ABSTRACT

This book describes how the Australian Government’s enactment of the iconic Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cth) (ALRA) reflected a shift in the political consensus of the time. Just a few years earlier the conservative Liberal-Country Party Coalition had opposed the introduction of land rights, and while there remained some resistance on the conservative side of politics, there was also a sufficiently broad middle ground for the ALRA to pass through parliament with bipartisan support. This did not mean that the issue of land rights was thereafter uncontested. Debate was ongoing, particularly with respect to the proper ambit of land rights, and the extent to which the rights of Indigenous landowners should prevail over the rights of others. Since 2004 something altogether different has occurred. There has been another shift in the political consensus with respect to Indigenous land, this time led by the Coalition parties. The new consensus takes the form of frequent statements about how existing forms of Indigenous land ownership are holding people back and need to be reformed. This chapter describes the debate out of which the new consensus emerged. It is argued here that that debate has been conducted using vague and ill-defined terminology that is poorly suited to a discussion of the tenure circumstances of communities on Indigenous land. This impacted in several ways. To a considerable degree, it led to the wrong issues being contested. Frequently, debate about communal and individual ownership has been used as a proxy for debate about the role of Indigenous culture and the direction of Indigenous policy. It has also resulted in pertinent issues – such as home ownership and economic development – being debated poorly, and in a manner that was far more divisive and less instructive than was necessary or helpful. Unsurprisingly, this has had a negative impact on understandings and has contributed to the at times considerable level of confusion that has been demonstrated during implementation of the recent reforms, as described in later chapters. It has also had a broader impact. This chapter describes how debate about land reform has contributed to confusion

about the nature of the issues affecting Indigenous communities and the direction of new policies. The debate has perpetuated an unhelpful dichotomy between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ culture in a manner that misrepresents day-to-day life in Indigenous communities. It has also enabled recent shifts in the direction of Indigenous policy to be portrayed as a shift towards greater ‘individualism’, when they are more accurately characterised as a deepening of the role of governments in the lives of Indigenous community residents. It is significant how and by whom the debate has been conducted. The debate was not initiated by residents of communities on Indigenous land or by the Indigenous landowners for those communities. Nor did it emerge out of a long history of academic research. While there were several Indigenous spokespeople on both sides of the debate, it was primarily conducted at a national level in mainstream forums. It also came to be embraced by a Coalition Government that had for some time been expressing a desire to find new ways of approaching Indigenous policy. Enabling a shift from ‘communal ownership’ to ‘individual ownership’ of land came to be presented as a core component of its new approach. The chapter broadly divides its description of the debate into three parts. Section 5.2 considers the main period of debate – between 2004 and 2007 – as well as the way in which debate emerged. Section 5.3 describes how a new or ancillary narrative, based on a different set of terminology, was used in the period between 2007 and 2013. Section 5.4 sets out more recent developments. The chapter concludes in Section 5.5 with a brief comment on the nature of the new political consensus.