ABSTRACT
In the last decade, a lot has been said about land reform and its potential to help or harm Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. It has often been argued that communal ownership of land and businesses has prevented economic development. Together with communal ownership of housing, it has been said, this has compounded the problem of welfare dependence in Indigenous communities. Often these statements have been made as if they were self-evident. But are they? Is it true that communal ownership is an impediment to economic development? More fundamentally, what do we mean when we describe something as communal ownership? It turns out that this is not a straightforward question. It is clear that communal ownership – or more correctly, communal property – involves ownership by a group of people. But then so does ownership by a corporation, and corporate ownership is not seen an impediment to economic development. To the contrary, corporations are key enablers of growth and prosperity. So how is it that one form of collective ownership is seen as essential to economic development and another as inimical to it? Relatedly, it has been popular to characterise communal ownership of Indigenous land as a ‘socialist experiment’ and compare it to the failure of communism. But is communal property really the same thing as, or similar to, communism? Then there is the concept of a commons. Many of us are familiar with the saying ‘tragedy of the commons’, a term made famous by Garrett Hardin. Where does this concept fit in? It might at first seem reasonable to associate a commons tragedy with communal property, but it turns out that this also is more involved. Yet another term that has appeared frequently in Australian Government publications is ‘secure tenure’. Chapter 5 describes how for several years this came to be presented as a key aim of land reform, to some extent displacing the earlier aims of enabling individual ownership or private property. But what exactly is secure tenure? And how is it related to private property?
