Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Nor will the Greens be supporting the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007. We opposed the changes to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act last year that set in motion this process. We were extremely concerned then and opposed those changes, as we will oppose these. Yesterday, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, released his latest report on native title and also the latest social justice report. I would like to start by quoting him, because his words go to the nub of these issues. The media release on the Native title report 2006 says:

The Native Title Report 2006 also examines the Australian Government’s economic reform agenda for Indigenous land, specifically the 99-year lease scheme that aims to provide home ownership opportunities on Indigenous land.

“The problem with this scheme is that Indigenous land owners have to give up their land rights if they want to access new homes and low interest mortgages,” Commissioner Calma said.

“Ultimately the lease and home ownership initiative is more a debt creation scheme - one which threatens our hard fought-for land rights. Unfortunately, the majority of remote Indigenous Australians can’t currently get mortgages because they are either unemployed, or they are recipients of benefits or precarious income that does not support mortgage repayments.”

The core belief on which the notion of the 99-year headlease process is built is that individual private rights will allow Indigenous Australians to accumulate assets and participate in the market economy. The fundamental belief of the government is that individual property rights will be the answer to everything. As Mal Brough said last May:

It is individual property rights that drive economic development. The days of the failed collective are over.

The cornerstone of all recent government reforms on homeownership and economic development for Indigenous communities is the belief in the individual as an agent in economic self-development. We are entirely justified in characterising this as an ideological belief because, on the government’s own statements, it is a belief that is held in the absence of any evidence based on domestic success. It is also in stark contrast and opposition to the knowledge and experience gained overseas. In the United States, Canada and New Zealand, and most recently Kenya, the conversion of communal hands to individual leasing arrangements has not led to any noticeable improvement in the creation of wealth. As the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner said when I questioned him in estimates last May:

What has been seen in all of those countries has in fact been a loss of communal lands when individuals have sold off their land to outside interests and, therefore, once that process is started, it is a concern.

Going to the Tiwi situation, he said:

... a significant concern is in relation to the permit system that is being reviewed at the moment. Tiwi people are concerned that if the 15 per cent of homes that are reported to be able to be sold to outside interests are sold, if the permit system has been withdrawn, then what is to stop any of that 15 per cent inviting people over to traverse all the lands and what controls do the Tiwi people then have over their own lands?

The evidence from overseas is that, when land is converted to individual leasing, the trade-off of communal title does not deliver the expected wealth creation or improvement in living standards. At the same time, these communities lose control of their land, and the strength and cohesion of their communities suffers as a result. We are concerned that this will ultimately lead to worse outcomes in health and wellbeing. As Tom Calma says in the Native title report 2006 that was released yesterday:

In many Indigenous townships these leases are currently operating on communal lands. The benefits of these leases are that traditional owners retain decisionmaking control over the land. Under the Government’s 99 year headlease plan, the ‘established entity’ will make the decisions affecting all future development on Indigenous land.

So what will happen under the government’s proposal is that communities will lose control over their lands and another entity will make those decisions. What has been seen overseas is that this process does not work.

Put simply, we believe that the 99-year lease scheme is in fact the AWA process of Indigenous Australia. But while the benefits of individual workplace agreements for individual workers may be dubious—and many of us believe they are highly dubious—when the concept of the individual as the focus of economic development is applied to Indigenous communities, and particularly remote ones, where the opportunities for such development are already severely limited and there is no evidence that it will deliver properly or deliver the outcomes the government claims, we believe that this will be yet another unmitigated disaster.

This is another manifestation of the dysfunction of leadership and misunderstanding of Indigenous policy development that has dogged this government over the last decade. This latest social experiment is shoehorning the ideology of naive individualism and economic rationalism onto our cultural landscape. It is destined to go the same way as the failed COAG trials and the mess that has been made of the whole-of-government approach to shared responsibility agreements, for example, where it is continually the government side of the equation that fails to deliver on its promises and any show of responsibility. This was best summarised by the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Dr Peter Shergold, last July. When talking about the failure of the government’s ambitious Indigenous reform agenda, he said:

I am aware that, for some 15 years as a public administrator, too much of what I have done on behalf of government for the very best of motives has had the very worst of outcomes. I (and hundreds of my well-intentioned colleagues, both black and white) have contributed to the current unacceptable state of affairs, at first unwittingly and then, too often, silently and despairingly.

These comments are mirrored in the findings of the Gray report that looked at the failed COAG trials and the disaster that has led to Wadeye. The Social justice report from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, released just yesterday at the same time as the Native title report, sums up the attitude and culture that is behind this failing. In particular, it looks at some of the issues under the shared responsibility agreements. It then goes on to look at some of the issues that manifest themselves in the proposal for 99-year leases.

The report highlights the definition of community where it talks about making communities sign SRAs. They are being made to sign SRAs at community level rather than at family level. The social justice commissioner points out that the focus is on community, despite extensive literature about the artificiality and problematic nature of major Indigenous settlements in Australia, saying that these are artificial constructs which have brought together disparate clans and language groups. He then goes on to talk about the fact that it comes down to the government trying to progress an objective of so-called normalising Indigenous communities, which is clearly the basis of where the government are trying to take the 99-year lease process—that is, they are trying to artificially create so-called communities and normalise leases because that is what they think will lead to economic development. The commissioner says that such attempts and the 99-year leases are just the latest incarnations of this objective and that it will almost certainly have the opposite effect to what is desired. The changes are likely to reinforce the artificiality and alienating nature of these communities and will add to their social dysfunction.

The rights of traditional owners will be nullified. Regardless of compensation arrangements or rents, this is unlikely to work towards the development of harmonious communities. At the heart of these arrangements is a failure to engage the community and a failure to listen to them, as much as is a failure to see beyond the blinkers of ideology. There are many quotes in the social justice commissioner’s report that highlight the concerns that HREOC has about the mindless ideology that is driving the 99-year lease process—that it is not based on any evidence in Australia that it is going to work and it is not justified by evidence from overseas. Perhaps we would accept the concept more if evidence from overseas showed that this has worked, but in fact it has not worked overseas and it is not going to work in Australia.

The social justice commissioner’s report also says that it is a culture of control that perhaps unintentionally disempowers Indigenous communities; it is a culture that is not based on respecting partnership. Indigenous peoples are treated as problems to be solved, not as partners and active participants in creating a positive life vision for generations of Indigenous people still to come. The greatest irony of this is that it fosters a passive system of policy development and service delivery while at the same time criticises Indigenous peoples for being passive recipients of government services. The commissioner talked specifically about the lack of consultation and the way this legislation is being forced through this place. There has been no consultation with the local community, as we heard from Senator Crossin. Great concerns are still being raised in the Northern Territory about the lack of consultation, the process this sets up and the fact that it is taking away control from traditional owners and putting it to an entity. These concepts were never adequately discussed. They were not discussed when the land rights changes went through last year. While elements of that legislation were discussed in the community, those particular elements were not; they were pushed through very quickly without adequate consultation, in the same way that these are being pushed through quickly without adequate consultation.

An example of the flawed nature of the thinking on this and the way this is being rushed through—and I touched on this the other day when I talked about the Greens concerns that this legislation is not being sent to a committee—is the issue around the money coming out of the account, the ABA, to pay for the leases. It is quite obvious that the government has not thoroughly thought this concept through. Five million dollars is coming out of the ABA and will go to traditional owners. The government could not even tell me—and Senator Scullion was there and knows this—what would happen with the $5 million once it had been collected from the lessees. After a number of hours, the answer came back that it goes to the entity to fund the entity to facilitate more headleases in other communities.

The Greens are deeply concerned about the fact that, for a start, it seems that no-one knew what was going on and that it had not been thought through. The bigger point is that this is being paid for out of the ABA. So that account is being used to undermine traditional owners’ decision-making powers. That is not what we understood the ABA was set up for in the first place. We very strongly object to that and I know that Aboriginal communities in the NT object to that because I have been told by them that they object to that. They do not believe that the money was put there for that. The money should be for the benefit of Indigenous communities to help them in their economic development. As I outlined earlier, we do not believe that this ideological approach will lead to economic development.

As Tom Calma points out, Indigenous people are likely to end up with a massive load of debt because they will not have the capacity to repay the loans. They will not necessarily have the capacity to get loans in the first place. Following on from that, it is highly likely that in a lot of these communities, with housing costs being so expensive, they will not be able to resell the houses anyway. So they are being forced into a process of giving up control of their land for very dubious economic circumstances. They are being forced into it because they are being normalised. No-one has actually asked them if they want to be normalised. Overseas, giving up community control has proved to be dysfunctional; it has proved not to work and it has massive problems, yet we use this flawed belief to force people to give up community control to get so-called non-essential services. However, I would argue—as I have argued previously—that these services are essential services and that people should not be forced into giving up control of their land and decision making over their land for essential services.

I have not touched on a lot of the issues as they relate specifically to the Tiwi example. I think Senator Crossin has covered that. I will just briefly touch on this and say that I asked the social justice commissioner about Tiwi specifically. He was invited up there by the local community because they were expressing concerns about the process in Tiwi. He raised in estimates a number of concerns the local community continue to have about the proposals for their agreement. As I highlighted the other day, there was a public announcement that an agreement had been signed not long ago when in fact that was not true—it was a memorandum of understanding; and further details are still being worked out.

I do not believe that Aboriginal communities have been given a full and frank assessment of what this process means in the long term. For example, they have not been given any analysis from overseas of what impact this type of process has delivered overseas. I do not believe there has been an adequate assessment of what so-called private ownership of houses really does deliver to Aboriginal communities. This is a flawed process built on ideology with no foundation in fact. It has not worked overseas. It is not likely to work here. This is about pursuing an ideological agenda that I believe will not work. It will further disempower Aboriginal communities and further entrench disadvantage rather than help them.

When the government were looking at the community in Alice Springs, because they were so ideologically focused on those communities in the town camps giving up control of their leases, they would not give them $60 million to address the issue of housing. If the government were genuinely concerned about the state of that housing, they would not have taken the ‘take no prisoners’ approach to bargaining that they did. They were inflexible. They said, ‘Take it or leave it.’ That is not a genuine approach to consultation and negotiation with the community. That is the expression of their ideological pursuit of their objectives. It is a case of, ‘It is our way or no way.’ I do not think that is the appropriate way that we should be working with Aboriginal Australians in the 21st century. This is bad policy, and I believe the Senate should reject it.