‘When Rights Go Wrong’, News.com.au, 2014. http://media.news.com.au/nnd/captivate/north-east-arnhem-land/
62. Patrick Dodson, widely regarded as the father of reconciliation, has been involved in arguing for the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Australian Constitution.
63. According to Johnny Liddle, Preteme is an old language that is not spoken fluently by many people anymore but that his mother, Bessie Liddle, is a speaker and advocate of the language. It is a language of the Western dry river region (including the Finke and Palmer rivers) in Central Australia. The language is linked to Luritja, Yankunytjatjara, and Western Arrernte. Many of the language speakers of these languages including Preteme will mix the languages, and several different language words will be found even in one sentence.
64. Self-government was conferred by the Commonwealth on the Northern Territory in the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978.
65. Tracker was referring to the Metallica Minerals bauxite mine, near their Urguhart Point heavy mineral sands project in Western Cape York near Weipa in Queensland.
66. ABC TV Q&A program, hosted by Tony Jones and broadcast live from the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land in 2014.
67. In 2014 Galarrwuy Yunupingu, in conjunction with the Garma Festival as the Gumatj chieftain, had written about land rights as sleeping – that it is full of everything yet full of nothing. Land rights sleeps because the system does not give life to the leadership that owns the land. Like the ownership, land rights is a process of claim but not of use. It does not give the land the energy and power it needs to be useful to its owners and to enrich their lives, and it does not unlock the wealth that belongs to the landowners. Galarrwuy Yunupingu, ‘Teach Our Young People to Look Up’, The Australian, 2 August 2014. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/teach-our-young-people-to-look-up/news-story/e055e6d9d5c51602c0de827ac137560c