Land rights now! By a strange quirk of fate, I was working in the Minister’s Office in 1976 when Parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act. Great was our pride, and our expectations. In terms of securing title to land and sea the Act has been highly effective. But in terms of creating assets for wealth generation, and lifting household incomes, and providing the means for people to participate in the economic activity of the Country, not so much.

In the interests of brevity and readability this paper will not exhaustively quote statistics and sources. Interested readers can seek them out if needed. The observations are about the Northern Territory, but many issues spill over into the States.

The structural factors pushing against closing the gap

Theft of a continent

Captain Cook disobeyed Kings Orders. He did not reach accommodation with the original inhabitants. And it suited the powers in London to gloss over that failure and proceed to plant the flag anyway.

The absurdity of that action was amplified by Burnum Burnum when he rowed ashore at Dover in the 1970’s, planted a flag and claimed England for the Aboriginal people.

In other parts of the world England concluded Treaties with the original inhabitants (Canada, America, New Zealand) but not here.

Here, the conquest was brutal. The advancing frontier was brutal. This was whitewashed from history, which of course was written by the conquerors.

In recent times corrections have begun to emerge. Like Prime Minister Keating’s Redfern Speech, like Robyn Smith’s book Licence to Kill – Massacre Men of Australia’s North (and now many other works).

One high profile politician saw that history this way:

“On 12 March 1913 the site of Canberra was dedicated as the future national capital: ironically our only capital city with a First Nations name. William Morris Hughes – ‘Billy’ Hughes – then Labor Attorney-General, later Prime Minister and a Labor deserter, spoke at the event.

His words were deeply shocking:

“Here we have a symbol of nationality… the first historic event in the history of the Commonwealth we are engaged in today without the slightest trace of that race we have banished from the earth”. Thank you, Barry Jones.

The truth was never whitewashed from Aboriginal minds. In the absence of written languages their oral history skills are superb. This terrible history is vividly etched in their minds. Invasion Day. Frontier massacres, Stolen generations . .

Aboriginal resentments run so deep that in some circles welfare payments, and mining royalties, are seen as reparations for the theft of the continent. The lyrics of Midnight Oils’ song ‘**_The Beds are Burning’_** include this stanza:

The time has come to say fair’s fair To pay the rent, to pay our share The time has come, a fact’s a fact It belongs to them, let’s give it back

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy has now stood in the Parliamentary Triangle in Canberra for over 50 years now. Write them off as unrealistic radicals in search of a cause if that salves your conscience. But you must concede some are fiercely determined to correct what they see are a terrible injustice.

King Charles heckled by Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe at Australia’s Parliament House

The King’s recent visit to Australia attracted the above world-wide media headline.

Lidia Thorpe, an independent senator from Victoria, approached the stage yelling “this is not your country”.

“You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” shouted Thorpe, who is a fiercely outspoken advocate for Indigenous rights.

“You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country. You are a genocidalist.”

As security officers escorted her to the doors, she shouted: “This is not your land. You are not my king. You are not our king.”

Ms Thorpe has been roundly condemned by some but regarded as a hero by others. She has hit two raw nerves:

• she has played right into rapidly developing revisionist thinking around the world about England’s role over the centuries in colonisation, subjugation of peoples, and slavery
• she represents Aboriginal people who oppose the ‘Voice’ on the ground that it cedes Sovereignty and continue to call for a ‘treaty’ (like in the other countries previously mentioned).

A collective guilt?

By the middle of last century, as the body of knowledge of the atrocities committed by our ancestors (certainly by the early settlers) began to build, so did the subliminal guilt about the past.

Various efforts to redeem, correct, to compensate, to atone for this shameful past, began to take shape.

The most significant of these efforts was the Referendum to amend the Constitution to remove the limitation on the Commonwealth’s power to legislate on behalf of Aboriginal people (and to count Aboriginal people in the census). Such was the goodwill in 1967, 91% of the population voted YES.

By 2023 that goodwill had drifted away to such an extent that another Referendum to recognize the obvious fact of the prior occupation of the Continent of Australia by Indigenous peoples, and to create a body to provide an Indigenous ADVISORY voice to Parliament, failed. In 2023 only 40% of the population voted YES.

The glaringly obvious reasons for this reversal are that this time bipartisan support was absent, and the misuse of social media (adversarial politics).

I will try to assess the other reasons for this reversal.

The inadvertent effect of well-intentioned policies.

The Commonwealth Government was very active in exercising that new power after 1967. It created new bodies such as the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Aboriginal Loans Commission, Aboriginal Land Fund Commission, Aboriginal Development Commission, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (over 50% of the Northern Territory land mass, and over 85% of the coastline is now in Aboriginal hands).

Massive increases in grant funding have been made available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations, and to State and Commonwealth Government agencies.

A massive increase in the payments of mutual obligation free money to individuals in remote communities has had a dramatic effect. Unemployment benefits replaced Training Allowances which obligated every able-bodied person to participate in useful community activity, supporting mothers’ benefits, family allowances, mining royalties combined to eliminate the necessity to work. Free money. The poison of welfare.

Children, who had never seen a parent working, saw no need to go to school in order to get a decent job.

The Land Rights Act acting in a way to block business migration and the creation of jobs, mining royalties and generous welfare entitlements acting in a way to disincentivize employment, results in idleness and a loss of self-esteem. Social problems follow.

These social problems are now manifest in the Northern Territory, and the wider population is fed up with the crime levels.

Sadly, the jails and hospitals are full, and the schools are empty.

Resentments build, and we have already seen the ugly re-emergence of vigilante-type responses to repeated crime.

Please explain

Year after year enormous bureaucratic and Parliamentary effort goes into the Closing the Gap Report. It is a valuable effort insomuch as it keeps everyone on their toes, but not so much about good news. It is invariably now a dismal Report that confirms each year that policies are failing.

I believe the reasons for this policy failure can be distilled down to a few simple issues:

• The adversarial nature of our politics which has seen every good approach pulled down each time there is a change of government.
• For example, the perennial debate about s_elf-determination_ and s_elf-management_
• A welfare smorgasbord that disincentivises employment in favour of intergenerational welfare dependency
• The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act which has allowed mining royalties to be paid to individuals, and inadvertently discouraged business migration and the creation of jobs.

I will deal with these key policies next, but I first want to focus people now by saying that I doubt very much whether we will ever find a government brave enough to take stern corrective measures. Brave enough to stare down privacy matters, anti-discrimination law, lies, and distortions of the social media. Even if they were brave enough to introduce legislation, it would have an uncertain future in the Senate where the government of the day is unlikely to hold a majority.

We now turn to policy failures.

Adversarial politics

Dispute these views if you will – write a piece yourself.

For me, the contest of big ideas in the 1960’s and 70’s centred on p_aternalism and land rights._

The cancer of welfare

The new government elected in late 1972 committed to replacing paternalism with self-determination, and to enact land rights legislation. Another change of government in 1975 changed that to self-management (I challenge anybody to spot the difference).

We must get rid of paternalism, they said. So around 1974 the scheme of training allowances (mentioned earlier) was abolished. This scheme had been operating for years and by then ‘employed’ every able-bodied person on community benefit works – the essential services like garbage collection, internal road maintenance, grass cutting. All such activity stopped.

Because such people had previously been ‘employed’ they were not eligible for unemployment benefits. They were now eligible, and the money flowed to individuals. The town councils were astonished.

The ways of the white men were strange indeed. They prefer to pay people to ‘sit down’ rather than work. The term ‘sit down money’ was coined.

Councils implored the Government to aggregate the total of unemployment benefits by council area and instead pay a lump sum to the Council so that they could again allocate essential tasks to people and pay them accordingly. This was the origin of the Community Development Employment Scheme (CDEP).

This scheme has been cut and diced so many times since by every incoming government that it lost its effectiveness and Welfare Benefits reign.

The clash of policies is breathtaking. Governments profess to want to move people out of intergenerational welfare dependency into jobs but the unemployment benefit that is greater than the wages at the entry point for most jobs. People are not silly. Then we face constant lobby to increase the rate of welfare benefits because people cannot survive with dignity in the big cities.

The effect in the bush would be to make the employment option even less attractive. The cost structures in Melbourne (e.g., rent) are quite different to Maningrida. Australia is a huge and very diverse country. ‘One size fit all’ policies throw up anomalies.

Land rights now!

I can still see the placards in noisy street demonstrations. And by a strange quirk of fate, I was working in the Minister’s Office in 1976 when Parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act.

Great was our pride, and our expectations.

In terms of securing title to land and sea the Act has been highly effective.

But in terms of creating assets for wealth generation, and lifting household incomes, and providing the means for people to participate in the economic activity of the Country, not so much.

Land rights in Australia was being crafted soon after the North American experience. Already significant tracts of land had been lost to crafty mortgagors. So, our government settled on a form of title called Inalienable Freehold Communal Title (forget the inherent contradiction). This meant the land could not be sold or mortgaged. In other words, it was secure/safe for future generations.

It also means that while it remains technically possible to negotiate a path to a lease over land, it is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. Most proponents give up. This was the reason a former government tried to achieve township leases. This initiative was defeated by land councils who characterised the move as a ‘land grab’ by untrustworthy governments trying to reverse land rights.

The result is business migration has been effectively stifled (there is the odd exception), with the loss of potential jobs and wealth creation. Before ‘welfare’ there were many small-scale economic enterprises like chooks, cattle, goats, orchards, gardens, fishing. Now the towns are begging for mechanical workshops, windscreen replacement centres, hairdressing salons for the teenagers etc.

We know that the parts of the Northern Territory that became Aboriginal land, and the vacant Crown Land available for claim, were the unattractive lands that had not already been taken up by others.

The availability of welfare benefits, land rights, and a supportive government led to a surge in the movement away from larger townships to Homelands. While this achieved a reduction in social tensions, and a beneficial return to natural traditional foods, it also took kids away from schools and adults away from jobs, health clinics and the like. An expectation grew that all the services found in the main townships would be replicated in each outstation. Obviously, that will not happen. Nor will Papunya ever have the same level of services as Perth, nor Maningrida be the same as Melbourne.

Close the gap? (while encouraging welfare dependency)

I came to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1973 with optimism, but that has waned by 2025. While there are rays of hope, they are too few and far between.

Let me summarise the reasons for my pessimism:

• Our job creation schemes have been butchered.
• Our generous welfare net means people would LOSE money to take up work.
• The payment of mining royalties to individuals further reduces the need to work.
• Consequently, Aboriginal people do not view welfare dependency with any negativity, but the government’s preferred approach. Many also see it as reparation.
• Children follow the example of parents and abandon school.
• The Land Rights Act has unintentionally stifled business migration
• The Homelands movement has taken people away from schools and jobs.
• The jobs in nearby mines are taken by FIFO workers.
• Most of the jobs in communities are filled by non-Aboriginal people from elsewhere.
• Idleness leads to drug taking.
• Increasing numbers of children are born with foetal alcohol syndrome, and
• Most of our social indicators like incarceration rates, domestic violence, Aboriginal on Aboriginal homicide, child neglect, school absenteeism are off the scale.

The wider population is fed up with what they see on the streets, the break and enter rates of businesses and homes, the likelihood of courts giving repeat offenders bail and returning them to the streets, and the inability of Governments to deal with crime.

I think these were the reasons for the loss of goodwill between the Referenda in 1967 and 2023 which resulted in the rejection of acknowledging in the Constitution the obvious fact that Aboriginal people were here first and giving them a Voice to Parliament (their previous voice, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, was dismantled by government in 2005).

So, I cannot see any likelihood of closing the gap on current policy settings. Nor do I have any confidence that those settings will be changed for the reasons previously outlined.

What we are all facing is the unintended effects of well-intentioned policies implemented over the last fifty years.

Were we trying to atone for the past?