George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Might I begin by complimenting Senator Xenophon on a fine, thoughtful and idealistic speech. On 3 April 2009, the minister for Indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, announced that the Labor government had decided that Australia would become a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and that has since happened. In her speech making that announcement on 3 April 2009, Ms Macklin described the declaration as a 'landmark document', both 'historic and aspirational', by which, as she said:

We show our faith in a new era of relations between states and Indigenous peoples grounded in good faith, goodwill and mutual respect.

Fine words.

Article 26 (2) of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the Gillard government has subscribed, provides—just listen to this, Senator Fielding, please:

Indigenous peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or other traditional occupation or use, as well as those which they have otherwise acquired.

So the Labor government and the minister for Indigenous affairs, Ms Macklin, have patted themselves on the back for subscribing to this declaration, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which contains that guarantee, the guarantee in article 26 that Indigenous people have the right to own, use, develop and control their traditional lands. By a crowning irony, on the very day that Ms Macklin made that speech, a thousand miles to the north, in Brisbane, the Bligh Labor government gazetted three major river systems in Cape York—the Archer, Lockhart and Stewart Rivers, their catchments, tributaries and floodplains—under the Queensland Wild Rivers Act 2005. The effect of the gazettal by the Queensland government on 3 April 2009 was to make it impossible for the Indigenous people—the traditional owners, the people whom we acknowledge and pay respect to every morning as this chamber convenes—to use, develop or control those traditional lands. How remarkable—the high-toned sentiments of Minister Macklin in Canberra and the reality of a cynical state Labor machine in Brisbane on the very same day saying one thing and doing another. There could not be a more stark example of the rule that the Labor Party says one thing but does the opposite. And what the Queensland Labor government did on this occasion was a peculiarly wicked thing to do. It destroyed the economic livelihood of the traditional owners of the cape. And it is to reverse this wicked decision that Senator Scullion's private senator's bill has been brought to the chamber.

I do not profess to be a specialist in this area, so do not take it from me, let us hear what the Aboriginal leaders have to say about the effect of the Queensland Wild Rivers legislation. Marcia Langton, Profes­sor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, described the gazettal of the Lockhart, Archer and Stewart Rivers—I hope you are listening to this, Senator Fielding—as 'a terminal threat to the eco­nomic future of the local Aboriginal people'. So please, Senator Furner, do not cond­escendingly tell us about the wildlife; let us talk about the human life, let us talk about the Aboriginal people, whom the Labor Party, with all its pious rhetoric, claims to champion, yet in reality stabs a knife through their heart with this legislation. Marcia Langton says this is a terminal threat to the economic future of the local Aboriginal people.

Even Mr Tom Calma, this government's own Aboriginal Social Justice Commiss­ioner, said he had 'serious concerns about the effect of the gazettals on the exercise and enjoyment of Indigenous people's human rights—in particular, those concerning cultural and economic develop­ment rights to their lands, waters and natural resources'. Noel Pearson said that the effect of the gazettal was 'to foreclose on the future for our people'. He said 'the state'—the state Labor government, that is—'cannot rip the future out from under Indigenous children's feet'. The Young Australian of the Year, Tania Major, a very impressive young woman with whom I shared a panel on Q&A two years ago, spent that program pleading with Anna Bligh, who was also a co-panelist that night, to understand the effect on local Aboriginal people, their livelihood and their economic future, of the Queensland wild rivers legislation. But Tania Major's pleas fell on deaf ears, just as Noel Pearson's pleas, Tom Calma's pleas, Marcia Langton's pleas and Bruce Martin's pleas have done.

Do you know what is peculiarly wicked about the Queensland Wild Rivers Act? As anybody who lives in Brisbane knows, it was the result of a backroom deal in a West End coffee shop just before the 2009 Queensland state election, which the Labor Party managed to win, managed to pull out of the fire, on the back of Greens preferences. And what happened in that deal was that the Labor Party powerbrokers in Brisbane, who are no better than the Labor Party power­brokers of Sussex Street or Carlton or any of the other unattractive Labor Party power­brokers across the country, sat down with the Greens in the inner-city suburb of West End in Brisbane and traded the future of the Cape York Aboriginal and Indigenous people for Green preferences. They made a present of the future of those people in order to appeal to the conceits and vanities of inner-city Green voters in Brisbane. It is as simple as that, and everybody in Brisbane knows it.

So please let us not have from Senator Furner and, I anticipate, from Senator McLucas, who I expect will be speaking shortly, pieties about how concerned the Labor Party is about Indigenous people when they come to this chamber to oppose a bill which will reinstate the rights which this very Labor government subscribed to an international instrument in order to secure—the right, as I quoted before from article 26 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership. How can you do it, Senator McLucas? How can you, because I know that you do care about social justice? I know that you are troubled by this. I know that the unattractive goons—or to use Mr Rudd's word, 'thugsters'—who control the Queensland branch of the Labor Party are hardly friends of yours. So I know you are troubled by this. But how can you in good conscience come into this chamber and oppose a bill that would restore the traditional rights of the Indigenous people of the Cape York Peninsula.