Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The minister’s explanation just begs the question: why not just make it ‘just terms’ and satisfy us? Why do you not just say: ‘We’ve heard your legal opinion, we’ve heard the concern of Indigenous people, we’ve heard the concern of senators and we think the terms are interchangeable. Why don’t we just interchange them?’ Labor has an amendment which seeks to interchange them, so there is no problem. I expect you to vote for it. Given there is serious concern in the Indigenous community that somehow their compensation will be undermined or the capacity to gain compensation will be undermined by this particular phrase in the bill, why do you not just listen to those concerns and provide the reassurance by using the term which you say is interchangeable? If your answer is correct and that is the extent of it, then you should have no problem. You would be happy to say: ‘Senator Brown, Senator Evans, we are happy to help. We will make you feel more at ease. We will make all those Indigenous people who worry about this more at ease and we’ll interchange it. There is no problem because it does not make any difference.’

But if that is not the case, you have not told us why it is different and what the impact will be on people who have a property right, acquired by you the government, and why you choose to use this term. I, like the bloke in The Castle, do not have a great legal understanding of what ‘just terms compensation’ means, but I know that you are taking away Indigenous people’s ownership or enjoyment of that property right for a period. They are entitled, under the Constitution, to just terms compensation, putting aside the arcane legal argument about whether it applies in the Northern Territory—and I do not want to go there; I am way out of my depth on that constitutional argument. But if you are so convinced and are able to so reassure us that there is no difference and that the terms are interchangeable, then why do we not go with a term that everyone else has understood and which has been in other legislation for years? That would provide the level of reassurance to the chamber that you say we ought to have anyway.