Tracker Tilmouth
Since the Abbott government’s getting into power we have got a few problems. The plans for the Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory and everything else has been in fits, starts and stops, it has been pretty erratic.
It started off with the question of governance: how do you control the process? This was what the Kalkaringi Statement and everything else was all about: How do you set up the process to control your life and what rights do you have? Now that was pooh-poohed by some Aboriginal leaders, but it has now come around full circle to where the federal government, the current Abbott government and the imposed processes are telling you that you have to learn to govern yourself.
This is the argument Noel Pearson is running; that you do not need other people to tell you what to do, and that you need to pull yourself up individually by your boot straps. This is what the commentary is. Now the Aboriginal nature, and Aboriginal culture, and Aboriginal communities would suggest that there is a misunderstanding of the right for community title, and for the shared title to become one of individual titles, this is not the Aboriginal process. So there is a fair degree of assimilation being imposed in relation to this. We want you to be like white people. We want you to own your own house, we want you to be independent and so forth and so on. Now this is wonderful if you want to live that lifestyle.
It is not just a matter of whether you can afford it, because you can always afford it – it is a matter of where your priorities are. And Aboriginal people are going to say, Well! How do we economically stay within the context of where we are at? Are we Aboriginal, or are we assimilated Aboriginals, are we traditional Aboriginals, are we community-based Aboriginals, or are we some in-between definition where we are not Aboriginal at all? The only time we are Aboriginal is when someone says, Oh! Gee, you look a bit dark. This is about it. This is the length of our Aboriginality.
And when you get bush communities trying to deal with this there is no model, there is absolutely no culturally based economic model. There is no structure, and the rate of economic development is determined by what the market wants and the economics of it, or how you supply that market, and how you service that market and in return, how you get the benefits and financial returns on that market.
Now that leaves the Aboriginal community very much out by itself because you do not have a model that says the rate of Aboriginal production should be x, and when we come to sell our goods the rate of production is now classified as y, and so we either get over-exploited to a certain extent, or we are over-priced. So our building materials, our building of houses, our service delivery and organisational structures in relation to CDEP and employment programs and so forth, are always over-priced.
We cannot compete. We cannot compete with town-based organisations and Aboriginal organisations, and we cannot compete with non-Aboriginal organisations that supply services. So we end up being part of the program as non-participants. Not participants but observers of economic development, and this all became quite clear in relation to the Intervention with the housing program. Aboriginal people were not employed, Aboriginal organisations were considered secondary to the major organisations like Leightons and so forth who got the major contracts to build houses on Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
It was a problem before the Intervention, but the Intervention brought it all to light. We could not compete in building houses, as simple as that. This is what we were told, therefore the jobs and the construction had to be done by outsiders. There was very little Aboriginal employment, very little Aboriginal participation, and so when you come now to the new model that is been quietly designed and driven through the process with Warren Mundine, Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and so forth, it is a model that is going to force people into a greater rate of assimilation to be accepted by government, and when you assimilate you take on the nuances, the policies, the politics and the self-development of a non-Indigenous person, and you offload your Aboriginality, or some of it, to a certain extent. And the people who are singing out about this rate of assimilation, they are the people that are stuck within the academic world, and they are living an assimilated lifestyle, and saying that they are Aboriginal, and saying do not come here, this is no good for you, you stay where you are and in the meantime we will carry on, we will be your spokespeople at the end of the day.
And this has happened time and time again, and this is just another piece of the puzzle that will force Aboriginal people into the quandary of – do I remain Aboriginal, and how do I define that in terms of my cultural identify and my cultural process? Or do I assimilate, which is a requirement of this self-governance, this education, and so forth. And education, while education is a tool to be used to allow you to make decisions in an ever-changing world, the argument is still the same at the end of the day when we have this rate of assimilation. The Aboriginal people who come from remote communities in Queensland, they get educated, they go to university, and off they go and they never return. And all of a sudden you get claims for native title and claims for other areas, especially in the Northern Territory, by a lot of people that live in Darwin, Alice Springs and so forth, and they say we are traditional landowners of this and we are traditional landowners of that, and they go out and all of a sudden there is a clash of cultures between the urban Aboriginal – the assimilated Aboriginal people – and the traditional Aboriginal people.
This is the place where Abbott’s policies are going to split the Aboriginal community down the middle, and it is his intention to do that because they are always saying, We want to talk to the real Aborigines. There is a disconnect between what is actually happening on the ground and what is happening in Darwin or Alice Springs, and this lack of consideration and consultation, and also the lack of understanding of the processes of pan-Aboriginality and individualism, is highlighted when you listen to the upheavals in the Jawoyn Association, the collapse of the trust out at Anindilyakwa, the corruption across the board, where individual Aborigines have decided that they have to adopt the Noel Pearson model at all costs and if that means ripping your own mob off – Well! Off we go.
They have misread the Noel Pearson model as well, because Noel Pearson talks about education as a tool and as a weapon to be used to further yourself, but he managed to get caught in the right-wing net and their philosophy of self-determination, meaning self first in determining what you want, rather than what your community needs or needs to be.
And people have a shot at the Land Council because there is nowhere else to go. The Land Council has always been a sounding board for people who are finding it difficult, and for their dissent against government policies of the day. It has always been in that role, and under the current process, all I can see is them closing the door on anyone that has anything bad to say about the Land Council on any issue. That is not a way to operate the Council. You better take on criticism, you can get positive criticism and you can get negative criticism, but at the end of the day you have to deal with it. And deal with it in a professional manner. Now can you deal with the competing interests of the Land Council members versus the Land Council itself – the traditional landowners, can you compete with that? Can you understand that and guide a path through it? The answer is, with great difficulty. And so you have to go and give the power back to the people and that was what happened with the Kalkaringi Statement, it was a re-empowering of people.
I am done talking about it now, I am just saying all this is the result of its [the Kalkaringi Statement’s] non-adoption, people could not see the forest for the trees, and that it was the only way that you could develop a process that allowed Aboriginal people a real understanding of what their rights were. The only way you can exercise your rights is to recognise your rights and exercise them, and then act like a sovereign people. And it is being said that we [the Central Land Council] went to a government department-type mentality, so that they are now treating it as a government department with no connections to the remote communities. This is the paradox of the two land councils at the moment. How do you do anything about it now, when the policies of Nigel Scullion to establish regional authorities to govern Aboriginal life will be based on physical boundaries rather than cultural and social boundaries.
So we missed the big bus. We missed the train, the train has left the station on the social processes of self-determination and self-governance, and that is unfortunately the situation that we are now facing and the Labor Party can see that, they can see that we are no threat to anyone. They could impose the Intervention, they could amend the Racial Discrimination Act because we are nothing, we were not even there to complain. We did not complain, we did not even bother to complain.68
And we accepted it as government policy. So the next lot of Liberals get into federal government and they say, if the Labor Party [while they were in government, 2007–2013] can do that to them, we can do this to them. And they will not complain. Howard’s policies will continue. And that is what will happen, time and time again, until [we go back to] this question of who we are as a sovereign people – and if we are a sovereign people, please act like a sovereign people. Do not act like a corn-fed. Do not act like a slave, where you do everything you are told to do. And this is the argument.
The communities understand the process of the Land Rights Act in the first instance. But does the community understand the question of self-governance? Does the community understand any of these processes that will magically bring the money to them? Do they understand the processes that people go through to get those funds? Do they understand what royalties are all about? Do they understand what the mining agreements are all about? The answer is no. There has been no real discussion. A lot of Aboriginal communities think, I have to receive royalties because I am a traditional landowner and I might spend it on funerals, or motor cars, or grog, or whatever. I want to go to the casino. And that is it. There is no understanding that you have actually got to think about what you are going to do once the mine closes or whatever happens, Where now brown cow?
With the Aboriginal community it is very simple, if you do not have any money up-front, you have no say whatsoever on what is happening on any part of your land at any given time, there is not a document in Australia with your name on it that says you own the land. There is not one document. The land rights title is owned by the Commonwealth, it is not owned by you. It is a trust, it is held in trust. It is a land trust administered by the Commonwealth and the people who administer it is the land councils who are Commonwealth statutory bodies. So you have no title. There is nothing in your hand or anywhere that can point to you as traditional owners. There is a blessing by the High Court that says you have native title rights and you have property rights, but until you exercise those property rights then you have nothing to talk to about anything. At the end of the day it is the Federal Court who gets up and says, Rise now, native title holders.
So when you come back to Kalkaringi, and you look at the opportunity lost, and now it is the opportunity cost, Kalkaringi was the greatest opportunity that we had to develop self-governance. We had these people who gave us advice, This is where you need to be if you need to govern yourself, or look after yourself, to determine what your future is, this is where you need to be. Unfortunately, we have been unable to do that. The best thing that I think the Central Land Council can do now is run another Kalkaringi campaign because it is going to be left out on a limb by itself, and it will be a shell of an organisation because of its internal feudings.
This opportunity is still sitting there, and until someone picks it up and runs with it and says we are an Aboriginal community and we want to be self-determining, then bend over because here they come. And you cannot be more brutal with that concept because it is a matter of life and death to Aboriginal communities in Central Australia and in the north. You have chaos at the moment. But you have this argument, the way you do it is plan another conference, and say let’s do another Kalkaringi. We will get experts in the area on self-governance, and get it talked about, and then see where that takes us.
Oh! Look! Some people will put their hand up [for an Aboriginal political party], they will fight to get it, but this is alright. You need bad people to carry the day. You need lunatics, you need a radical fringe because you drive through the middle of them. The Charlie Perkins model of community development, he used to say to the government, You think I’m mad, listen to Mansell and Clarky, and the government used to listen to Charles – No we’ll listen to you Charlie. Fuck them, they’re mad. And Charlie said, I told you. He did the same thing at Redfern. He did it everywhere. So you have this type of argument, and my advice to Rossy would be run another Kalkaringi.
I will say, You want me to give you advice? I will say to him straight off, You just run another Kalkaringi campaign, your chairman will jump on board because he will not be able to help himself. He will think it is his idea and off he will go and you will support him and wow, end of problem, end of program. And the government will say, God! Fuck me dead, what have we got here? They will be very, very reluctant to start looking at splitting up Aboriginal communities. The only thing that Mundine and those blokes can do is wait to be invited, if they get invited at all. And then the direction to Mundine will be, Well! Mundine do you support Aboriginal self-determination?
Yes I do.
Well! Shut up.
You have got to run a campaign. I have got the Chief Minister on Monday next week. I am going to build my regional authority at Pine Hill, Alcoota, Wade River, Harts Range, Utopia, Ti Tree – this is my regional authority [north-eastern region of Central Australia]. I will build that because I have authority there.
I have an economic model for it straight away. I have got all the horticultural areas. I can grow citrus out of season, and I will probably need electricity and a bitumen road, and then I have a fully blown regional authority. That will give me at least six hundred jobs. Now I can do that standing on my head. That is a no-brainer, but what happens to the mob next door? Or, the mob before that, and the mob past that?
Tracker Tilmouth
You will end up with regional authorities. The Land Council will become a shell of its former self. This is what is happening today and the government told us at the ABA meeting that this is the way it is going to go. The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Nigel Scullion was saying this. I think that they are going to set up regional authorities but seeing is believing as they say.
I do not really know what to think. When you add it all up, the millions and millions of dollars of expenditure on legal issues for Aboriginal people, and you compare that to Queensland [which does not have big land councils], you get more bang for your bucks there because you do not have the big edifices, the big bureaucracy to handle, and with most of them, the money can get out to the community a lot easier.
When it first started it was this mystical beast called the Land Council and as we have gone through it, and people have become a bit more educated and more understanding of the processes, so you get a different argument coming back the other way now. It is a different process, it is an evolving process that over time people are able to look after themselves. And once you get to look after yourselves then the question of Aboriginality disappears, everyone will call themselves something different, and that is the evolution of organisations like the Land Council I suppose. They need to look after themselves, and they are not so interested in looking after everybody else.
We do not have the cultural connections like the Maori or other groups, we are quite spread out and split up. You have got Western Australian blackfellas looking after themselves in Western Australia. You have got Queensland blackfellas looking after Queensland, and so forth. And we ended up following Aboriginal academics and academics in general about where we stand on certain issues. We ended up with my position…is my position, and it applies to me…in Queensland, but does not necessarily apply to anybody else in the Northern Territory or vice versa. The Northern Territory’s position would be different to Queensland and the governments made sure that this would be the case, that there is no connection between any of us.
So you can deal with Tasmania in one breath and people from Arnhem Land in the next but with a different set of outcomes, or proposed outcomes. This is part of the overall strategy of division that you get, where you do not get the real, or the pan-Aboriginal process. You end up with Aboriginal people trying to get one voice and one process together, but with the whitefellas appointing the leaders of the Aboriginal community by virtue of their participation on various boards, whether it was through Aboriginals Benefit Account, Indigenous Land Corporation, [Aboriginal] Hostels, or whatever it is, and you are the leaders.
They are appointed as leaders by being appointed to the boards by the white people. White blokes have blessed them to lead, and so they take on this mantle of leadership without any references to the community they are supposed to be leading. You end up with policies or projects and everything else being outside the control and the debate of the communities, and this has happened time and time again. This is the problem of when you join a non-Indigenous organisation even though it has got an Aboriginal name like Aboriginal Hostels, or Aboriginals Benefit Account, or Aboriginal something or whatever, and you are appointed by the non-Indigenous community [to dispense funds or policy] without really any reference to the Aboriginal community you are supposed to be representing. It is all full of symbolism.
This is the problem that you are getting with a lot of the organisations competing with the Land Council at the moment. You are caught between. There is an old saying that you cannot serve two masters, and you are getting this argument that the Land Rights Act is Commonwealth, and therefore you are a Commonwealth statutory body, so you are responsible to the minister, and off you go and you get your funding according to what your admin books look like, rather than the political and social activity that you have been trying to undertake.
And it is crunch time. It really is crunch time at the zoo now because the governments have got you pegged in a certain area. The Liberals have come in now and they have said, Right! I know where you’re at, you’re over there and we know where these sheep are at, and they are over here. And then the communities are in the middle. The Liberals talk about education, employment and everything else that at the end of the day will be about you getting off your backside and being employed, and thereby adopting a non-Indigenous process of going to work every day, and coming home to a wife, three kids and a car.
So you have got this assimilation process running at a hundred miles an hour, parallel to the dysfunction of Aboriginal communities. And they have to be kept dysfunctional because you do not want any models to evolve from the Aboriginal community, Well! This is our economic model, this is our social model, this is our governance model. You do not have that. You will not have a chance to take a breath, because they are going to be on to you very quickly and the main protection you had of balancing by the land councils especially in the Northern Territory, and other organisations in Queensland, was the protection you used to have.
Now this protection is gone because of the advent of the Native Title Act, the rep body [Native Title Representative Body] status, the adoption of land-council models which are non-Indigenous structures, and it is very difficult to understand, for Aboriginal people to understand this. When you are an Aboriginal person, you are responsible to a certain part of your country and your sacred sites, nobody else’s, and you have to protect them. What is very hard to understand for a lot of people is that they were [legislated] into this American Indian model of sitting around at councils with great chiefs blessing you and thinking all the best for you, but ignoring your life. You know, group of elders – there is no such thing in Aboriginal society. There is no group of elders as such. There are people responsible for you and your sacred sites, your Dreaming and your culture, and that is it. So you get this process going on and it is going to accelerate on us in the next couple of years, where the assimilation program and Marcia [Langton] and Noel’s [Pearson] position is being stepped out.
One side of me says this is a good thing because your argument for survival is that you have to hide in plain sight. And you hide by being assimilated, by having the economic wherewithal to pay for your own lives and being able to do what your independent thought is. You cannot do that when you are on CDEP, or unemployment benefits, or anything else. So you are caught in this quandary as an Aboriginal person where you ask: Do I go to extreme Aboriginal processes, the full cultural gambit, or do I sit in the middle? Now do you have a bit of this and a bit of that and balance on a tightrope, and wonder why you keep falling over as an Aboriginal person and this is the grog and everything else?
The escape hatch is a tightrope. Ha! You can see the policies that are being adopted by the federal government will be very much about employment, education, training and so forth, and Aboriginal people will be saying let’s adopt some of this purely and simply because we are living in town, we need to be assimilated, we are going to lose our language, going to lose our culture. Which parts of our culture can we afford to lose before we become speakers of creole, and receivers of unemployment benefits through CDEP programs? This is what you have got. This is the agenda that will come out of this [Liberal] government, and it was the agenda that ran with the previous Labor government, and we will not see much change other than an acceleration of the process.
There can be another agenda that is not assimilation. You can have an agenda where you look at being Aboriginal, but you can push the idea for so long and you will get takers, but the minute you leave, everything drops. There is no sustainability in Australia, and in the meantime you do damage to the cultural makeup of the community. That is what will happen over time. You are going to get the old people saying we need to teach Aboriginal people on Aboriginal communities the laws and languages of our culture, but they are going to be very far and few between as these old people die off. The question will be: Do we need to follow the culture, or do we need to follow the whitefellas? The pressure is going to be on them to follow the white blokes because they want to be able to survive, and this question of survival is not a question of decisions, you take the best view you can get purely and simply because you live for the next day.
There is this argument about buying your own house on a remote community, but it is in a community you probably do not come from, you were put there by welfare or the missions, and here you are buying a block of land on somebody else’s country, and you are paying for a house, so you need a job. The house is not free, and the rent and electricity are not free. So then you have an imposter buying the house – home ownership! Wow! That is wonderful. I do not see the real estate agents flocking to sell Aboriginal housing, not in Papunya, or anywhere else for that matter. They cannot afford it, this must have been a figment of someone’s imagination. It is the ultimate deal on assimilation. That if you own a house you are therefore supposedly economically free, culturally free.
Of course this cannot happen when you are living in a community. The Queensland government went through it all when I was at the Gangalidda/Garawa [Aboriginal nations in the Gulf of Carpentaria] meeting and dodging bullets at Doomadgee. Bob Katter had, as the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland, allocated private land in the middle of Doomadgee to certain families, and some people lived there and some had moved on, and they did not even know that they owned their land. Their names were on the books. So when it came to native title they had to go and try to find the people who owned the land. Some people did not even know they owned a house block in Normanton. Wow! Where are you living now? Townsville. Do you think you will ever go back to Doomadgee? No I don’t think so. What happened to the house you owned? Oh! It got pulled down, or they built a new house on top of it. Who did? The council. Didn’t they ask you? No, no, we didn’t know we owned the land. We didn’t even know we owned the house. So you have got these blocks in the middle of Doomadgee that are privately owned. Some of the traditional landowners own the blocks, some were, and some were not. A lot of them were not.
So! Yes! I am not negative about the process. I am saying it is a difficult choice for Aboriginal people at the end of the process. Right! Do you understand what you are getting into is the question now. Do you understand that you are going to become a worker, and are going to go to work five days a week? A worker on CDEP, because that is the only employment program happening? It is turning around again, we are going back to the future. It cannot work, and it will not work.
Regional authorities will just be another way of packaging the deal, but the deal is still the same. There will be a land-council office but that’s all. There will be regional authorities and regional development according to a non-performing economic program that is not based on regional economic processes, but on service delivery, and that is it. No real economic activity will happen. This is what we have got. We have asked for it, the worst thing is, we have asked for it because we have been unable to build the process.
I have still got an economic plan for Aboriginal communities in the Territory, the Northern Territory as a whole, and I will implement that with my group, my family, and we will do that over the next couple of years for sure. I have got to design the model and I am leaning very much towards a kibbutz-type model where everybody works, everybody gets paid, and we all make money and this is how it is done every year. You can see a few bob during the week, but your tucker, housing and education all gets paid for. The kids are fed, go to school in your language and they are taught not only in English, they are taught their language as well, because you want them to know it is important. The more you look at it the more relevant it becomes. You cannot not do it if you want to be an Aboriginal community.
Tracker Tilmouth
My understanding of my family group is Upper Aileron, Alcoota, Bushy Park, and Waite River and Utopia, and when I set up that area, we will be talking about horticulture, and we are going to be talking about cattle. We are going to be talking about organic beef. We are also going to be talking about mining – but mining and electricity supply. We are not talking about just mining, we are thinking about the whole gambit of how we use the land.
We are going to have areas set aside for endangered animals, reintroduction of species, feral animal eradication programs, all that sort of stuff, but we are not going to allow that to dictate the total thing. We want to be able to supply organic beef to the market. We want to be able to supply good fruit and vegetables to the market – to Woolies and Coles.
I worked on the Gibb communities in the western region of Central Australia around Utopia in the 1970s. We called them Gibb communities because there was a report done by [Cecil] Gibb on pastoral leases, and what was the fancy name they gave them? Homogenous De-centralised Units. That was the name of a Gibb community. That was an outstation.
The hardest part was really the Northern Territory Government. The NT Government wanted to stop living areas as such, but the federal government insisted there be living areas, and the pastoralists were quite happy with it because all their labour force came from those communities. I do not think I have ever met a really redneck pastoralist, ever. I have had discussions with all sorts of pastoralists who are a bit gruff and a bit this and a bit that, but once you sat down and had a yarn with them, had a cup of tea, they were nine times out of ten on your side. They were more angry about the government than about the Aboriginal community because they were all their mates. People like Roy Chisholm [former owner of Napperby pastoral property]. Thorough gentleman, Roy Chisholm. Kil Webb, a thorough gentleman, Tommy Webb, thorough gentleman [former owners of Mount Riddock and Alcoota pastoral properties]. The only bloke that was really any problem was a bloke from Ammaroo Station, the young Weir, but at the end of the day he understood where we were coming from.
I do not think I have ever met a really redneck, racist pastoralist. I have had disputes and discussions with people who did not understand my point of view, but when you sat down together, you worked it out. The best bloke out of all of these people, and the bloke who gave me a lot of advice, was old Reg Underwood from Inverway Station, which is up near Kalkaringi, [about] what I was doing with Mistake Creek and everything else. His family owned the southern properties. Thorough gentleman. Very well respected, very smart. I was a stock inspector and I had Dr Ross Ainsworth doing work with me, a veterinary surgeon specialising in the cattle industry in the Northern Territory. Working with the pastoral industry and negotiating living areas was not too hard a deal. The biggest problem was the Northern Territory Government and the public servants within the Northern Territory Government, rather than the Aboriginals and pastoralists themselves. Once we managed to get living areas and people saw that they were going to get real housing and real water and real electricity, and they did not have to live off electricity from the station powerhouse, they would have their own powerhouse, people were happy. The pastoralists were happy. I do not think that has changed much at all.
Well! People wanted living areas purely and simply, and I think the greatest need for the living areas was from the pastoralists because at the end of the day, the pastoralists were worrying about whether Aboriginal people had a living area that they could call their own, where they could grow vegetables or whatever.
Many pastoralists thought that way because these were people out bush who shared the stock camp with them, and then when they went back to their humpy were asking, Why can’t we get a decent house, all that sort of stuff. So a lot of support came from the pastoralists in that regard, and a lot of the communities said, We come from this country and we want a living area, we want to be in that place. Many pastoralists were a bit indifferent. Their antagonism had a lot to do with the people that came along and negotiated stock routes and so forth, and they were Land Council people.69
I never had the antagonism they had from the pastoralists, which was probably because they rubbed the pastoralists up the wrong way and did not know how to talk to them. There was always the Central Land Council–pastoralist debate on stock routes. It should never have gone that way, it could have been done quite easily but I came in too late on that debate. I was not there, I was at university when that was happening. But with the living areas, Aboriginal people wanted to be on their country, they had nowhere else to go, that was their country.
There are a lot of properties that have now been purchased by Aboriginal people and converted to Aboriginal freehold. I did most of the purchases with the Central Land Council. Owen Cole and I did most of the submissions. We started doing economic projections of where the pastoral properties should be and we fell foul of the entrenched ideologues of the Council, because we were not allowed to make money out of cattle stations. These were the properties that would be returned to Aboriginal people, so that they could one day walk aimlessly across hunting and gathering and maintaining culture. Which is a good thing, there is nothing wrong with that, but someone has got to pay for the fuel, someone has got to pay for the repairs and maintenance, someone has got to pay for the bores.
This argument started off with, How do you value Aboriginal land? You had to try to quantify an Indigenous concept of value to a contemporary process and that was quite difficult, and that was what the Deen Mar Research Program was about: how do you say that country over there is worth x culturally, socially, economically, environmentally and so forth? You had those sorts of criteria because people wanted to live there, but how do you sustain them in that landscape, because hunting and gathering would have meant the depletion of firewood and kangaroos from around the community.70
Then you get [traditional landowner] people saying my malnutrition is through the roof, my health problems are through the roof because I do not have access to kangaroos anymore, and I have gathered up every bit of wood, and dug up every witchetty bush, and I have done everything else that you can ever do within a ten-kilometre radius of my community. So they race to the ranger program to try and protect the landscape but it is too late, because they did not think about a process of transition.
You are not looking at nomadic people anymore, you are looking at people who have been in remote communities for twenty or thirty years, this is where they live, they do not move around. They might grab a Toyota and go out and get a killer or a kangaroo or whatever, but they are travelling twenty or thirty kilometres. They need diesel, they need tyres, they need vehicles.
I think the biggest issue at the moment is eradication of camels. You roll your eyes and say, Well! Hang on, why camels? Why not horses? Why not scrub donkeys? The camels are a big-ticket item for the greenies: we have marauding camels down at Docker River and they found out that the camels had probably been let in by following the pet horses into the water and into the communities. Each community house had a trough at the back of it where they watered the horses, so the camels followed the horses and got a drink of water, and they did this every day. So these marauding camels at Docker River were not really marauding at all, just coming in for water. Instead of shooting the horses, and getting rid of most of them, since they have done more damage environmentally than the soft-padded camels, they decided to shoot all the camels. They spent ten thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars, forty thousand dollars on each of the shoots and they just left the dead animals lying in the sun. There were no resources. There is nothing wrong with camel meat. They could have quietly harvested them, and the nutrition would have been a factor. None of that happened because the greenies said, Oh! No! We have got to get rid of the camels. What is his name, Peter Garrett, the [former] Minister for the Environment, from Midnight Oil? He turned up and gave twenty million to anyone to shoot camels throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Bang. They have got absolutely no idea what they are looking at, where they are going, what is happening, who is doing what, and how they expect to survive.
You have this issue of remote communities and how they survive. They have this idea that we will build houses. Wonderful, let’s build houses, but let the community build the houses to get the skills, and if it takes ten years to build a hundred houses so be it. Ten houses a year. Is that the strength of the community? Yes. Let them do it because once they build the houses they know how it works and they will look after it. If you keep getting contractors turning up and building houses and handing over keys, it is like parking jumbos on community airstrips, it all looks wonderful but no one knows how to fly one.
They fall into that trap time and time again, instead of sitting back and saying, Righto, for us to build ten houses, we need plumbers, we need electricians, we need roofers, we need carpenters. These are four trades looking at you. We are going to bring the carpenters in, but the rest of the trades are all local Aboriginals. And build it slowly. Ten houses, twenty houses, continuous. But no, we had this massive Intervention, seven hundred million dollars worth of houses. And communities that never had a house, for example, all of a sudden Woodapulli has got twelve houses. I do not think there are twelve people at Woodapulli.
Tracker Tilmouth
When I was the director of the Central Land Council, I spent a lot of time out bush. You could not just buy cattle stations and have them fall over. You have to allow for the country to come back, to be re-vegetated and everything else. You look at the sustainable carrying capacity in the desert areas, but you have to remember that for every five years, three years in the desert is drought. So you have to factor that in, every three years you are in drought and on drought relief. Now for an Aboriginal cattle station this is pretty hard because the land title is held by the government, you cannot mortgage the title, you cannot get drought relief, and Elders and Dalgety’s [agribusinesses] would not loan against the cattle that you had. So your sustainable land-management practices had to be top-notch, and it was a blessing in a way that a lot of the places were not stocked because it would have meant a lot of hardship and and debt for some of the remote communities. On the other side of it though, it was the only long-term form of employment other than housing, health and education and that had been taken over by different organisations.
The hardest thing too, was trying to get a regional economic zone established in these sorts of areas and utilising what is there. Everyone can put their hand up and say we want tourism, we want this, we want that, but if the tourists are not turning up then you have got a problem. Nine times out of ten the only industry that is sustainable out there is the Aboriginal welfare industry, or the cattle industry. Mining was alright, there were exploration programs, but if they did not find anything they soon disappeared. That was the case in a lot of places. We had mining company meetings all over the place but they did not find any minerals, so the projects moved on. You have got to remember the ratio for mining in the Northern Territory is that for every thousand exploration licences there is one mine. This is the average. So you are flogging a dead horse if you are going to rely totally on mining. Real pot luck. But we had Part IV of the Land Rights Act which made a large part of the argument on how you go about accessing land, and it played a large role in giving access to mining companies. But there has not been a mine established on Aboriginal land for a long time because it has that ratio, one in a thousand they are going to find a mine. So Ranger, Gemco, Gove, Tanami, Tennant Creek that is just about it, and Mereenie.
You had to do the agreements. I took Martin Ferguson out there to the Granites [mine] to sit down with [Robert Champion] de Crespigny and go through the mining agreements, and we restructured the mining agreement out there to allow employment and so forth. The debate on employment goes forward. Aboriginal people are seen as anti-mining but a lot of them saw mining not only as an income from the royalties, but also from employment. And when you have an average rate of eighty per cent unemployment in remote communities, any job is a good job.
Alexis Wright: Those agreements were first of their type that familiarised mining companies with doing business with Aboriginal people?
Yes. With mining companies, we could have all the philosophical debates, but I do not live out bush, I do not sit in the camp, I am not there in the community, I do not have a humpy, and anything that comes over the horizon is a good thing as far as I am concerned. If it is a mining company so be it, or if it is a pastoral project so be it. And I was not worried about who I upset, whether it was the greens or environmentalists or anyone else for that matter, it was not my call. I was not a greenie, I was not an environmentalist, I was not pro-mining either. My role at Kakadu was surrounded by problems with uranium but at the end of the day the debate was not mine.71 I could not say, Oh! Tracker Tilmouth says this, or Tracker Tilmouth says that in relation to mining, because it was not my call, it belonged to somebody else, somebody who was living out bush in a camp and had eighty per cent unemployment rate and if that is where you start from, then the debates about sustainability and economic programs and so forth all disappear.
It is like the Aboriginal debate on the Indigenous Strategic Reserve which is all about holding water in the north. If you allow the current water usage, which is what it is now with the rivers, you may get a drying-out effect over time but you are also getting these peaks where there is a lot more water than expected. Now they have put up an argument that says that we need an Indigenous Strategic Reserve, but when you look at the amount of arable land available in the north for Aboriginal people, it is not very big. Now Ord River Stage 2 or Stage 3 is not worth doing, I would not waste the time. Probably there are very good soils between the east and west plains, some very good soils in around Mataranka and Larrimah but that is not very big, and there is some out at Katherine, and there are some very small bits at Ngukurr, and this the end of the horticultural scenario in the north, north of Elliott, which is bugger all. So to do a strategic reserve for that you are looking at probably eight thousand hectares all up, which is nothing.
The top of Australia is a different argument. You have got some better soils in and around the Gregory [River in the Gulf of Carpentaria]. You have got some better soils in and around Normanton. You have got plenty of water out there, but there are also better soils. Whereas up here the soils have been leeched, and now they are as good as.
[In Central Australia], Utopia has got good soils. Good water. Ti Tree has got very good soils and water, while Willowra has an equal amount, and Ali Curung, Karlantijpa [land trust], and you have got the Finke, and the Finke Basin which is a huge water reserve and soil reserve. This is where the argument is about whether you can develop the north, and it has nothing to do with the north. My mate said it is not a food bowl of the north, it is more like a finger bowl. You know, what you dip your hands in after you have had a feed of crab or something.
Alexis Wright: You had a lot of really big ideas about horticulture in Central Australia and other places but they have all been really hard to get off the ground. Why is that?
The argument is that you develop the project now and hold it in care, in trust for whoever is coming through. You cannot go out to remote communities and say, go and get educated, we are going to do this. Do what? I am going to be a CDEP worker like my father and father before him? The answer is: I really do not want to do that.
Or you say, if you go to school and get educated you could run this farm, and there is some good money in it, but you cannot paint them a picture of a farm if they have not seen one. So you have got to actually operate the farm, and run the farm, and keep the farm going, until such time as there is someone able to come in and say, I want to do that. This may take three or four years, or it may take ten years, but you have got to hold the thing, and while it pays for itself and while it pays money – this is the horticulture model at Ali Curung. It pays money to traditional landowners, and there is some interest.
But to bring someone forward now and get the education processes in place! You cannot stand on the rocky ridge and say this country will do x, y and z when no one can see that except you. This is the idea of the Ali Curung model, which was to get someone in there to put the project together commercially, and hold the fort until such time as a Centrefarm, or an Aboriginal community, or whoever, could take up areas of the land and develop it. You cannot say to somebody I want you be a Qantas pilot if you have no plane to show them. What do you want to be when you grow up? This is the first question kids are normally asked when they go to school, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a doctor. I want to be a nurse. I want to drive a truck. I want to do this, I want to do that. Ah! That sounds like a good job. Well! On Aboriginal communities there are no jobs like that.
You cannot point to anything that you want, that you think you can do. This is the biggest problem we have got today. It is not whether kids want to go to school, it is what are they going to school for? Parents are saying, Why do I bother getting my kids to school? That is the argument. You have actually got to build the program and hope to hell that somebody comes along who is able to pick up the reins. It is no different to any other rural community in New South Wales or Queensland where [the farmer asks his children]: You want to become a farmer?
No.
What do you want to be?
I want to be this, that…
Well! You have to go to town.
The white kids leave the old farmer there, and a big agricultural company comes along and buys him out, so they have lost everything. They have lost their connection, lost their whatever.
Whereas in the Aboriginal community you cannot move because you do not own that country over there, it is somebody else’s country. For instance, Alice Springs belongs to different people. So it is very difficult to work through economically. It is, when you paint it like that. It is what hits you and there is no easy answer to it.
Tracker Tilmouth
The processes that run the land councils in relation to the enjoyment of land rights have in a way not been dealt with. We have got imposed programs from an extremely active green agenda and this is not only restricted to Central and Northern Land Councils, it is also across most of the land councils, and where we have this idea that Aboriginal people care for the environment and care for the cultural aspects of it, but the question is, When I go to my outstation, what can I do there, if I can do anything? Because the cultural paradigm that is put forward by the elders and the old people that want that country is not normally reflected by the intentions of the young, and the middle-aged people who have decided that their lot remains within the bright lights of the local town or city or whatever. So they move off, and this is not uniquely Aboriginal either, this is also in the pastoral industry, the farming industry, and mining as well. So you are getting this rather large emphasis on the Aboriginal community to support the green agenda or the environmental agenda to provide the establishment of corridors, green corridors, that would not normally fly in NSW, Queensland or Victoria, or South Australia for that matter. These programs would probably be set aside by the farmers themselves: Well! We don’t really need to do that, we are doing this and this over there. We are into production, we’ve got to pay our bills. It is all loaded onto Aboriginal land where Aboriginal people have to forgo economic development to appease the policy directions of the environmental lobby.
This is the ACF [Australian Conservation Foundation] and some of the more radical green groups, but the question will become larger than life when the Tasmanian timber deal is finalised and the Aboriginal community understands fully what they have inherited, because the position of the greens and the environmentalists in Tasmania means the wilderness without people.72 Not just the Aboriginal community. They have been excluded from a lot of the real decision-making processes of this agreement, and this is going to come to light sooner rather than later.
It will come to light on economic development especially within the Gulf of Carpentaria when people move away from the mining industry because the mines do close, it is a finite resource, and they try and move to other areas of employment. Now the ranger program in the Gulf is probably one of the better ones, but it is still subsidised to a certain extent by the Commonwealth.73
I can see ranger programs dropping off, so we end up with a greater unemployment rate because there is this wonderful idea that we are going to be employed in green industries. There aren’t any. This experience was becoming quite clear in relation to the fire-abatement trials in the north where they made two hundred thousand dollars last year on fire abatement in a couple of areas, but they just employed twenty people. Now two hundred grand by twenty people is not much money.
Instead of having pastoral properties and employment or horticultural projects we have ranger programs, and all the green stuff that people in Canberra and the cities in Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane or elsewhere feel they should have because it has all been depleted in the areas that they live in. So you have bilby enclosures and so forth out bush in remote Aboriginal communities, but this is not funded by a normal process. It is funded by grants from the Commonwealth or the state, and they could disappear at any time the political wind changes instead of being locked in and saying we put a value on the environment, these are the values, and it is just like direct action, it is that sort of program. There is no locking in of the process. It is voluntary.
Climate change is here and now, but the arguments that are placed on Aboriginal communities is don’t do anything that will stuff up and knock over the environmental values. Forget the cultural values. Forget about the survivability of the community in terms of employment and everything else, that has been put aside to a certain extent. That is the long-term argument I think the Aboriginal community has got to understand, that when we enter these programs it is really not our agenda. It has been set up by people from the Commonwealth. It all looks good, but what is the real economic activity?
Murrandoo just said an interesting thing, Well! You are going to talk about the croc farm, we should capture the crocs and open it as a tourist venture. I said, No you can’t. Every crocodile in Queensland is owned by the Queensland government, even when it is dead.
You are prohibited from harvesting crocodiles. You cannot have a crocodile farm in Queensland. The Queensland government owns everything from the egg to when the croc dies. The legislation should be changed is my point exactly. This is an example of finding out that we [Aboriginal people] do not own the crocodiles. You can take the crocodiles for meat, but you cannot sell them. You cannot sell the skins, cannot sell hatchlings, you cannot do anything of that nature. So crocodile farming in Queensland is not on. It deprives those communities of a substantial economic activity on their land. You cannot do this. The fishing is the same, and people in Queensland running croc farms at the moment have all their eggs coming from the Northern Territory. All their hatchlings come from the Northern Territory. They cannot get any animals out of the wild, or eggs out of the wild in Queensland.
They are allowed to farm crocodiles from the Northern Territory but they have a resource centre there looking after them. Now there are crocodiles everywhere in the Cape, more crocodiles than anything else at the moment. So when you go back through this environmental discussion, and you look at what might be the catalyst that provides economic development once mining closes, it is apparent that the environmental groups by default are forcing people to accept mining as the economic process even though it may be adverse to some of their cultural and social beliefs.
I have Yanner coming to Darwin and I am going to sit him down and say, Look, me and you have got to sort this out before we go much further, because we need to harvest the rogue crocs for tourists, and we need to breed off them, and we need to be able to sell the eggs and the hatchlings and your staff are very reluctant to do it, because all of a sudden it means that they will be arguing with their environmental mates about harvesting crocodiles. They all want to be Steve Irwin, swimming with the crocs. Go for a swim with the crocs and see how long you last. And we have allowed that to happen to a certain extent. We see protecting the environment as a major issue too. But because of its low rate of return, in terms of financial reward, the government does not share our concerns for the environment, they pay lip service. They do not fund it properly, and the Aboriginal community is then forced to be a training centre for mining jobs.
And that is where the crunch of this issue is starting, in the Gulf of Carpentaria with the closure of Century mine, the closure of Bootu Creek mine near Tennant Creek. Where do you go when the mine closes? What income can you derive from your activity in Kakadu? And the answer is none. You are going to rely on the tourist industry, but the tourist industry is just about dead, and people are not going to share their income with you. The tourist operators are not going to say, Well! Take half of my money because I am visiting your place, that is not going to happen. So the economics of it all starts to fall flat on its face.
Two hundred thousand for one ranger group is not worth going home for. The ranger group is twenty employees, so when you go through these programs and look at the analysis of it, and you say what can we do and where can we do it, we get this really clichéd argument that we are the owners of the environment. Yes we are. We are owners of an environment but we were not sedentary, we were nomadic, and moved through the country and took as we needed from it. That stopped. That stopped when the white blokes turned up and said, Well! You can’t come across here because I’ve got a barbed wire fence and I want to run cattle over here, so I don’t want you blokes burning the grass. So everything has changed dramatically. The rescue of Aboriginal people was through the establishment of reserves, to move Aboriginal people into a safe area along the riverbank, to keep them away from the evils of grog and white people and interracial marriages, and everything else.
We have got a new way now. Well! The news out of this is you join the mining industry because we are going to supply you with money and you are going to be able to go home and buy your own house. But I don’t live there. I don’t come from there. I come from over here. Can I build a house over here? No, you can’t. You buy the house in the reserve that you have been trying for the last four generations to escape from.
And a lot of the Aboriginal people are saying: Well! That’s a reserve. The traditional landowners, whoever they may be, are about four or five people in the whole community of about a thousand. When we go to most communities the traditional landowner group numbers no more than ten in a community of a thousand people. And the thousand people are there because they were taken there or moved there by welfare and by Native Affairs, or the police, or both. So you are going to buy a house in a country that you do not own. You are going to go and work in a mine to be able to do it. And then if you are a really smart blackfella, we will allow you to move into town and you can buy a house there but you are going to work all your life to pay it off, and it belongs to somebody else’s country. Darwin belongs to the Larrakia, and Alice Springs belongs to Lhere Artepe, and Tennant Creek is Waramungu. All that sort of stuff.
So we have this great move of locking up the land in environmental programs, then forcing Aboriginal people to go to the mining industry because there are no jobs in the environment, there is no green industry. And we are going to become social misfits because living and working in a mining camp can be one of the most devastating experiences that a lot of Aboriginal people will ever see. It is bad enough for the whites, this is why they have wet canteens – drown your sorrows because you have just been accepted by the gulag. And we have got some of the Aboriginal leadership – the academic leadership – advocating the total movement of Aboriginal people into mining.
They have not been able to think of anything else, and now we have Andrew Forrest racing around to get fifty thousand Aboriginal people employed in the mining industry. Employed in what? What are you employing for, to dig holes in the ground? How long do we do that for? What is the job satisfaction rate of it because you cannot get white people to turn up? They turn up for a little while and then they go home, and then you go to 457 visas to get Asians to come and do your work because the white blokes cannot handle it. They do not want to be out bush in the hot and the heat digging holes.
I am advocating that the property-right argument on native title be looked at again, and we use that to dictate mining agreements, so the conditions for Aboriginal people going into the mining industry are supported by union processes with Aboriginal people asking unions to go to the negotiating tables, and with the unions ensuring that standards of health and safety are there in the first place. People are going in there and coming out quicker than a mincer. It is an employment mincer. This is why you do not succeed. You cannot get everyone off to work in the mine. This is not Russia. This is Australia, and Aboriginal people decided that there is an income from mining, but working in the mine, count me out, and white people have the same argument. They have said we do not mind the income from mining, the taxes and royalties and state-based royalties, but we do not want to do the mining. We do not want to be in the mine. We will leave that for the Asians, the 457 visas. This is the political and economic argument that people have not thought about, the forcing of Aboriginal people into this process, because the doors are locked on horticulture or pastoralism on anything else by the green groups. They have locked the country up. Why don’t they lock their own country up in NSW or wherever they come from? No, they cannot get the political power to do it so they pick on the most vulnerable people.
These are the sort of political, financial and economic arguments that have not been thought through. The land councils in the Northern Territory have refused to have this discussion because of the misunderstanding about the enjoyment of land rights. They misunderstand, because a lot of them have never been exposed to Aboriginal communities as such. They do not understand there is an extremely strong social paradigm of how people act as a community that has not been considered, and it is reflected when someone comes back from the mine. Their money is everybody else’s money. And then there is the whole greater extended family. These are arguments that are very difficult to quantify and this is my argument, but Richie Howitt did not like me talking like that. No, he wanted me to be another Marcia type. I said no, I am different and contrary to other people. I have got a different understanding of how politics and economics works because I have seen it in action, and I have seen the policies that drive these processes. And they are racing at a hundred miles an hour to lock up Aboriginal land away from the Aborigines doing anything with it.
Tracker Tilmouth
In 2014, Nigel Scullion and the Prime Minister Tony Abbott went to the Garma Festival. They were talking about regional authorities, but the regional authorities that Scullion was talking about meant an attack on the Land Rights Act, putting the land councils on the side, and that is why we had that Section 28 amendment knocked back in the Senate.74 Now the blackfellas were not talking about changes to the Land Rights Act under regional authorities, they were talking about government services.
Abbott agreed with them, but Scullion did not know what he was talking about. So Abbott must have appointed Mundine as a bloke who understood what Abbott was talking about, rather than Scullion. And so, Abbott has got two horses in the same race, one is Mundine [as chairman of the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council] on regional authorities for government services, and the other is Scullion [as Minister for Aboriginal Affairs] on regional authorities to deal with the Land Rights Act, or to nullify the Land Rights Act.
Now Alison [Anderson] very cleverly decided that her lot rested with the Abbott position which is regional authorities for government services, and not with the Northern Territory Government. And this has not dawned on the Northern Territory Government yet: that Abbott wants services to remote communities. He wants Aboriginal people to live according to the same standard that everybody else has. He is going about it in a weird way but this is what his agenda is. Now the Northern Territory Government is the problem. The Northern Territory Government gets a lot of Aboriginal money but it is untied. Here is the Commonwealth saying, Well! Get out of the road, you’re really a hindrance to us.
What Alison is taking about, when you work it all back, is exactly what Aboriginal people were saying to Abbott at the Garma Festival. The argument is pretty simple. You cannot keep funding Aboriginal affairs in the Northern Territories with untied grants. You have to say, you have got to fund Aboriginal communities with this amount of money that we are giving to Aboriginal communities. There would be a change in lifestyle, a change in a whole range of fortunes, if the amount of money that was allocated was actually spent on Aboriginal people, not on bureaucrats, not on duplication, not on Northern Territory Government programs, but on Commonwealth programs that are well thought out and that allow Aboriginal people to progress.
There would not be a regional authority. It would be the Department of Aboriginal Affairs under the Commonwealth. Simple as that. Get rid of the ILC, get rid of the IBA. Those organisations are public nuisances, they do not perform. Leave the land councils in place to handle the mining stuff, then we would progress.
This is what Alison was on about and this is what Abbott was on about. This is why [John] Howard said the other day that he likes Alison, because he knows exactly what she is talking about.
Rossy agrees with me, and that is why we have got to have a royal commission into funding the Territory Government for Aboriginal affairs – where the money has gone, who spent it, on what? I reckon the taxpayers of Australia would like to know where their money has gone.
I got friendly with Tracker, arguably as two of a kind, and we hit it off big time together. I suppose it is worth mentioning in the public domain, that when I was on the Aboriginal Affairs Committee that visited settlements in the Northern Territory, a lady called Alison Anderson who I had never seen or heard of before in my life, gave the most fiery, abusive, confrontational address which was in a way quite brilliant, and then she proceeded to burn our report.75 They had forty or fifty copies and she had this bonfire going. I was standing next to Tracker and that was all we could do, we were all laughing. He said, Do you like her? I said, Like her, I love her. She’s fabulous. Where did you get her from? Tracker just smirked knowingly.
Tracker Tilmouth
We are in limbo land at the moment and political agendas running in the Northern Territory reflect that. This was shown when [Aboriginal] members of parliament [in the Northern Territory Assembly] moved from the Labor Party to the CLP, and then to Palmer United Party.76 What we are getting is this floating from one party to the next, because we cannot get protection from the Labor Party, we cannot get protection from the Liberal Party, so the next stop is the Palmer United Party. People are looking for protection, economic protection for Aboriginal and remote Aboriginal communities, rather than social and political protection. The real agenda is economic protection because they are talking about infrastructure, they are talking about housing, they are talking about health, they are talking about these other issues, and the political protection is not there in any of those mainstream parties.
Aboriginal people do not really understand, or they do not really want to understand, what the rest of the non-Aboriginal society is doing. All they are looking at doing is protecting their society, their language, their culture. This is paramount, but it does not mean that you exclude economic development. What you have to do is incorporate economic development within the political framework and that is not hard if you understand the process. But people like Alison who understand the process are not getting any assurance, and everyone says she is jumping all over the place, she is unreliable. They are saying this because they have no understanding of the Aboriginal paradigm that she works in. They do not understand that she sees the need to protect the economic and political structures of her society, and if you do not protect that first and foremost, then the agenda that you run does not mean anything to anyone. This is how she survives and this is why she is there today, and because she could not get that protection from mainstream parties she has been wooing Palmer United Party to see if they can deliver the protection that is required for Aboriginal economic development.
Alison is trying to get the basic stuff done such as housing, health, infrastructure, roads, electricity and resource development. She knows that if she can supply that, or if the Aboriginal community can receive that, then they can take a deep breath and think of other things. [If] you take white society for instance, the people who think of the environment, and the people who think of other things like refugees and everything else, such as the people from the leafy suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney where there is a social agenda that can be thought about, [this is] because the rest of the societal needs of that group are being met. They have got transportation, they have got electricity, they have got housing, they are well, they are quite wealthy and they can think of other things. These things are all paramount to any society, and white society can think of other things because they are already receiving these social goods.
When you analyse Alison Anderson it stands out every time, and I know her better than anyone else. I know what her agenda is. Her agenda is, This is Alison, Alison is going to protect Alison, and at the end of the day the delivery or non-delivery of services to her community is what she will survive or not survive on. There is a famous saying in Papunya [her home community], big name, no blankets. You have got a big name but you cannot deliver anything, you cannot produce anything. This is a fairly common and embarrassing position to be in as an Aboriginal person, when you ask people to vote for you because you can deliver things. If you cannot deliver those things then you have got to do one of two things. You can either blame yourself for not delivering, or you blame the party you are in for not delivering.
The Northern Territory Government should never exist, with all due respect to everyone who lives in the Northern Territory. It should never be a state. It cannot support itself. It does not have any manufacturing base. They all talk about the live export trade in the Northern Territory, but the best contributor to the economy of the Northern Territory is actually horticulture, the mango farmers and the fruit and veg farmers from Katherine and Darwin and elsewhere, and that puts more money in the Territory coffers than the live exports combined. The beef industry is not there. The mining industry is starting to slow right down. You have got a whole range of economic paradigms that suggest that unless you get the Aboriginal money, and you get it in such a way that allows you to develop, then the Northern Territory Government receiving Aboriginal money starts to become a toxic process, because you are using money that is supposed to go to Aboriginal communities for other projects.
A lot of people forget that I have known Alison since she was about ten years old. I knew her and her brothers. I was mates with her brothers. I have seen her grow up. We share through one of my aunties the Ilpili sacred site between Papunya and Mount Liebig, so we have cultural connections as well – plus Tilmouth Well. Country says it all, says it all. Now this is through Wenten Rubuntja because the Chief was my old man’s first cousin, and the country around Aileron, Napperby and Laramba, and across to Papunya, we know this country backwards, and it ends up at Tilmouth Well at Napperby Creek. So we know where we are, and we know how we are related to Alison’s mob. I have never shied away from saying she is my relative, I have always said that. Now you can pick your friends but you cannot pick your relatives. But at the end of the day you have to understand who she is and what she is before you can make comment because it is a complex argument. You can see where she is coming from quite clearly and at the moment I support her. I have got no problems at all understanding what she is about.
It is a hard area [having Aboriginal members of parliament]. Unless you have been exposed to it, to the machinations of political life – you have to remember when you watch people like Laurie Brereton and Martin Ferguson, Ferguson’s father was a member of parliament, Ferguson grew up with a silver spoon, him and his brothers. His father was a member of parliament with Neville Wran in NSW, and the Fergusons are from a long dynasty of people in the Labor Party. I do not think any of them had a real job outside of politics, so they have been eating and sleeping and drinking politics since day one. But you take someone from Aboriginal society, even where you bring them in through the Aboriginal organisations and possibly the land councils, you are still going to struggle. You are going to struggle on the concepts, you are going to struggle on the understanding of the minor nuances of political life, and I take my hat off to people like Marion Scrymgour, because Marion was a very good operator and she understood it very clearly. We learnt our politics, our non-Aboriginal politics, from people like Neville Perkins when he was Member for MacDonnell and the Leader of the Opposition in the Northern Territory Government. We learnt a lot off Neville. It is a hard road to hoe.
Unless you have access to and you understand resource development, it is the only road for a lot of Aboriginal people. It is the only road left and as we go along that road we are being attracted to the Dodsons, Marcia [Langton] and everybody else – a whole range of people who I do not really think fully understand what the impact is on non-Indigenous society if it understood what they were talking about. When you compare them to the thoughts of Michael Mansell and people like that, I mean, what Mansell understands is economics. Greg Crough said if you do not understand economics you do not understand politics. Simple as that. That was the first thing he and Richie Howitt would have said to us when we started setting up Centrecorp and everything else in Alice Springs. The two or three mentors that came and visited us were Greg Crough, Richie Howitt and Bill Pritchard. The three of them all came from Sydney University’s School of Economics. Greg Crough’s a brilliant man in his own right and he taught us to understand economics. If you do not understand economics you cannot understand politics, this was the lesson that he taught us. Richie Howitt pushed that line as well, with a different slant to it. Bill Pritchard was straight up and down. Bill Pritchard was a hard-nosed economist, whereas Richie Howitt dealt with the human geography aspects of economics, but the agendas were nearly the same. This is why people like David Ross, Owen Cole, and me to a certain extent and a few others, switched to a Centralian process of economics as much as possible. That is the agenda that dictates non-Aboriginal society, and non-Aboriginal society the last time I looked, made all the rules for Australia. If that is what is dictating to them, well we better understand what they are talking about, and understand very quickly. Alison has picked up on that, and with all due respect to her, and I might not agree with her totally on all her policies, but she has been consistent, and when you put the personality aside and look at the activity, then it hits you. I am a student of people – always have been, and I never stop learning.
We, as Aboriginal people, at the end of the day because of our current economic situation, cannot afford to pick sides with anyone. We would not be able to stand up in a brawl. Let’s be honest. We would be flattened economically within five minutes. So anyone that comes along we hitchhike, we get a lift with a fellow traveller going our way. When they do not go our way, we jump off the cart and walk along the road again. That is all we have been doing. It has not changed. It has not moved. It has not gone anywhere since those days. It is all we can afford at the moment. Our position is economically shot.
68. Although Australian and international law prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, the Australian Government legislated in 2007 to override this protection as part of the Northern Territory Intervention, implementing a number of measures that apply only to Aboriginal people living in prescribed areas in the Northern Territory and suspending the operation of the Racial Discrimination Act. This removed any legal protections Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory had against racial discrimination.
69. The two main land councils in the Northern Territory were established in the 1970s. Their work in the early days of land rights claims was to assist traditional landowners to fight their land claims. Many land claims were aggressively contested in the courts by Aboriginal groups, with others including pastoralists and the Northern Territory and federal government not being prepared to relinquish their interest in the land claimed back by Aboriginal people. Under the Hawke government, in 1989 the Miscellaneous Acts Amendment (Aboriginal Community Living Areas) in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 allowed for living areas for traditional Aboriginal landowners to be created on stock routes and stock reserves, which were Crown land (available for land claim) on pastoral land. The pastoral leases were not available for land claims unless they were bought back first, a very expensive process. Pastoralists protested about the stock route claims despite their being over Crown land, as many considered the routes to belong to them.
70. In 1999 Deen Mar, traditional land owned by the Framlingham Aboriginal Trust and located on the South East Coastal Plain of Victoria, became one of the first declared Indigenous Protected Areas. At the time of developing the IPA concept, the Indigenous Protected Areas Sub-Committee, which included Geoff Clark of Framlingham, worked with the Department of Environment when Senator Robert Hill was minister (1996–2001). The sub-committee argued that Aboriginal-owned land should not be excluded from Aboriginal knowledge and values, and for the right of Aboriginal people to use their land to develop economic self-determination.
71. Tracker is referring to his advisory role in the late 1990s to the Mirarr people who eventually stopped the establishment of a uranium mine at Jabiluka in the heart of Kakadu.
72. The Australian Conservation Foundation was set up in the mid-1960s as a national conservation body with a commitment to achieve a healthy environment for all Australians. Since Tracker talked about the Tasmanian timber deal in 2013, the Tasmanian forest industry had endorsed the state government mandate to cancel the Tasmanian Forests Agreement in 2014 with a change of government from the ALP to Liberal.
73. Most land councils operate ranger programs funded by the federal government, with caring for country rangers and activities in formalised structures for the transfer of traditional and scientific knowledge from old to young, as well as training and employment of Aboriginal people living in remote areas in species management, biodiversity surveys, landscape remediation, eradicating weeds and feral animals, beach and ghost net clearance, fire management, cultural support, environmental monitoring, sacred site protection.
74. In 2014 the Abbott federal government intended to change the Aboriginal Land Rights Act by amending Section 28 to allow the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs to directly bypass the land council’s power in terms of management of land, such as mining and other developments.
75. This protest action was first established in the area by Paddy Uluru who in the 1980s threw the government’s plan to only give the traditional owners a perpetual lease of Uluru – instead of a handback and proper title of traditional land – into a fire in a forty-four gallon drum.
76. In a controversial move, on 28 April 2014, three Aboriginal members of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly defected from the Country Liberal Party government to the Palmer United Party. Alison Anderson represented the electorate of Namatjira and returned from PUP to the CLP in February 2015. Larisa Lee represented the seat of Arnhem and became an Independent in November 2014. Francis Xavier Kurrupuwu returned to the CLP in September 2014.