Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening I call out the Labor Party's universal lack of attention to detail and how this is playing out both federally and in my home state of South Australia. The Prime Minister insists we can trust Labor on the detail of the Voice. In WA we were asked to trust state Labor back in 2021 when they gagged debate and rammed the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 through the WA parliament. With the act set to become law in 1 July, it is obvious that Labor cannot be trusted to support the WA landowners, farmers, property developers and miners on whose revenue the WA government is achieving record budget surpluses. This insidious law has been universally condemned, with concerned stakeholders calling for a minimum six-month deferral of the implementation date.

Few people would argue in the wake of the desecration of the Juukan Gorge in 2020 that an update to the WA state heritage law wasn't warranted. But, instead of limiting its act to areas where Aboriginal heritage is at greatest risk, WA Labor has ensured that almost every mining company, every farmer, every local government—indeed, every owner of a freehold block of land larger than 1,100 square metres—will pay for the actions of that single multinational mining company at Juukan Gorge.

In Labor's crosshairs are O'Connor householders, the miners and prospectors of WA's Goldfields region, and the food and fibre producers on the fertile farming lands of my electorate. Many O'Connor farmers are already doing it tough thanks to the devaluation of their flocks wrought by federal Labor's plan to ban live sheep exports. Like that ideological thought bubble, the WA Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act is overreach in the extreme. Under the act, landholders will need a permit for activities such as building a fence line and digging a footing or a farm dam. In fact, any disturbance of the soil deeper than 50 millimetres may be subject to heritage assessment, and approvals will not be granted until heritage permits have been processed. The property council of WA warns that shovel-ready projects will be affected. WA's biggest miners have held crisis talks, and a petition launched by the Pastoralists and Graziers Association attracted 29,000 signatures in less than two weeks. The PGA petition calls on the WA government to pause the law's rollout until state Labor gets its act together.

Much like the federal Labor's stakeholder consultations after committing to ban the live sheep export trade, the act information sessions arranged by the state have been an absolute shambles. Four sessions scheduled for O'Connor's largest regional centres quickly reached capacity after the bureaucrats selected venues too small to hold all the interested parties. Their solution was to stop advertising the workshops and to close RSVPs. I called for bigger venues, but in Albany the revised venue has already reached capacity for the 27 June workshop. Nonetheless, on June 12 in Esperance 550 residents flocked to the civic centre to voice their displeasure at the act, and more than 400 people attended the session in Merredin. At the Kalgoorlie-Boulder Racing Club attendees heard how the act could impact on mining companies and the prospectors of the Goldfields. Everyone was concerned that the state is yet to publish guidelines on how the law will be applied to their particular sector.

Perhaps the greatest indictment on the blanket of bureaucracy WA Labor has thrown over the state is that many Aboriginal people do not support the act. In the Kalgoorlie Miner this week, the founder of the Goldfields Land and Sea Council, my good friend Aubrey Lynch, has urged Labor to heed the Pastoralists and Graziers Association petition and to defer the act's implementation. Mr Lynch said that in the rush to ram the act through landowners, prospectors, pastoralists and Aboriginal people will be harmed. In the Financial Review the Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation said it had no desire to be bogged down in any government imposed compliance or permitting.

Of major concern to landholders, the act will hand considerable powers to a group known as local Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Services, which do not exist in many parts of my electorate. WA's Aboriginal affairs minister, Dr Tony Buti, says where this is the case existing native title bodies will be able to support the act's operation, yet Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation says it does not want to be involved in administering the act.

As with federal Labor's planned Voice to Parliament, WA Labor asked the general public to trust them on the details of the act only to be let down two years later. So I close by asking: why would the average Australian trust Labor on anything, let alone an amendment to our Constitution?