Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm glad for the opportunity to speak on this report. It's a very serious and timely piece of work. I recognise at the outset the effort and commitment of all committee members. It's notable that the committee has undertaken the inquiry in hardworking and hard-hitting fashion and has delivered a set of focused and meaningful recommendations. It's timely in the sense that it comes close on the heels of one of Australia's greatest cultural tragedies—the destruction of rock-shelters at Juukan Gorge, on the land of Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples, two distinct Aboriginal ownership groups that are collectively referred to as the PKKP peoples.

As anyone who followed the awful events of last year would know, the site that was destroyed, which dated back some 46,000 years, contained some unbelievable cultural material, including a kangaroo-bone tool that was 28,000 years old—10,000 older than any similar artefact that has been discovered—and a plaited hair belt that was 4,000 years old. Think about that: an item that, for reference's sake, comes from twice as long ago as the birth of Christ, with genetic links to traditional owners today. This is history and heritage that was rightly described as being of immeasurable significance. It is through no fault of the committee that the report is also, in a sense, not timely. The recommendations in the report come too late to prevent the destruction, and it must be acknowledged that, to some degree, the recommendations repeat imperatives that have sat before this government for some time.

This tragedy, which might as well be called a fiasco, occurred through multiple failures—failures by Rio Tinto, failures of our national Indigenous heritage protection framework and failures of administration within the office of the Minister for the Environment. If any of those errors had been avoided, the tragedy might not have occurred. Underlying those failures is the larger issue of disempowerment of First Nations people, which persists in Australian life today and requires serious cultural change through reconciliation, truth-telling and institutional change, including constitutional change. These are all the things that were touched on in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which this government first invited and then dropped like a stone That is a matter of stinging shame. It's an abdication of leadership and of responsibility.

This deep and unaddressed cultural failure—the disempowerment of First Nations peoples—bled through everything that was wrong in the circumstances at Juukan Gorge. Let me quote from the committee's report on the recognition of this problem in Australian life:

What was missing from Rio's decision-making process was the voice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The Committee does not want to make this same mistake.

…   …   …

The Committee has prioritised the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples throughout the report. The Committee acknowledges that there are many companies within the resources industry taking strong measures to protect heritage sites and commends those companies. However, the resources industry has more access to governments, the media and therefore the broader Australian community, than traditional owners and the Committee considered it important to highlight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices above all others.

In closely examining all the things that went wrong at Juukan Gorge and in weighing the harm and the loss and the pain, the report says:

… perhaps the tragedy may at least be a catalyst for change.

Let's hope so.

It would be easier to have some optimism about that if the government had ever shown a preparedness to accept its past failures or a preparedness to get on with the task of serious reform. In its introduction, the report states:

It is time for the legislative frameworks in all Australian jurisdictions to be modernised to bring meaningful protections for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage …

Funny that. This government's 2015 Australian Heritage Strategy included a commitment to review the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act by December 2017. That did not happen. The government's own appointed reviewer of the EPBC Act, Professor Graeme Samuel, said in his final report that a comprehensive review of national-level Indigenous cultural heritage protection legislation is needed. His report mentions the fact that, post Juukan Gorge, the minister held what has so far been a one-off meeting with state and territory ministers and started some kind of process of engagement with First Nations stakeholders. But the report notes:

Little detail has been provided about how this process will be progressed.

Recommendation 7 of the Samuel final report is for this government to:

… immediately initiate a comprehensive review of national-level cultural heritage protections, drawing on best practice frameworks for cultural heritage laws.

The final report was provided a year ago, in October 2020, yet no comprehensive review of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act has commenced. At Senate estimates in May earlier this year, the question was put as to why the review, which was supposed to occur by December 2017, hadn't happened. Departmental officials could only say that the review hadn't occurred and that, if there were be a review, that would be a matter for government—in other words, the bleeding obvious. Nothing has been done; nothing is being done. What was offered was the following:

There's an ongoing process of the department examining how to best operationalise that act.

In other words, meaningless, useless, pointless, bureaucratic waffle.

In relation to the roundtable meeting held by the minister with state and territory counterparts, there was a reference to a commitment to reconvene at a later date. That commitment was given in September last year. No further meeting had occurred in May, when the questions were asked in the Senate, and, as far as I'm aware, no further meeting has occurred in the time since.

On that basis, it's hard for anyone—for First Nations peoples, for anyone in the Australian community or for anyone in this parliament—to be all that hopeful about the government's response to the same recommendation in the committee report we're considering this afternoon. Again, it comes back to the point that, if you're not prepared to acknowledge the failures of the past, you're not likely to prevent failures in the future. As with so many things that we look at with this government, until there is some accountability taken for incompetence, incompetence will continue.

Australia does not have an effective national framework for the protection of First Nations heritage. This government has been aware of that for some time and it has done nothing. If the Commonwealth law had been reviewed by December 2017 as promised, it's possible that some material reform might have occurred by now. Whether that would have saved the immeasurable cultural heritage destroyed at Juukan Gorge, we will never know. When representatives of the PKKP got in touch with the minister's office, before the rock shelters were destroyed, seeking emergency intervention under the law that is supposed to provide exactly that kind of last-minute protection, no-one even bothered to get back to them. To this day there has been no accounting for that failure and no explanation of steps taken to ensure it can't happen again.

In September 2020, Professor Graham Samuel's final report to government said a comprehensive review of national Indigenous protection should begin immediately. That was more than a year ago. Nothing even faintly like that has occurred. This report is titled A way forward, and that's appropriate because we desperately need a way forward and we certainly need a response from government to make sure that First Nations Australians don't again suffer such an appalling loss of their heritage, which, in this case, was also a loss of national significance—and I would also say of global significance. But there is no point glossing over the fact that this government has excelled at doing nothing, at ignoring the obvious need for action and breaking its promises, at rolling out the stock standard process-based waffle at every turn and at denying there's anything wrong about its approach in the face of catastrophe.

When the action so far in response to the Juukan Gorge disaster has been the usual government gobbledygook about initiating consultation and convening further meetings in the future and better operationalising existing departmental responsibilities, there's not a lot of cause for hope. There's not much sign of any intention from this government of looking for, let alone of finding, a way forward. Indeed, it looks a hell of a lot like a government intent on keeping things exactly as they are, and that is a terrible shame. It will be a terrible shame. First Nations Australians deserve better and they're rightly demanding better from this government.

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to be speaking on the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia's inquiry report into the Juukan Gorge disaster. I note that this is one of those examples where the committee, with its key recommendations, showed the sort of bipartisanship that's really good to see come out of our committee structure.

I want to start by repeating a quote of the committee chair, the member for Leichhardt. When he spoke to ABC he said it was:

… inconceivable that Australia has not developed proper protections for such sites, and action must be a matter of national priority.

Because, he said, we can't just pay lip service to this and see a repeat of the loss and devastation of Juukan Gorge across other parts of Australia on that scale.

A 46,000-year-old site of global, cultural and archaeological significance was destroyed when Rio Tinto exploded Juukan Gorge. What the committee found, via the inquiry that the explosion triggered, was that it wasn't a one-off. The report describes it as one of:

… countless instances where cultural heritage has been the victim of the drive for development and commercial gain.

It also found failures at every level of government, and recommended urgent change to stop the destruction of Aboriginal heritage sites across the nation.

The member for Leichhardt describes the disaster as a wake-up call that there are serious deficiencies in the protection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage. As Senator Pat Dodson says, the committee spent a lot of time on the ground with traditional owners and Aboriginal communities, and was moved by the lack of power that they had in the situation they found themselves in. In his view, this report highlights the systemic nature of the injustice that has been perpetrated on Aboriginal people by inadequate cultural heritage law.

This report and its recommendations for urgent change are particularly relevant to my electorate and the work that's currently being done on assessing the impact of raising the Warragamba Dam wall. There are lessons in this report for us. The quality of the assessment of the impact on Aboriginal heritage has come in for criticism. It's estimated that around 1,200 culturally significant sites could be affected by the proposal. The Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area Strategic Plan recognises 14,000 and possibly 22,000 years of Aboriginal occupation in the area.

Reading about the way traditional owners felt about what happened at Juukan Gorge really resonated with me when I heard Kazan Brown—a Gundungurra traditional owner whose great-grandmother was the last Aboriginal person to leave the Burragorang Valley before it was flooded to build the original dam—talking about trying to have a voice in the current process. That's what's come through in this report—an inability to have a voice. Kazan says that in early 2018 a panel of 22 registered Aboriginal parties was established for the project, but she was not part of the panel. She was involved in only four consultation meetings and felt as though she'd been locked out of the project:

We couldn't get on the survey team. It was like people who had a real connection to the place were not included. It was really, really horrible. It's like we have no control … we go into these meetings, and there's no consultation. They just tell us what they're going to do … They don't talk with us. They talk at us.

So these same things that this committee has found, which it says are repeated countless times, we're seeing happening here as well. Kazan describes the place that could be inundated if the dam-wall-raising goes ahead:

The place is full of culture. My grandfather used to call it our Vatican. The river is our creation story … all along the river there are spots.

Reading this report, you can see it's wrong to think about it as simply loss of a natural feature of the landscape. Aunty Sharyn Halls, a Gundungurra elder, said the same when she described, for the New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into the wall-raising, what's at risk. She said:

We have an Aboriginal connection to country with our songlines and everything [in] that will be destroyed.

She talked about the creation stories that are connected. Of the 15 waterholes in the creation story, 11 were destroyed by the filling of Warragamba Dam in the 1950s. If the dam wall is raised, she says, two of the four remaining waterholes that the creation story describes will be inundated.

This is a pattern that we've seen, and it is really incumbent upon the government to act, not just pay lip-service to this. We're seeing multiple pieces of evidence that, to me, sound like the sort of thing that the committee has found with Juukan Gorge. Things that point to the New South Wales government's efforts to ensure adequate investigation and assessment of the impacts are seriously lacking. One example would be that there is no assessment about the significance of certain sites. Michael Jackson, an archaeologist and cultural heritage adviser, said:

… significance assessment was done by one person who only spent one day in the field and who had no discussions with the archaeologists involved in the field survey—not one discussion about any of the sites … There were no discussions with the Aboriginal community.

The current laws we have, as the committee has found, allow for those sorts of processes to happen. That view was echoed by multiple parties who reported to the New South Wales inquiry. What they also highlighted, from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, ICOMOS, was that the cultural heritage survey undertaken as part of the impact assessment for the dam wall project comprised 25 days across a 354-square-kilometre section around the shores of Lake Burragorang. ICOMOS said:

This time-frame appears to be inadequate, either to identify the cultural heritage places which may be affected or to engage appropriately with the relevant Gundungurra Traditional Owners.

An application has been made by the Gundungurra Aboriginal Heritage Association and other descendants to have their ancestral lands protected under section 90 of the National Parks and Wildlife Act as a place of special significance to Aboriginal cultural heritage, and that's still to be determined. But I think what the committee's report shows is that we can't necessarily have confidence in these processes and that they are going to get the result that best preserves and protects Aboriginal cultural heritage. The committee particularly notes the need for all tiers of government to be involved in this. They have direct recommendations for the Western Australian government, and I would really urge New South Wales to look at these recommendations. In the briefing notes of one of the New South Wales departments, the heritage department, they blasted their own government and said that the consultation with traditional owners was inadequate and modelling was needed to determine the likely impacts on cultural heritage from inundation.

This is what we're seeing again, and none of us wants to see another Juukan Gorge where we realise too late and people say, 'Oops, we shouldn't have done that.' I would like to point out that the Insurance Council of Australia has taken action on these matters, and the evidence around the failure to respect traditional owners and Aboriginal heritage has led to the council dropping its support for the dam wall raising. All those stories echo exactly what we saw in a different set of circumstances at Juukan Gorge: Aboriginal people and traditional owners not being listened to. The systems in place are failing to adequately protect significant cultural heritage, and there is no point in saying that you care about this stuff and then not doing something about it. There have been reports and recommendations to the Morrison government and previous Liberal governments to review the relevant laws, and the current government and its predecessors have failed to act on them. The loss of such significant Aboriginal heritage as we saw in Juukan Gorge in Western Australia is a real tragedy. I urge the government to act on the recommendations in this report so that there are protections in place that ensure we don't see the same thing happen across the rest of the country, including in the Blue Mountains World Heritage area.

Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the final report of the inquiry into the destruction of the 46,000-year-old caves at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia delivered by the Joint Standing on Northern Australia. The final report, titled A Way Forward, builds on the damning interim report, which was titled Never Again. First, I wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land here and the land in Warringah and, importantly, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people. Their lands and waters cover almost 11,000 square kilometres of Western Australia's Pilbara region, including the Juukan Gorge area. Sovereignty over those lands was never ceded, and I pay my respects to their elders past and present.

On 24 May 2020 Rio Tinto, in full knowledge of what they were doing, detonated explosives in a sacred site of the Indigenous PKKP people. The Juukan rock shelters were the location of their ceremonies and were sacred sites for the storage of artefacts for 46,000 years. It's important we stop and ponder to reflect on that: 46,000 years. This is a great loss to the world and to the history of civilisation. The shelters demonstrated one of the longest periods of continuous habitation on the planet. They showed that Indigenous Australians had lived in that place since before the last ice age. The Juukan rock shelters were clustered around a perpetual source of freshwater in an otherwise parched landscape. In great symbolism of the intersection of the physical world and the spiritual world of the Indigenous custodians of the land, following the destruction of the cultural sites that occurred, that water source has now run dry. As Australians, we should be celebrating our rich history. Indigenous Australians, through the Uluru Statement from the Heart, have invited us to share in this history and walk with them on a path to reconciliation. I strongly support the call in the foreword of the report for legislative frameworks in all Australian jurisdictions to be modernised and to bring meaningful protections for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage to ensure that nothing like the destruction of Juukan Gorge ever happens again. Sadly, that is not the case as to what is happening. Approvals are still occurring.

The committee recommended that the Australian parliament legislate for an overarching Commonwealth legislative framework, based on the protection of cultural heritage rather than its destruction. I'd argue that this legislation should be prioritised, with only a few sitting weeks left of this 46th Parliament. The government should consider reforms to environmental protections along those lines.

The report highlights that states have failed, and that's a concern that I and many others have, in relation to the existing reforms proposed by the government to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act which seek, in fact, to remove Commonwealth protections and have a single-touch approach driven by the state legislation. When the states have failed so dramatically, and this report recommends that the Commonwealth establish nationally consistent legislation and establish standards, I would ask why they continue to pursue the absolute opposite course of action through their legislative agenda in the Senate. We saw shameful conduct by the government this year in relation to the EPBC Act amendments and a complete lack of willingness to follow the very strong recommendations on stronger environmental and cultural protections.

The committee also recommended a set of standards and best practice in the management of cultural heritage sites and objects be established and endorsed by Commonwealth, state and territory governments. This is a national standard and it should be established. One of the tools that is recommended to assist with this is the use of the Indigenous Ranger Program. Only a few days ago, I wrote to the minister for Indigenous affairs, advocating for an expansion of the Indigenous Ranger Program, following advocacy from constituents in Warringah on the issue. We're calling on the government to double the number of Indigenous rangers over the next 10 years; to create a fund for ranger training, capacity building, networking and infrastructure costs; to double the funding for the Indigenous Protected Areas program over the next four years; and to ensure equal employment opportunities for women rangers by 2030. The recommendations argue that the authority for oversight of decisions related to culturally significant areas should be transitioned from the Minister for the Environment to the Minister for Indigenous Australians. When one looks at the outcome at Juukan Gorge, it's clear that the current decision-making process, of having this in the hands of the Minister for the Environment, failed dismally—there is no other way of describing it. And so it should be transferred.

This approach, as we heard in the inquiry, is part of the failing of the system, because there was confusion created by the current system of approvals, and, while this transition is important, the model is employed in many states and territories. But there still remains a lot of conflicts of interest as a result of multiple portfolios being held by the responsible ministers. In Western Australia, for example—in particular, in relation to Juukan Gorge—the minister for Indigenous affairs at the time was also the Treasurer, and so it's clear there were conflicts in how the decision-making went in relation to that approval. In South Australia, the minister for Indigenous affairs is also the Premier—clearly, again, a conflict. It results in conflicts of interest between the state's finances and revenue from mining and the destruction of cultural sites, and the imperative to in fact protect and preserve cultural sites. So I urge the federal government to ensure that such conflict does not arise, should this recommendation be implemented.

Recommendation 6, which recommends that the Australian government develop a model for a cultural heritage truth-telling process, is welcome. However, it needs to be viewed in the bigger picture of recognition of Indigenous people. I would posit that the Uluru Statement from the Heart and that process would be the most effective model for the development of the cultural heritage truth-telling process. Enshrinement of the Indigenous voice to parliament in the Constitution is an important first step to that model. It was something that was much debated prior to the last election, and yet no progress has been made in this 46th Parliament by the Morrison government. The makarrata, which would be a venue in this House for Indigenous people to oversee policies and legislation that impact them, would be the most effective form of truth-telling process. It would be an active voice and one that would give individuals, governments and companies a clear avenue for engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage issues.

We need to do more to celebrate our history—and we hear a lot from the minister about how we should have a positive view on Australian history! But where he completely fails his portfolio is in the recognition, in fact, of our cultural history—of our Indigenous history. In my view, there is a complete lack of education about and awareness, respect and celebration of the deep cultural heritage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I know my generation were failed by the system. It completely failed in properly educating us on the richness and importance of that history.

Overseas, museums abound with Indigenous cultural artefacts, yet here in Australia we are sorely lacking. We do not have a national Indigenous museum in Australia. It's outrageous. Many of the artefacts recovered from mining sites are in shipping containers and the offices of mining companies. These are artefacts that are thousands of years old. Think of artefacts from Egypt, from the pyramids, and the kind of care that is taken in that respect. But here in Australia such artefacts are put in containers or in the back offices of mining companies. We need to store these artefacts properly, to highlight their significance, to build awareness through education and celebration of our rich cultural history, and we need to make sure that Indigenous elders direct this process.

It is only through the elevation of the history and stories of our Indigenous peoples that we will build respect and learn to take responsibility as a nation for the rich cultural heritage developed over tens of thousands of years. I call on the Minister for Indigenous Australians to progress development of a national ossuary for the remains that are unable to be restored to their original country or nation, and to develop a set of protocols for the storage and keeping of artefacts recovered from mine sites. It is mind-boggling that we don't have that in place. We don't even have from the federal Minister for Indigenous Australians, from the government, a set of protocols for the proper storage and conservation of artefacts. It's just so disrespectful.

The establishment of a national Indigenous museum, as I said, is sorely overdue and something that should be a priority. I remind the minister of the proposal to establish a museum at Manly—but I know there are many others—where in fact Captain Phillip first set foot on Australian soil. Many Indigenous elders have said to me it would be a process of healing to go back to where songlines were broken.

Debate adjourned.