Bills Digest no. 47 2015–16
PDF version [626KB]
WARNING: This Digest was prepared for debate. It reflects the legislation as introduced and does not canvass subsequent amendments. This Digest does not have any official legal status. Other sources should be consulted to determine the subsequent official status of the Bill.
Kirsty Magarey
Law and Bills Digest Section
12 November 2015
Contents
Purpose
of the Bill
Background
Committee consideration
Policy position of non-government parties/independents
Position of major interest groups
Financial implications
Key issues and provisions
Concluding comments
Date introduced: 24
June 2015
House: House of
Representatives
Portfolio: Indigenous
Affairs
Commencement: The
formal provisions commence on the day of Royal Assent, and the operative
provisions (Schedule 1) commence the day after.
Links: The links to the Bill,
its Explanatory Memorandum and second reading speech can be found on the
Bill’s home page, or through the Australian
Parliament website.
When Bills have been passed and have received Royal Assent, they
become Acts, which can be found at the ComLaw
website.
The purpose of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern
Territory) Amendment Bill 2015 (the Bill)[1]
is to amend the Aboriginal
Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (the ALR(NT)A or the
Act)[2]
to:
- extend
the powers of the Executive Director of Township Leasing to encompass subleases,
including to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations and to broaden
the Executive Director’s powers to deal with all Aboriginal land (rather than
being confined to township leasing)
- to
arrange for the Aboriginals Benefit Account to pay the costs associated with the
new leasing arrangements and
- to
incorporate two new parcels of land into the Act, thereby giving title to
Aboriginal Land Trusts.
The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act
1976 has been subject to numerous amendments since it passed the Parliament
with bipartisan support. The Act, as first passed by the Parliament, provides
for title to land to be granted to a Land Trust on behalf of the traditional
owners. Title is inalienable and equivalent to freehold title but is held
communally, reflecting the nature of Aboriginal land ownership. The Act also
provides for Land Councils who represent traditional owners and negotiate with
developers on their behalf and provides that royalty equivalents from mining on
Aboriginal land are paid into an Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA), which used
to have a statutory formula for distribution (but now is paid in part at the
discretion of the Minister).
This Bill’s proposed amendments build on and extrapolate
from amendments made in 2006 and 2007. The Bills Digests for those amendments give
a comprehensive background to the issues and can be found here:
The second reading speech for this Bill was given by Mr
Tudge, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, who emphasised that
the amendments in the Bill are specifically designed to address issues faced by
the community of Mutitjulu, where, according to the Parliamentary Secretary,
‘tenure arrangements ... are irregular, uncertain, and inconsistent with other
communities on Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory.’[5]
As a result ‘the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Senator the Hon. Nigel Scullion,
has been working in close cooperation with the Mutitjulu community, traditional
owners and the Central Land Council to negotiate a sublease which will provide
certainty of tenure in Mutitjulu.’[6]
While they may have been focussed on Mutitjulu, the amendments are framed so as
to affect all the various arrangements under the ALR(NT)A.
The historical background to this Bill is not fully
explored in this Digest. As the Bill largely consolidates or expands the 2006
and 2007 amendments, relevant background can be found in the Digests for those
Bills. Another useful and detailed account of the changes can be found in Associate
Professor Sean Brennan’s exploration: ‘Economic
development and Land Council power: modernising the Land Rights Act or same old
same old?’.[7]
That article reviews key changes from the central 2006 Amendment Act ‘against
the backdrop of the Land Rights Act’s chequered political history, in which
bipartisan endorsement and ideological antagonism have jostled for priority’.[8]
While the Bill’s amendments are effectively minor, the issues
involved are under ongoing consideration. Indigenous land administration and
use has been the subject of a review under the aegis of the Council of
Australian Governments (COAG), which in its communique of 17 April 2015 stated:
‘COAG agreed the report of the Investigation would be provided to the late 2015
meeting.’[9]
The Abbott Government also issued a white paper on developing Northern
Australia,[10]
which was received with some cautiously optimistic scepticism, mixed with some
hope for effective implementation.[11]
Public/Private ownership: but is
this an appropriate dichotomy?
Professor Brennan and others have pointed out that, while
the ALR(NT)A was passed with bipartisan support in 1976, there has been
an on-going tension around the communitarian aspects of the form of land
holding and the more standard forms of title. Nicole Watson,[12]
when looking at the three different amendents to land tenure arrangements since
2006, summarised some of the tensions by observing:
In the closing years of the Howard Government, conservative
politicians and aligned think tanks advocated for the growth of individual
property rights in Indigenous lands, on the basis that communal title impeded
economic development.[13]
Watson goes on to explore the dichotomy and argues that
the writings and thinkings of Hernando de Soto, upon which much of the economic
analysis advocating approaches based on an ‘indiividual title’ model relies,
cannot necessarily be applied to the relevant areas and conditions of land
under the ALR(NT)A. Professor Brennan’s article also questions the
applicability of Hernando de Soto’s analysis. He comments:
In July 2004, Noel Pearson and Lara Kostakidis-Lianos
discussed the applicability of the ideas of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto
to Aboriginal communities with communal landholdings in Australia. De Soto
argues that one important explanation for the poverty of millions in Latin
America and elsewhere is the weakness of economically important legal
institutions and processes - in particular, the absence of individual property
rights....
Pearson and Kostakidis-Lianos said that de Soto’s ideas
encourage a focus on the structural barriers to Indigenous participation in the
’real economy’ in Australia. For many Aboriginal people, they said, those
barriers include their presence on communally-owned inalienable title:
The majority of Indigenous assets
exist outside the Australian economy. They are, in de Soto’s words ’dead
capital’, because they cannot be leveraged to create capital.
Pearson and Kostakidis-Lianos advocated
moving Indigenous assets into the mainstream economy. On the other hand, they
cautioned against simply breaking up communal titles into individual ones.
Sites of cultural and environmental significance require protection and the
risk of ‘surrender of land on unjust terms’ must be avoided. The objective,
they said, is an ‘intelligent compromise’ that involves maximising the
fungibility of assets while minimising the risk to communal ownership and
values.[14]
Professor Brennan goes on to point to possible dangers
with applying de Soto’s analysis:
First, the case made by government about the link between private
leaseholdings, home ownership and improved economic outcomes for Aboriginal
people was largely rhetorical. The argument appealed to ’common sense’ and formal
equality – offering the same choice and opportunities as other Australians[15]
– rather than empirical evidence demonstrating an economic case.[16]
This concern has additional weight given the apparent shift within the World
Bank – formerly a strong proponent of individual titling as a path to
development in poor countries around the world – to a more sceptical view. In a
recent article, Penny Lee attributes to ’the World Bank‘s key policy advisor’ a
warning that in remote areas of low population replacing communal tenure with
individual titling may not be cost‑effective and that instead of
ideologically-driven solutions, policy-makers ‘should focus on ways to enhance
security and effectiveness of property rights under existing arrangements’.[17]
Another detailed account of the ‘three principal reforms’ concerning
land tenure between 2006 and 2008, (Township leases, five-year ‘intervention’
leases and 40-year Housing Leases) is offered by Kirsty Howey in ‘‘Normalising’
what? A qualitative analysis of Aboriginal land tenure reform in the Northern
Territory’.[18]
This account critiques the concept of ‘normalising’ aboriginal land tenure in
the Northern Territory as an expression of a post-colonial impulse which
constructs Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory as ‘morally
depraved, socially dysfunctional and anti-economic.’[19]
She argues that the relative success of the 40 year housing leases, as
contrasted with the township leases and the five-year intervention leases is
because ‘the first two reforms ... effectively involved the supplanting of
traditional Aboriginal control of communities with Commonwealth Government
control,’ while the 40-year housing leases ‘reflected the narrower focus of
normalisation discourse at this time on securing tenure for government assets in
communities and standardising services and infrastructure.’[20]
She also identifies de Soto as having been significant in the development of
thinking about land tenure reforms.
Another resource which offers a
contrasting analysis to Ms Howey’s analysis is Sara Hudson’s Centre for
Independent Studies paper, ‘Can 99-year Leases Lead to Homeownership for
Indigenous Communities’, which argues that the Rudd administration’s focus on
40 year Housing Leases was inappropriate.[21]
More recently Mick Gooda and Tim Wilson have cited de Soto
in their call to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to use
their land to participate in the formal economy:
In his seminal book, The Mystery of Capital, Hernando
de Soto described the challenge: “Capital, like energy, is also a dormant
value. Bringing it to life requires us to go beyond looking at our assets as
they are to thinking actively about them as they could be. It requires a
process for fixing an asset’s economic potential into a form that may be used
to initiate additional production”.[22]
They went on to point out that, as Noel Pearson had put
it:
The challenge is to convert title into a fungible asset that
can be used in economic transactions, without compromising its underlying
communal nature.[23]
Gooda and Wilson convened a meeting of indigenous leaders
in Broome in May 2015, which was widely reported,[24]
and approved by many, including The Australian, whose strongly worded
editorial lauded the event and argued that ‘[e]conomists generally agree about
the centrality of individual property rights in economic prosperity and
development.’[25]
The thinking from Gooda and Wilson’s meeting was also reflected in a subsequent
opening address to the National Native Title Conference.[26]
However Dr Leon Terrill, who is the Research Director of
the Indigenous Law Centre and has directed the Indigenous Land Reform Project
at UNSW argues that a dichotomous approach to these issues – which focusses on contrasting
‘commual ownership’ with ‘individual ownership’ and prioritising ‘private
property’ and ‘secure tenure’ is inappropriate in the context of the ALR(NT)A.[27]
In particular he argues that these concepts have been applied and used
incorrectly ‘with the result that there is a great deal of confusion about what
the reforms actually do and what they mean for the affected communities.’[28]
The Indigenous Land Reform
Project has a useful timeline regarding land tenure reforms in Indigenous
communities across Australia and offers a variety of resources.[29]
Aboriginals Benefit Account
The history of the management of the Aboriginals Benefit
Account has been somewhat troubled. The Account was initially established as a
holding mechanism for profits raised from land held under the ALR(NT)A. The
Reeves Review[30]
suggested that there were problems with this arrangement and legislative
amendments were made which transferred the powers of management away from
indigenous people to the Minister. The Digest for the 2006 amendments details
this history and since those amendments there has been ongoing criticism of the
arrangements.[31]
The 2007 Bills Digest (for the Bill that introduced the Executive Director of
Township Leasing) summarised some of the concerns as follows:
The use of the ABA to fund the administrative costs of the
headlease entity was widely criticised in the debate surrounding the 2006
amendments to [the Act], with opponents stating that by using the ABA to fund
such entities, traditional landowners are being asked to pay for the
administration of renting their own land.[32]
More recently Nicholas Rothwell has commented in the
context of an article examining the lack of consultation mechanisms for
Aborigines:
Projects funded by the NT Aboriginal Benefits Account, a
half-billion-dollar royalty trust, were chosen for decades by an indigenous
board, but changes to the Land Rights Act in 2007 quietly augmented the federal
minister’s control.
The consequences have swiftly become evident: the ABA’s
financial resources are now being used as a handy source of extra commonwealth
program funds. ABA revenues, which are royalties paid to traditional owners as
recompense for mining, are now even being earmarked as the source of long-term
loans to Aboriginal communities that agree to give the commonwealth 99-year
township leases over their land.[33]
An earlier piece in The Australian looking at the
uses to which the ABA should be put commented:
Accusations that the ABA has been used to
fund discretionary or short-term items date back at least to 2007, when then
Coalition indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough defended a $20m drawdown for
Aboriginal housing.[34]
and went on to comment:
... Last financial year, Ms Macklin
drew $9.5m from the ABA to pay for township leases in two NT communities, while
the account provided $4.75m to the Office of Township Leasing, which included
running costs.[35]
The article also commented there had been
issues identified in the Office of Evaluation and Audit’s 2008 audit which had
reportedly been ‘critical of the transparency, accountability and operation of
the ABA’. Finally it reported:
Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal Social Justice
Commissioner, criticised Ms Macklin's use of the ABA to pay for township leases
earlier this year. He said it was "outrageous" the government
negotiated just compensation and then paid for it with "Aboriginal
money".[36]
The National Indigenous Times’
Chris Graham was that much more robust in his commentary. After saying:
On a national scale, the conservative
response to dysfunction in Aboriginal communities has not been to match funding with need, but to introduce assimilationist policies aimed at making Aboriginal
people, particularly in remote communities ‘just like everyone else’.[37]
He went on to say that the Aboriginals
Benefit Account is:
... money earned by Aboriginal people, but the
government doesn’t trust them to spend it, so it keeps control of the fund
through an appointed panel.
...
Late last year, the government introduced amendments to the NT Land Rights Act
under the guise of helping Aboriginal people to realise an economic benefit
from their ownership of land.
But when Aboriginal people do derive an
income - mining royalties - the government pinches the cash to fund public infrastructure
that all other Australians expect in return for paying tax.[38]
Adding parcels of land to Schedule
1 of the ALR(NT)A
The two parcels of land to be handed back by being
included in Schedule 1 of the ALR(NT)A seem unlikely to provoke
controversy, although the Northern Land Council indicates it would have been
unhappy if the return of Wickham River had been made contingent on entering
into a lease arrangement. In a series of articles under the banner ‘Yarralin—Justice
after 40 years’ the Land Rights News—Northern Edition provided
background to the Wickham River handback.[39]
These include an article, ‘They never gave up the fight,’ which comments that
when the land is returned the Federal government ‘will have turned the last
page of a long history of sorrow and disappointment’ which included a walk off
by workers and their families from the Victoria River Downs station in 1972,[40]
and a story about Minister Scullion’s desire to enter into a 99-year township
lease for this area, a move which is described by the Land Rights News
as ‘a give-with-one-hand and take-with-the-other scenario: the Commonwealth has
agreed to hand back the land at Yarralin (and land beyond the community itself)
as Aboriginal freehold title, but wants to secure a township lease under
section 19A of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act.’[41]
Selection of Bills Committee and
the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills
The Selection of Bills Committee resolved not to refer the
Bill for committee consideration,[42]
and the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills had no comment on
the Bill.[43]
As required under Part 3 of the Human
Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011 (Cth), the Government has assessed
the Bill’s compatibility with the human rights and freedoms recognised or
declared in the international instruments listed in section 3 of that Act. The
Government considers that the Bill is compatible.[44]
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights had no
comment to make on the Bill since it ‘promote[d] human rights or contain[ed]
justifiable limitations on human rights.’[45]
The passage of the 2006 Amendment Bill was hotly contested
and opposed by ‘all non-government parties other than Family First’.[46]
However, the current Bill has not excited much public interest or commentary. Leasing
arrangements are already in place, and while the Rudd/Gillard government
focussed on 40 year leases of housing properties, rather than the broader and
longer leases envisaged by the 2006 amendments those amendments were not seen
as sufficiently pernicious as to need further amendment. Non-Government members
have not commented on this Bill.
Reactions to the Bill have been quite muted, possibly
because the amendments are quite targeted in their effect. Nevertheless the various
analysts and commentaries documented in the background section demonstrate that
there is some feeling against the on-going development of provisions some
people regard as inappropriate.
The Explanatory Memorandum says that ‘[t]he measures in
the Bill have nil or negligible financial impact.’[47]
The Bill is likely to have some financial implications for the Aboriginals
Benefit Account, but these are not explored in the Explanatory Memorandum.
Amendments to Part IIA
Division 2—Functions of the
Executive Director
Items 1 to 6 of the Schedule to the Bill operate to
adjust or enhance Division 2 of Part IIA of the Act, which sets out the powers
of Executive Director of Township Leasing. Under the 2007 amendments the
Executive Director was established to enable the Commonwealth to arrange
township leasing of Aboriginal land.
These amendments seek to ensure that leases and subleases
that the Executive Director can manage are more generally available over
aboriginal land and that these powers are not confined to ‘community living
areas, town camps and prescribed lands’ as the legislation was originally
framed. Items 3 and 4 make this clear, both by adjusting the title of section
20CA, and by adding a reference to a generically framed lease of ‘Aboriginal
land’ and the Executive Director’s capacity to offer a sublease of this lease. Item
2 has also been framed to ensure the Executive Director has the power to
administer subleases acquired by the Commonwealth and then leased on or re-acquired
from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation, which is what new
section 20CB would allow (item 6).
Another clarification that is made to the ‘Functions of
the Executive Director’ by the Bill is that, ‘to avoid doubt’ the relevant
‘proprietor’ of Aboriginal land may be the Director of National Parks (item
5).
Division 6—Effect on other laws in
relation to certain leases or subleases entered into by Executive Director
Items 7 to 17 of the Schedule deal with the
‘Effects on other laws in relation to leases or subleases held by the Executive
Director.’ In essence there are a series of amendments ensuring that dealings
by the Commonwealth do not come within the purview of the Land Acquisition
Act 1989 (items 7-10) or Northern Territory taxes (stamp duty or
similar, item 13). It brings such transfers within the Northern
Territory’s processes of registration (item 14) but exempts them
from the Northern Territory’s procedures regarding subdivision (item 15).
Various minor technical adjustments are made to section titles to reflect the
changes made to the content of those sections.
Amendments to Part VI—Aboriginals
Benefit Account
Item 18 is potentially one of the more
controversial provisions, dealing, as it does, with Part VI of the Act – the
Aboriginals Benefit Account. Section 64 of the Act sets out a framework for
‘Debits from the Account’ which makes some provisions for payments to Land
Councils, to Land Councils in areas where the relevant mining interests are
occurring, to ‘Aboriginals living in the Northern Territory’ and to cover
various costs associated with the new leasing arrangements (subsection 64(4A)).
Item 18 inserts into subsection 64(4A) four new paragraphs which extend
the current coverage of costs for leasing arrangements to provide that the costs
of acquiring and administering a sublease by an Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander corporation can also be paid out of the Aboriginals Benefit Account,
as can the costs of the Executive Director in re-acquiring or administering the
lease.
Amendments to Schedule 1
Items 19 and 20 add two parcels of land (identfied
as ‘Simpson Desert’ and ‘Wickham River’ respectively) to Schedule 1 of the ALR(NT)A,
which, through the operation of sections 4, 10 and 12 of the Act, gives title
to these lands to Aboriginal Land Trusts.
The changes being made by the Bill simply enhance or
clarify changes which have been made in earlier legislation, nevertheless they
represent a policy approach which has been the subject of critiques by
academics and activists alike. The responses to this Bill have been minimal and
this may well be because the Bill will particularly affect one specific
community, the Mutitjulu community and has been devised with the assistance of
the Central Land Council. The return of the two parcels of land will be
welcomed by the relevant Indigenous communities.
Members, Senators and Parliamentary staff can obtain
further information from the Parliamentary Library on (02) 6277 2500.
[1]. Parliament of Australia, ‘Aboriginal
Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Bill 2015 homepage’,
Australian Parliament website, accessed 18 August 2015.
[2]. Aboriginal Land Rights
(Northern Territory) Act 1976, accessed 1 November 2015.
[3]. J Norberry and J Gardiner-Garden, Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment
Bill 2006, Bills digest, 158,
2005–06, Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 19 June 2006, accessed
18 August 2015.
[4]. B Jaggers, Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment
(Township Leasing) Bill 2007,
Bills digest, 165, 2006–07, accessed
18 August 2015.
[5]. A Tudge, ‘Second reading speech: Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory)
Amendment Bill 2015’, House of Representatives, Debates,
24 June 2015, p. 7382, accessed 25 August 2015.
[6]. Ibid.
[7]. S
Brennan, ‘Economic
development and Land Council power: modernising the Rights Act or same old same
old?’, Australian Indigenous Law Reporter, 10(4), 2006, p. 1,
accessed 20 August 2015.
[8]. Ibid.,
p. 1.
[9]. See
generally Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), ‘COAG investigation into Indigenous land administration and use’, PM&C website,
accessed 11 November 2015. See also Council of Australian Governments (COAG),
Communique,
COAG Meeting, Canberra, 17 April 2015, accessed 10
August 2015.
[10]. Australian
Government, Our
north, our future: white paper on developing Northern Australia, Canberra,
18 June 2015, accessed 20 August 2015.
[11]. B Gosford, ‘Abbott’s white paper for the black tropics: boon or boondoggle?’, Crikey Insider, (online edition), 19 June 2015, accessed
29 August 2015 and A Campbell, ‘Is the white paper a game-changer for northern Australia?’, The Conversation, (online edition),
19 June 2015, accessed 29 August 2015.
[12]. Nicole Watson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Jumbunna House
of Learning, University of Technology, Sydney.
[13]. N Watson, ‘Raiders of
the lost capital’, paper presented at the 4th annual conference of the
Human Development and Capabilities Association, 18–20 September 2007,
New York, USA; and also in Ngiya: Talk the Law, 2, 2008, p. 49, accessed
21 August 2015.
[14]. S Brennan, op. cit., p. 13, citing N Pearson and L
Kostakidis-Lianos, ‘Building
indigenous capital: removing obstacles to participation in the real economy’,
Australian Prospect, Easter 2004, accessed 10 November 2015.
[15]. S Brennan citing R Kemp (Minister for the Arts and Sport), ‘In committee: Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment
Bill 2006’, Senate, Debates, 16 August 2006,
p. 20, accessed 12 November 2015.
[16]. S Brennan citing the call for 'evidence-based' approaches in J Altman, C
Linkhorn and J Clarke, Land rights and development reform in remote Australia, Oxfam Australia, Fitzroy, Victoria, 2005. Brennan
states: ‘The NT Government, which appears to have instigated the idea, has
admitted that no economic assessment was done to assess whether the changed
tenure arrangements would improve economic development in NT Aboriginal
communities’; see also D Bree (Deputy Chief Executive, Department of Business, Economic
and Regional Development, Northern Territory), Evidence to Senate Community Affairs
Legislation Committee, Inquiry into the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern
Territory) Amendment Bill 2006, 21 July 2006, accessed 11 November 2015.
[17]. S Brennan, ‘Economic
development and Land Council power: modernising the Rights Act or same old same
old?’ op. cit., p. 15, citing K Deininger and H
Binswanger, ‘The evolution of the World Bank’s land policy’, World Bank Research Observer, (14)2, August 1999, pp.
247–76, in A de Janvry, G Gordillo, J-P Platteau and E Sadoulet (eds), Access
to land, rural poverty and public action, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2001, pp. 418–19.
See also P Lee ‘Individual titling of Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory:
what Australia can learn from the international community’, University of New South Wales Law Journal, 29(2),
2006, pp. 22–36, and J Fingleton (ed) Privatising land in the Pacific: a defence of customary tenures, discussion paper, 80, Australia Institute, Canberra, 2005, all
accessed 11 November 2015.
[18]. K Howey, ‘‘Normalising’
what? A qualitative analysis of Aboriginal land tenure reform in the Northern
Territory’, Australian Indigenous Law Review, 18(1), 2014–2015, pp.
4–23, accessed 11 November 2015. Ms Howey is a Lawyer at the Northern Land
Council, Darwin.
[19]. Ibid., p. 19.
[20]. Ibid.
[21]. S Hudson, From rhetoric to reality: can 99-year leases lead to homeownership
for Indigenous communities?, policy monograph,
92, Centre for Independent Studies, St Leonards, NSW, 2009, accessed 29 August
2015.
[22]. M Gooda and T Wilson, ‘Property
rights will aid Indigenous Australians to participate in the economy and
community’, The Weekend Australian, 23 May 2015, p. 24, accessed 20
August 2015. Mick Gooda is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social
Justice Commissioner and Tim Wilson is the Human Rights Commissioner. Both are
members of the Australian Human Rights Commission.
[23]. Ibid.
[24]. N Robinson,
‘Leaders
unite to finish the land rights battle’, The Australian, 20 May
2015, p. 1, accessed 29 August 2015.
[25]. The Australian, ‘How
to turn indigenous land rights into prosperity: Broome event a welcome focus on
practical property issues’, editorial, 21 May 2015, p. 13, accessed 15
August 2015.
[26]. M McKenna, ‘Plea
to drive indigenous business’, The Australian, 17 June 2016, p. 8,
accessed 20 August 2015.
[27]. L Terrill, ‘The language we use to debate Aboriginal land reform in Australia’, Australian Indigenous Law Review, 18(1), 2014–2015, p. 24,
accessed 29 August 2015.
[28]. Ibid.
[29]. L Terrill, ‘Indigenous Land Reform Project’,
University of New South Wales website, 5 August 2015, accessed 11 November
2015.
[30]. J Reeves, Building
on Land Rights for the Next Generation. The Review of the Aboriginal Land
Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Report,
1998.
[31]. J Norberry and J Gardiner-Garden, Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment
Bill 2006, Bills digest, op.
cit..
[32]. B Jaggers, Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment
(Township Leasing) Bill 2007,
Bills digest, op. cit., p. 7.
[33]. N Rothwell, ‘A decade after ATSIC was axed, Aborigines still have little say’, Weekend Australian, 27 September, 2014, p. 21, accessed 29 August 2015.
[34]. P Cleary, ‘Macklin taps Aboriginal fund’, The Australian,
10 January 2012, p. 1, accessed 29 August 2015.
[35]. Ibid.
[36]. Ibid.
[37]. C Graham, ‘Black buckets: keeping up appearances’, National
Indigenous Times, v.5(103), 20 April 2006, p. 5, accessed 11 November 2015.
[38]. Ibid., p. 6. The Australian has taken an
ongoing interest in the Aboriginals Benefit Account, even reporting in its
‘Strewth’ column at one stage that ‘A new art centre was opened ..., the funds
for which came from the Aboriginal Benefits Account [sic], a stream of mining
royalty payments; in other words, Aboriginal money paid for the project. The
commemorative plaque fleetingly mentions the ABA, but goes on mysteriously to declare:
"Proudly Funded by Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and
Indigenous Affairs."... J Jeffrey, ‘Strewth: Er, whose money?’ Weekend
Australian, 17 March 2012, p. 22, accessed 20 August 2015.
[39]. Land Rights News—Northern Edition, 3,
July 2015, accessed 20 August 2015.
[40]. ‘They never gave up the fight,’ Land Rights News—Northern
Edition, op. cit., p. 3. There is also an article
by Dr Philip Nitschke who worked in the area in the early 1970’s, ‘What I saw
at Wattie Creek’, Land Rights News—Northern Edition, op. cit., p. 5.
[41]. ‘Government wants a lease’, Land Rights News, op.
cit., p. 2.
[42]. Selection of Bills Committee, Report, 9, 2015, The Senate, Canberra, 13 August 2015, accessed 11
November 2015.
[43]. Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny
of Bills, Alert digest, 7, The Senate, Canberra, 12 August 2015, p. 1, accessed 29 August 2015.
[44]. The
Statement of Compatibility with Human Rights can be found at pages 8–9 of the Explanatory
Memorandum to the Bill.
[45]. Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, Twenty-fifth report of the 44th Parliament, The Senate, Canberra, 11 August 2015, p. 2, accessed 25 August 2015.
[46]. S Brennan, ‘Economic
development and Land Council power: modernising the Rights Act or same old same
old?’, op. cit., p. 1.
[47]. Explanatory Memorandum, Aboriginal Land Rights
(Northern Territory) Amendment Bill 2015, p. ii.
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