Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to amend business of the Senate motion No. 1 in the terms circulated in the chamber.

Leave granted.

I move the motion as amended:

That the following matters be referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee for inquiry and report by 6 December 2024:

(a) the effectiveness of the operation of the native title system, and options to improve:

(i) the economic development resulting from native title, and

(ii) certainty over the claim process

My motion is to do with native title. After more than 30 years, it's past time for a comprehensive review of native title legislation and how it operates in Australia. In the early 1990s, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations owned 14.22 per cent of Australia's landmass including islands. Under freehold, leasehold and reserve, these organisations, not including individuals, owned 1,094,000 square kilometres of Australia. Following the Mabo and others versus the state of Queensland decision in 1992 and in the wake of the Native Title Act 1993, all vacant Crown land; occupied Crown land, like native parks; and Crown leasehold land—that is, pastoral farming properties—were and still are under threat.

According to the National Native Title Tribunal, on 31 March 2016, native title existed in an exclusive sense over a total of 851,654 square kilometres of Australia, an area greater than the state of New South Wales. Native title also existed in a non-exclusive sense over another 1,488,237 square kilometres. All up, in 2016, native title held by Indigenous people was over 2,339,890 square kilometres of land. This amounted to 30.4 per cent of 7,786,850 square kilometres of land in Australia, an area bigger than western Europe. Then, in 2021, just five years later, 26.6 per cent of Australia's land was under exclusive Indigenous native title, meaning the right to exclude others from the land, and 27.5 per cent under non-exclusive Indigenous native title. The total proportion of Australia's landmass under native title today is 54 per cent, with approximately another 10 to 12 per cent under determination.

Native title land is owned by corporations and Indigenous shareholders, but they cannot sell or, in some cases, use their land. Those who would love to own a home on their own part of Australia are denied this because there are no individual titles. Native title is a farce and controlled by land councils holding Indigenous people to ransom in their squalor and conditions that they experience in remote communities purely to milk the taxpayer funded gravy train. Aboriginals and their corporations don't pay tax on royalties or land leasing agreements. Why?

Perhaps the most galling aspect of native title is the complete exclusion of non-Indigenous Australians from any meaningful say in the process. This country belongs to all Australians, so all Australians should have a say about ownership and title of the land and waters over which all Australians share equal sovereignty. I mention that specifically because in a question without notice last year I managed to get the Labor government to concede that, in principle, this was the truth: all Australians have sovereignty over Australia.

We hear the more extreme activists routinely repeat the line that Indigenous sovereignty over Australia was never ceded. Here's an uncomfortable bit of truth-telling for those activists: you can't cede something you never had in the first place. Sovereignty is a concept that was brought to this continent by British settlement. Sovereignty is a concept of civilisation, which emerged independently in many parts of the world but never touched presettlement Australia. It requires the infrastructure and machinery of estate: government, physical institutions, currency, written records, borders, and armies to defend them. They were not concepts that existed before the emergence of civilisation around the world. Before that, virtually all human beings were essentially nomadic hunter-gatherers with no concept of borders; they just followed the food. It wasn't until people learned that it was safer and easier to grow food and keep livestock near them and the need to defend them against other people that these concepts emerged. It was this competition with others which fuelled invention and created concepts like the sovereign state and sovereign borders. Intense competition with other peoples was not something that Indigenous people ever really encountered before British settlement, so there was no impetus for these concepts to emerge independently in Australia. They were imported here in 1788.

Sovereignty is also something that requires defence. Virtually every civilisation on this planet has been both the conqueror and the conquered. That's very much the story of Britain. Celts, Anglos, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans all invaded and conquered parts of Britain. The English people are a composite of many ancestries as a legacy of these waves of conquest over thousands of years. They routinely sought to dominate the Welsh, Scottish and Irish peoples they shared their lands with. Eventually, they created the largest empire the world has ever seen, but only because they had successfully defended British sovereignty against foreign invasion for centuries. This provided the stability and secure base from which to effectively control more than a quarter of the entire planet by the 19th century.

Australia only became part of this empire because the British lost their previous dumping ground for the transport of convicts in the American War of Independence. Settlement of Australia was brought about by the British, already in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, into contact and conflict with Indigenous people who were still at Stone Age level of technological development. As a result, the conflicts were very much one-sided. Indigenous people could not effectively resist settlers armed with muskets and supported by the British sovereign state. The obvious factor was the different levels of technological development, but an important factor was the absence of sovereignty among Indigenous people.

There's no small irony in the existence of the native title system. It is directly the product of machinery of the modern sovereign state imported here by the British of government, fiscal institutions, borders, armies to defend them, and money, of course—another concept alien to presettlement Australia—truckloads of money. Money provided by taxpayers—97 per cent of which will never be able to make a native title claim or be allowed any meaningful say in the transfer of the land and wealth under their sovereign ownership.

Governments and councils have considerable input in the determination of these claims, but, as usual in this country, this input almost never reflects the views of affected communities. As a vehicle for reconciliation, native title is a complete failure, but it almost completely excludes non-Indigenous Australians from the process. Reconciliation is a two-way street, not a one-sided process. There has to be give and take on both sides. Reconciliation is also a process which is supposed to come to a resolution or conclusion at some point. That's part of the reason I've been calling for a sunset clause in native title legislation, as did former prime minister John Howard. With more than half the continent now under a form of native title, and more land transferred to Indigenous corporations and land councils under state legislation, many Australians are saying, 'Enough is enough.'

In my home state of Queensland, native title claims and state based land transfers are dividing, not uniting, our communities. Great Keppel Island, once the jewel of Central Queensland, is now subject to an exclusive-use native title claim that, if successful, will lock non-Indigenous Australians out of 84 per cent of the island. It's very apparent that this is the reason the state Labor government's $25 million promise to restore and clean up Great Keppel Island hasn't been met in more than four years. I don't think they have any intention of honouring that commitment, or the updated one they made in April this year, because they expect this claim to be successful.

Then there's the small community of Toobeah in the Goondiwindi Shire. Land which has been the beating heart of this community for a century is being claimed by an Aboriginal corporation with a Brisbane office more than 400 kilometres away. The community was kept completely in the dark about the transfer, until I visited the town and demanded some consultation. But there was no consultation. Because of my intervention, and after keeping the community in the dark for over three years, the local council had a couple of meetings at which Toobeah residents were just told what was going to happen. They have no meaningful say in it. I also believe that's precisely why non-Indigenous Australians are never asked: because the claimants, the government and the councils know the answer will very likely be no.

I also remind Australians: what about being denied the right to visit Ayers Rock, or Uluru; the Grampians National Park; Mount Warning; some beaches that we have been locked out of and many other parts of Australia? We can't go there. It's, 'Oh, sorry; it's secret women's business,' or, 'It's because of men's health.' Really? Give me a break! And this is what you're doing. For three per cent—and I question that as well—of the population, we are denying Australians the right to actually go to these beautiful places.

Native title is racist and divisive. It's treating one Australian differently to another, but purely based on race. Last year's referendum proved that beyond a doubt. The Australian people threw it out. You wanted to have a separate advisory body, another layer of government, purely for the Indigenous. Voters have woken up to the many ways that they are being denied the rights that Indigenous Australians enjoy. Non-Indigenous Australians are, in many ways, second-class citizens in their own country, and nothing illustrates this like native title. One Nation is the only party in Australia fighting for these communities and standing up for our rights to be heard and heeded, for all Australians.

My referral motion is for an inquiry that will, I hope, consider a better native title process that includes meaningful consultation with the non-Indigenous; more certainty; and better options, for Indigenous claimants, for economic development and empowerment. Indigenous people have actually come to me and said: 'We can't get any part of the land; we are denied the right. We can't set up businesses. We can't go for loans. We can't do anything.' You're keeping them locked in this squalor, because they can't access their own country. Even people that I visited in some of these Aboriginal communities have said that, although it's native title land, unless they get the say of one of the community leaders, they can't visit the land; they can't hunt on it; they can't do anything. So you're not advantaging anyone here. You're just handing it over to those who want to use it to empower themselves and to the nepotism that happens.

There's also all the taxpayers' money that goes out the door. And, as I said here, they don't pay royalties. Why? Why don't they pay tax and royalties? Why aren't they funding themselves? Why is it still upon the taxpayers to fund these corporations, these organisations, that I have called out repeatedly to be corrupt? No-one is interested in doing an investigation and audit. If you've got nothing to hide, have the audit; do an investigation; find out where the money's gone. But you know, because you know that there is corruption there and you don't want to show them up for what they are.

This whole thing is about division within our nation over native title. As I said, in the early 1990s, 14.22 per cent of the nation was under native title. Now it's over 54 per cent, and possibly an extra 10 per cent or 12 per cent will be given to native title. So over 60 per cent of Australia will be under native title for less than 812,000 people who claim to be Aboriginal. How ridiculous is that? If you really have a good think about this, what are you doing to this nation and future generations? You're not helping the Aboriginal people or the Torres Strait Island people by what you're doing. You're not talking about giving them a helping hand up. All you're doing is to keep funding all the time to keep them in the conditions that they're in, and there is no helping hand up to get them out of it. Or is this a plot to actually divide this nation and have an Aboriginal black state?

That's why we need this Senate inquiry and an investigation into it. You tell me: What are the benefits of having native title? How has it helped the Australian people? Where is our future going to lie if we keep heading down this path?