Pearls and Irritations

The headline in the Weekend Australian said it all: NT Bases Key to American War Plans. Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, the Chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Australian, after a ten day visit to Australia that our geography offered key advantages to the US “as it sought to deter Chinese aggression”. Indeed, the north would become “the central base of operations in the Indo-Pacific to counter the threat.’ Defence Minister Marles added his voice to the crusade explaining that after AUSMIN talks in the US last week that America’s military was now “operating in Australia across land, sea, air, cyber and space”. This all followed the commitment earlier in the year to spend $18 billion in the coming decade on upgrading defence bases across the north.

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy declared that the Northern Territory was “critical to the defence of the nation, not just in defending Australia but projecting power out into our region against any potential adversary”.

What is most striking here is the ease with which the American authorities assume proprietorial rights to occupy and employ our territory as a base for future aggression, and the comfortable complicity of the federal ministers. Historical antecedents arise inescapably. They take us back to the way in which the Menzies Government handed over the Montebello Islands along with Maralinga and Emu Fields in Central Australia to Britain in order to carry out its atomic testing between 1952 and 1963. There was no consultation with the traditional owners in the 1950s and as far as anyone can tell none whatsoever with the First Nations of the Territory, the Gulf country, Cape York or the Kimberly about plans to turn their homelands into the critical arenas for future warfare. But much has changed since the 1950s both domestically and internationally.

While traditional communities lived on their homelands in the Menzies era, they had no legal right to their own country. Today’s situation has changed dramatically, especially in the north. The First Nations hold title to 48% of the Territory, 80% of Cape York and 96% of the Kimberley. They control 80% of the Territory’s coastline and even more in far north Queensland and the Kimberley. This includes such strategically important locations as the Tiwi Islands and the Torres Strait. Nolan Hunter, the head of the Kimberley Land Council, spoke for many of his contemporaries when he said recently that native title “gave people authority to make decisions about what happened on their land”. Given the long association between Chinese settlers in the north and many family connections with First Nations, it cannot be assumed the indigenous landowners would welcome a war with China.

But much has changed internationally as well since the passage of the International Labour Organisation Convention 107 in 1957. There was a follow-up Convention 169 in 1989 and the even more significant United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People in 2007 when it received the support of 150 countries in the General Assembly and therefore the affirmation of most of the world’s population. There is, therefore, general agreement since then that the world’s 500 million or so indigenous people have a set of collective rights which are essential for their survival as distinctive peoples. The Rudd Government ratified the Declaration in 2009, but it was Julie Bishop who as Coalition Foreign Minister between 2013 and 2018 strongly promoted it and played a significant role in September 2014 in the UN General Assembly’s World Conference on Indigenous People. And then in August 2015 she launched Australia’s “first ever strategy for advancing the interests of the world’s indigenous peoples”. She declared that the country had “a leadership role to play in shaping the international age on indigenous issues”. When Penny Wong assumed leadership of DFAT in 2022, she also gave her commitment to further Australia’s international support for the principles outlined in the Declaration. At much the same time the Law Council of Australia published a study on the document which they declared was “the authoritative international standard informing the way Governments across the globe should engage with and protect the rights of indigenous people”. But the Council observed that, despite announcing support for the Declaration as far back as 2009, Australian Governments and the Parliament were “yet to recognise its standards in a formal and comprehensive way”.

Some of the Declaration’s 46 Articles would prove harder than others for our Government to deal with. This is surely the case with what seems to be the little noticed Article 30 and it is particularly significant for the matter in hand. It has two clauses:

1. Military activities shall not take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples unless justified by a relevant public interest or otherwise freely agreed with or requested by the indigenous peoples concerned.

2. States shall undertake effective consultations with the indigenous peoples concerned, through appropriate procedures and in particular through their representative institutions, prior to using their lands or territories for military activities.

Have these principles played any role in Defence Department planning for the dramatic militarisation of north Australia? More to the point has Marles paid any attention to them? Does he even know they exist? If so, has he let his American buddies know about the vast areas of north Australia where the traditional owners are convinced they have authority to make decisions about what happens on their land? He was a member of Rudd’s ministry in 2009 when the declaration was ratified. Perhaps even more to the point, he talks more than anyone else in the Government about our commitment to the “rules-based international order”. In a recent address to a distinguished international audience at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, he began by declaring that at the centre of global contention was “quite simply the global rules-based order”. As he proceeded with a reasonably short speech, he managed to refer back to the rules-based order 12 times and ended with a flourish, telling his peers that its “maintenance must be the collective mission of us all”.

We await news that the minister has toured communities all over the north carrying out effective consultation about the plans for the rapid militarisation of the north in preparation for our participation in an American war with China. That is the least we might fairly expect from such an ardent public advocate of the rules-based international order.

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