ABSTRACT
Federal-state relations are the ants at the picnic of Australian public life, getting into things and spoiling perfect plans; but then the whole point of federalism is to place limits on power. In the formative years of the Native Title Act, state governments had little direct involvement in the process of resolving objections to exploration tenements. Initial state government responses to the question of how to evaluate claims tended to be fairly imprecise and generic. The assessment of connection reports by state administrations created a new set of complexities, calling for the involvement and retention of lawyers, historians and anthropologists and the development of additional procedures and protocols. That state governments rarely entertained an all-inclusive agreement approach to dealing with native title was often seen, either implicitly or explicitly as a failing of policy. Mapping and explaining the broad convergence of the state politics of native title is not to argue that there haven't been important differences at work.
