The great federal land grab

When it comes to governments depriving NT traditional landowners of rights which the rest of us take for granted, there have been two other worrying recent trends.

One was associated with amendment of the Commonwealth’s Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act last year to allow voluntary head-leases of settlements on Aboriginal land to government authorities.

There’s nothing wrong with this idea - except that the Commonwealth raided the Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA) to pay for it. This account - created to offset the effects of comparatively large mining projects on Aboriginal people after Aboriginal reserves were opened to mining in the 1950s - receives “mining royalty equivalent monies” which are then paid to traditional owners or used to run land councils on their behalf. So raiding the ABA to pay rent on settlement leases meant that the landlords, not the tenants, were paying the rent - not something you’d expect when there’s so much talk about bringing these “communities” into the “real economy”.

There is a risk that the Commonwealth will be tempted to resort to this source of funds again, to pay the compensation for, or the rent on, its compulsory “Emergency” five-year leases. While such anomalous arrangements might be defensible in the context of voluntary arrangements, they cannot be defended where forced on traditional owners. It might be argued that “mining royalty equivalent monies” are themselves anomalous, because other Australians do not receive them. But similarly large mining projects are not normally visited on other Australians for simple political reasons. It’s not like there are no mineral deposits under Australian cities. If the ABA is to be sequestered, it should be for genuinely beneficial purposes - not just so that money can be moved around in Indigenous affairs.

Finally, on the day that Mr Howard and Mr Brough announced their NT “Emergency Plan”, the High Court decided to grant special leave to appeal in a case which illustrates well how some people’s property is more equal than others’. That case concerns native title rather than the special freehold available under the Land Rights Act, although the appellants in the case hold both. They come from Timber Creek, where they have voluntarily leased their land rights land to a non-Aboriginal neighbour. But when their native title claim to other land in which the neighbour was also interested appeared likely to succeed, the NT government decided that voluntary arrangements weren’t good enough any more, and set out to acquire the land compulsorily in order to re-grant it to the neighbour.

Although it is not well-known, the advent of native title transformed compulsory acquisition laws across Australia. Once, these laws were vehicles to facilitate road-building and other government works - some were even called Public Works Acts. But post-Mabo, most allow not only the nightmare depicted in the movie The Castle - acquisition of private land so that a private operator can deliver a public service - but also acquisition of private land so that it can be granted to another private holder for private purposes.

Native title is commonly acquired in this way, but nobody seems to have told non-Aboriginal Australians that our property has become similarly vulnerable, at least legally. Perhaps we don’t need to know. Even when the same laws apply to remote Aborigines as to those of us who live in “Infront” Australia, they can’t possibly make the same demands on us. There are many other important rights besides property at stake in the NT right now, but other Australians simply would not tolerate the routine sacrifices of property rights required of Aborigines, even where (unlike in the Timber Creek case) those sacrifices benefit the wider “community”.