Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The MPI before the chamber today takes me right back to the fearmongering that politicians undertook in response to the Native Title Act. 'They're coming for your backyards,' they said. And yet here we are again with a Native Title Act that is pretty weak, in my opinion. Not only has it failed to steal people's backyards, but, in lots of cases, it has actually helped industries such as agriculture and mining. The sheer ignorance of this MPI still astounds me, and I'm lost to it. How dare people stand in this chamber and lecture me about protecting culture—protecting cultural heritage, protecting my lands. My people have lost so much, yet people in this place and in my home state of Western Australia want to whinge and complain that they might actually have to put in a bit of effort and ask the people whose land they're on. They do an acknowledgement of country every morning that they're in this place but continue not to want to ask whether there's a burial ground under there—whether there are bones there that were there before they came. It's 65,000 years of culture. This is our country. You built a Native Title Act to make sure that I needed to prove through anthropological links—through my connection to country—that I had an identity. You did that.

On the land that pastoralists and farmers who Senator Brockman has met with and wants to talk about, my hometown is Kojonup, right across the road from Katanning. One of my ancestors' burial grounds is on the farm that belongs to my family, so it's close to home. But these pastoral acts and others are enabling legislation to steal land. Every mining company and pastoralist in this country is operating on stolen land. These laws at both the federal and state levels come as a direct result of what happened at Juukan Gorge. I served on the Joint Select Committee on Northern Australia alongside Senator Smith. To some people, what happened at Juukan Gorge might have just been a rock shelter—a few carvings, a bit of rock art—that got in the way of business in this country, but that is our culture. That is the oldest continuing living culture in the world. Juukan Gorge showed human occupancy that dated back 46,000 years, and those ancient rock shelters held onto that history and that continuing culture for the PKKP people. Juukan Gorge was a sacred site and still is, but, like a lot of our cultural heritage, it was destroyed, and it was done legally. You can't tell me that these laws are not being disrupted and broken every single day. I'd like to think that we'd moved on from the dog whistling but, unfortunately, we haven't. We haven't matured as a country, and I wait for that moment.