Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I thank Mr Entsch, as he walks out the door. While he's still here, I want to acknowledge—I want to talk about you, so get in!—that this will be the last occasion that I'll get to speak to a committee report by this committee as a member of parliament. Firstly, I want to acknowledge how well the committee has worked over a number of years and the cooperation from the chair to us. I really do commend the chair for making sure that all views were included and for working collaboratively to get an agreed outcome on our inquiries.

Both the member for Leichhardt and the member for Lilley have outlined some of the important aspects of the recommendations in this report, but I think it needs to be seen as a piece of work which will be ongoing. It's not something of which we can say, 'We've done the job; we've made these recommendations.' It will require us to make sure that governments and this parliament are held to account for ensuring that the recommendations in this report are, as far as possible, carried out.

Most importantly, that will mean carrying on the work of this committee in inquiring into Juukan Gorge, and some of the recommendations in this report flow directly from that inquiry. In particular, recommendation 9 of this report flows, in a way, from the Juukan Gorge report, which made a number of recommendations, including something which I think is well overdue now, and that is a review of the Native Title Act to ensure that we're properly funding prescribed bodies corporate and representative bodies so that they can properly represent the interests of traditional owners and native title holders.

I think there also needs to be a bit of education going on so that people understand the difference between native title, as it exists across the country in its various forms, and land rights, as they exist, in this case, in the Northern Territory, where there's an inalienable freehold title which can't be bought or sold and which gives Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory very powerful rights of withholding consent for development on their land. I think we need to be paying particular attention to this point, and the Member for Leichhardt referred to it: the importance of acknowledging, and doing something about, and ensuring that legislation in this parliament recognises, the principle of free, prior and informed consent, as set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We should be incorporating that in the laws of this country, as they have done in Canada, to make sure that any work which is being done on Aboriginal land or Torres Strait Islander country requires the free, prior and informed consent of the native title holders or traditional owners or those who speak for that country, before any development takes place. That is fundamentally important, in my view, as is the recognition of the fact of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and all that it entails, because I don't think that we, as a nation, have yet understood our obligations in being signatories to that declaration.

I will conclude by saying: the recommendations are all worthy. They are the result of quite a detailed discussion with Aboriginal groups, industry groups and Torres Strait Islander groups from across the country over a number of months. We started this inquiry before we started the Juukan Gorge inquiry. This inquiry was, in part, suspended to allow us to do the Juukan Gorge inquiry, and we again took up this inquiry post the Juukan Gorge report being tabled.

Again, I want to thank the members of the committee and the secretariat. I say again to the member for Leichhardt that we've enjoyed the opportunity to work with him in his capacity as chair of this committee, and I certainly see it as very important that we acknowledge his work. And I might say—she's gone, but I was going to say that the member for Lilley is a breath of fresh air and I'm very pleased she came onto our committee.

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