David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

What really gets to the mining industry and the coalition is that there's this one case where Aboriginal cultural authority and Aboriginal heritage prevent one part of a mine going ahead. They can't believe it. Their spruikers in the Murdoch press and on Sky are appalled. How could it be possibly that, this one time, the system listens to some traditional owners who don't have the power, the resources or the money? How outrageous it is that, for once, traditional owners get heard and one small part of a Western Australian mining company's application to put a mine in New South Wales is actually rejected because, for once, the system listens to First Nations peoples over the money, power and influence of mining! They are so appalled by it. This is the same industry, of course, that just bulldozes, explodes and destroys Aboriginal heritage, as in Juukan Gorge. They don't seem to have learned. They're happy. But the very idea that a First Nations culture could once block one part of a mine so offends them.

Now they come in and say the only authority is the land council. What I find extraordinary about that is that you would think that, as legislators, they would have read the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which establishes land councils. Land councils are not established to speak for culture and country. I will just read it out:

The purpose of the ALRA—

the act under which Aboriginal land councils are established—

is:

They are not established to speak for country and culture. The people elected to the boards of New South Wales Aboriginal land councils represent all Aboriginal people in that area. Whether or not they have traditional connections to land, they represent every Aboriginal person who lives in their patch. Sometimes the members of those land councils do elect traditional owners, who have connection to country and can speak for country, but their authority to speak for country doesn't come from being elected to the board of the land council. The authority to speak for country comes from mob, from connection, from history and from culture.

What we get from the coalition is this simplified view that, because a land council may have gone from opposition to neutral, somehow that negates traditional owners. It just goes to show how little regard the coalition has for First Nations culture. It goes to show what contempt they have for the very idea that there might be authority—cultural authority and spiritual authority—that stems from 60-plus thousand years of continuous connection and occupation in this country and not from some act that the New South Wales Parliament passed in the early eighties. That's where traditional authority and culture comes from. When the coalition get up here and say 'the land council this' and 'the land council that', it just confirms the utter contempt the coalition has for any sense of First Nations independent cultural authority and the tens and tens of thousands of years of connections to this country, which are totally unrelated to some New South Wales act of parliament that was passed in the 1980s.

I want to end by remembering that it can actually work right, because the coalition's Minister Ley did listen to traditional owners and protected Wahluu. She did the right thing, and I credit her for it. Both she and Minister Plibersek, for once, listened to these same traditional owners and protected this one little precious patch of my home state and of their traditional country and culture. If we can do it right once, we can do it right again. Far from this ugly attack, it was a little spark of hope, and now the coalition wants to rub it out. What you're doing is disgraceful.