Patrick Dodson (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Reconciliation) Share this | Hansard source

As a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, I wish to make some comments about the committee's interim report on its inquiry into the destruction of caves occupied by humans for 46,000 years in the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia by the Rio Tinto mining company. The committee was due to report on 30 September 2020 but COVID restricted our travel into Western Australia. The Senate, on 31 September, agreed to an extension till today.

First, I want to thank the committee chair, Mr Warren Entsch, for his leadership and commitment to this inquiry. It is most heartening to me that the interim report is a unanimous one. The report expresses a common concern held by all about the destruction of the caves at Juukan Gorge, news of which reverberated around the world. We should take note of the fact that shareholders took a very keen interest in what had happened in this particular situation. But our concern extended beyond the Juukan Gorge. The priceless First Nations heritage is under threat right across the land, and protections are wanting.

The joint committee inquiry attracted more than 140 submissions, which demonstrated widespread community concern at the wanton destruction of the caves at Juukan Gorge on 21 May this year. The most poignant testimony came from the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people themselves in both written and verbal evidence. It will suffice to quote one of those witnesses, Burchell Hayes, whose grandfather was known as Juukan. He said:

We have an obligation to look after country in accordance with traditional law and customs. It is our obligation to the old people, who also looked after it. It was on loan to us to pass on to our future generations, our Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura children, and the future generations yet to come. The disaster has now left a gaping hole in our ability to pass on our heritage to our children and grandchildren.

As a committee, we were able to hear evidence like that directly thanks to the good offices of the Premier of Western Australia, Mr McGowan, and the Commonwealth, which, given all the difficulties with COVID, laid on an Air Force aircraft to transport us, particularly interstate members, to Karratha and for us to get out to the Brockman mine site at Newman. It was an invaluable opportunity, because we were able not only to hear from and talk to the people so tragically affected but also to see their country for ourselves and to witness the area of destruction. The committee had a meeting with over 100 of the traditional owners, a very rare kind of way for committees to work, and we heard from various people the hurt, frustration and anger that they carried as a consequence of this.

This interim report identifies a catalogue of failures of the processes of Rio Tinto. It much saddens me that a company which not that long ago was one of the industry leaders in the way it dealt with First Nations peoples became so cavalier in its pursuit of profit. I caught the tail end of my colleague on this point about how the company had lost the integration of its management and its governance, but failures such as these that led to the Juukan Gorge disaster do not happen out of the blue. These failures were symptomatic of the 'don't care' culture that infected Rio Tinto from the top down. It had gone through a rapid decline in the way it did business. While we're dealing with the top, let me say it was a mistake for board member Mr Michael L'Estrange to be the one to do the company's review of cultural heritage management. He was the wrong man for the job. The report was full of corporate mea culpas and corporate lingo and was an unsatisfactory piece of work. It didn't get to the heart of the drift and rot that were allowed to corrupt Rio Tinto's formerly good practice. It simply didn't nail the fundamental cultural shift over recent years at Rio Tinto that devalued the importance and the input of top-shelf anthropologists and physical heritage advice, as witnessed by Professor Cochrane and Mr Bruce Harvey, who informed the inquiry.

What became plain in the course of the inquiry is that the First Nations peoples are seriously disadvantaged when it comes to dealing with mining companies and government agencies. The scant resources that the First Nations can muster are far outweighed by those the mining companies and bureaucracies bring to bear. The legislation, state and federal, has failed to protect First Nations and their heritage. The ineffectual Native Title Act has delivered nothing of substance to protect the interests of First Nations. We heard of gag clauses in contracts. We heard of people signing over their civil rights to not protest about destruction, or potential destruction, by a company in the exercise of its rights under section 18 of the Western Australian act. If Eddie Mabo were with us, he would be deeply distressed to realise that what he fought for so vigorously has delivered so little—and I'm talking about the future legal regime of the Native Title Act.

The environment and heritage protocols and laws around the country need a serious overhaul, and this committee will be looking at those, going forward. As we speak, even in the Northern Territory, where sacred sites legislation leads the nation, important sites at the blighted McArthur River Mine in the Gulf Country are under threat right now because the government has approved a new mine management plan without the necessary sacred sites clearance certificates having been approved. Australia's reputation and standing in the world is under threat because of deficient legislation, and the casual disregard for First Nations heritage that flows from that.

We have international obligations here to take the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples seriously. Article 11 speaks about the right of Indigenous people to maintain and protect 'manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites'. It goes on to say that states shall provide redress 'which may include restitution, developed in conjunction with Indigenous peoples,' if their cultural property is 'taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs'. That's a matter this report dealt with in a tangential way. But the importance of free, prior and informed consent cannot be underestimated, and in the review we've been encouraging companies to look at what they've got in their existing section 18s. Australia signed up to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but what does it really mean in practice? It just gets disregarded.

How many more Juukan Gorge catastrophes are lurking on working schedules around the country? We don't know, because there are still existing legal regimes that permit—and legally permit—various companies to destroy them. So, whilst our report is called Never again, it's in a legislative environment where there's still the capacity for an organisation or a company to destroy such sites. We have a serious problem, and this committee's got some serious work to do, going forward into the new year, on the comparative basis of the legal framework.

It's so sad that things went wrong, badly wrong, for Rio at Brockman 4. But it's also sad that this is not an isolated incident; it's not confined to just this company's operations. There is a lot for us to consume and there is hard work ahead of us. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.