Still not sorry!?

Different property relationships with a society's land were at the heart of the Mabo case.  Mabo recognised both the legal existence and the ability to co-exist of Australia's three systems of land tenure. Where native title has survived, it is a communal ownership vested in the Aboriginal community and its members as a whole. It is similar to that of the Meriam people, the Torres Strait Islanders who own Mer Island - the famous Mabo case island. Both these forms of land tenure are quite unlike the individual ownership of our dominant society. These differences must be understood so that muddling of the systems, however well-intentioned, with probable catastrophic consequences, can be avoided.

The Mabo case was the culmination of an Australia-wide movement that corrected past mistaken legal judgments that the colonisation of Australia had been of an empty land owned by no-one – known as a terra nullius in Roman law. Mabo came about because of a sense of justice as well as respect for the rule of law.

The opposition of the Howard government to these policies has now taken a dramatic form with recent take-over of the lands of traditional and native title communities in the Northern Territory - a move executed without consultation, consent, or charm - and as in the past, the army, public service, and police were the instruments used. This is a return to the failed colonial methodologies of our past, underpinned by enormous ignorance and misunderstanding, together with a “we know better than you” mind-set that ensures new failures.

Nothing epitomises this better than the enforced racially discriminatory policy of quarantining individually paid unemployment benefits to be controlled as they were in the past by white managers of the reserve system - of course this results in the trap of powerless "welfare dependency" (just as it was always designed to do).

The misunderstanding of the nature of the traditional communal system of native title is stark. Because of the nature of native title, individual payments made within a communal system of land tenure are a contradiction.

Instead, this thinking should be turned full circle from colonial times to today’s world. The community council should receive a proportion of each of these payments as income for the community as a whole to manage for the benefit of the community and its members. Unfortunately, the Howard government has taken a backward step here.  Because it rejects the policy of enabling self-government to be exercised by surviving indigenous communities living on their own traditional lands, it has chosen to repeat the past.

Of course, living together but separately, requires the observance of basic minimum standards set by the dominant community. Our system fails young Aboriginal and other children when it does not enforce: the Australia-wide minimum age for marriage; the crime of sexual abuse of children; the obligation to attend school; bans on alcohol, and other similar offences within any community subject to counter-pressures from older members as well as outsiders. The old policies arose from greed for the land, racial discrimination, ignorance, a mistaken Darwinism, and ‘born to rule’ and ‘might is right’ attitudes. What is the reason now?

Uranium

The Howard government policy towards the mining of all resources, particularly uranium, is that it is an urgent necessity to be brought about as quickly as possible while the demand lasts. So policy is being enacted to enable the decreased controls over environmental assessments of mining proposals.

A constant criticism by resource interests of Aboriginal land ownership is the restriction on resource companies towards access to native title lands and the requirement that they negotiate exploration rights and conditions for any proposed developments with native title owning communities – a lengthy process that is part of the gradual re-empowerment of indigenous peoples in Australia.

The take-over of Aboriginal lands in the Northern Territory by the Howard government supposedly remedies seriously dysfunctional criminal behaviour towards children within their communities. Yet there has been no employment of resident female workers who could share with female elders the need for through-the-night watches inside houses with children at risk; no building of compulsory over-night hostels for males seen at risk of causing harm. The methods adopted have been those of the colonial past, not today’s empowering Aboriginal communities who still own their traditional lands.

Why has this emergency action necessitated the apparently unrelated serious weakening of indigenous land ownership? The measures have included the potentially disastrous removal of permits for entry on to Aboriginal lands and the freezing of all land applications under the National Native Title Act, both extremely harmful for the self-preservation of the communities concerned.