Mal Brough (Longman, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

in reply—I thank the member for Kennedy for his passionate recall of history and for reconfirming to this parliament that Indigenous Australians are like the rest of us. They absolutely want the opportunity to own their own homes, run their own businesses and not be dependent upon welfare. They want to be able to make their way in the world as equals. Unfortunately, due to well-meaning but poorly directed policies in the past, that has been a dream, and nothing but a dream, for those people who live in certain parts of our country—some of them still in Queensland, in the Northern Territory and South Australia, and even in Western Australia. What we have to do and what the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007 does today is to enable Indigenous Australians to make a choice for themselves.

I will take up one issue with the member for Kennedy. We are not actually forcing anybody to do anything—not a thing—because we do not need to. There are 130-odd Tiwi Islanders who are the traditional owners, the rightful owners, of Nguiu. For those who do not understand, Nguiu is a town: it has streets, football ovals, police stations, community buildings, childcare centres et cetera. The difference is that nobody under any circumstances can own anything there. There are 130-odd Australians who own that land. That is beyond dispute, and we know exactly who they are. But, as they have said to me, and in public, for the last 100 years they have had absolutely no say over what happens on their land. I ask the members of the gallery, I ask anybody listening to this broadcast today: could you imagine for one moment, as another Australian operating under the same constitution and the same laws, having to have other people living on your plot of land and doing whatever they wanted on terms that they determined, with you having no say, no recompense and no control whatsoever. It is such an alien thought and consideration that it is laughable. But that is in fact what occurs.

So over the last 14 months I have been travelling in the Tiwi Islands and meeting with the Tiwi Islanders, down here and on the phone. We have had six, seven or eight personal meetings with these people, and over that period of time they have come to a realisation that the great hope of land rights back in the seventies was in fact a fraud in giving them control. It was not a fraud in handing over land—the member for Kennedy mentioned 42 per cent of the Australian landmass—but what has it actually delivered? What it has delivered is very little when it comes to anything that has been of real benefit in ensuring that children get out of poverty, that they have a school education, that they can speak English, that they can move and be mobile members of the Australian society. That has not happened.

What they have discovered with what we have put on the table here is that, for the first time in 100 years, in the township of Nguiu, on Bathurst Island, in the Tiwi Islands, those people who are the rightful owners beyond dispute will get compensated in a reasonable fashion for others, including government entities, using their land. It is unbelievable to think that you can have a government office on your land and not be paid something for it being there, but that happens. Others just determine under what conditions all sorts of public facilities get built on your land. The lease arrangement that we put on the table for their consideration was that those traditional owners could collectively decide that they wanted to enter into a negotiation and ultimately an agreement with the Commonwealth government that we would pay them directly a financial recompense for the use of that land. It is not for the Commonwealth to use it; there is no profit to be gained here. Some of those who sit opposite tried to make out that somehow the Howard government or some notional shadowy figure was going to benefit. No; this is all about providing certainty.

Again, as the member for Kennedy said, unless you can wave around a document called a mortgage, a bit of security, a title, a deed, you will not get investment in these places. When you go to these locations, you sit down with these people and you say: ‘You’re not going to have any jobs here. It is just living a lie to tell you that somehow a government is going to turn up and create the thousand jobs that are required.’ Governments do not create jobs; they create the environment that allows business to create jobs. That is what has happened in the wider Australian community. So if a businessman turns up at Nguiu and says, ‘I want to put in a fishing resort and I’m going to have to get title over the land,’ he cannot get it. They cannot get it in a sustainable way which—

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