Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Before I respond to that, I draw your attention to the articles in last weekend’s papers from elderly Aboriginal women. They said that this legislation will make humbug worse for them, that they will be subject to more violence because of the breaching on social security and that they will be subject to more pressure and violence for their social security income from younger or other people in the community who are subsequently breached. So I draw that to your attention. I intend to come back to that later in the discussion of that particular bill.

In relation to the mining industry, my understanding is that you are privatising land because you want to provide infrastructure in those communities, but ‘infrastructure’ is not defined. You say that at the end of five years there will be ongoing interest in that particular land from the Commonwealth, the Northern Territory or any departments thereof. I also note that you said that the provisions of the land rights act still apply and so on, but I do draw to your attention that last year the government moved to allow for the nomination of a waste dump on Indigenous land without the consent of Indigenous people. It allowed the minister to approve a nuclear waste dump on Indigenous land without the consent of Indigenous people, and it also legislated to take away procedural fairness from Indigenous people. So you can hardly be surprised that Indigenous people or the general community are extremely cynical about a move to privatise land—especially when we know that the uranium miners are out there now, in large areas of the Territory. And, by coincidence, a lot of the prescribed areas would be enormously satisfying for the industry if they were able to service them from infrastructure in those communities. That is why I am asking specifically about this: we know that the mining industry has been a driver of the campaign against land rights and undermining Indigenous land rights.

The point I make is this: this legislation privatises land for the purposes of infrastructure. You have not defined ‘infrastructure’. You have said it is not designed to stop private enterprise. What is to prevent a mining company from entering into a partnership with the Commonwealth or with a community to access some of this funding to build infrastructure to support mining exploration or some other mining development, including a nuclear waste dump?