Racist gamble in Australia

Submitted by Anon on 13 January, 1998 - 12:38

There is a stench hanging low over the country. It’s not the bushfires nor the greenhouse gases which Australia has inexplicably been allowed to increase as a result of the Kyoto conference. No, it is the stench of racism that the right-wing Coalition government has been generating since its election in March 1996 and which came to a head just before Christmas.

The Senate effectively killed prime minister John Howard’s Native Title Bill by passing amendments unacceptable to the government. The bill will now be sent back to the House of Representatives who will pass the original bill and send it back to the Senate a second time. If the Senate fails to pass it then the government can dissolve both Houses of Parliament and call an election. One of the central issues of such an election would be over Native Title, that is the recognition of Indigenous Australians’ land rights.

The system of land ownership and management in Australia was turned on its head in 1992 when the High Court reversed the long-standing legal fiction that Australia was terra nullius, or empty land, when the British arrived in the 18th century. There had never been a treaty with the Aborigines as there had in New Zealand nor any recognition that a society, or a system of ownership and connection with the land existed. The High Court ruled that native title had in fact covered the entire continent, but in the meantime Crown grants of ‘freehold’ had extinguished native title.

In 1993 the Labor government introduced the Native Title Act to give legislative force to this decision. In 1996 the Wik people went back to the High Court arguing that native title continued to exist on Crown Land which was covered by pastoral leases, that is, leases with a specific duration issued for specific pastoral purposes. Pastoral leases cover some 42% of the continent.

The High Court accepted the Wik argument ruling that the rights of native title holders and pastoralists could co-exist, but ruled that where there was a conflict of interest the rights of the pastoralists prevailed. Native title applicants still had to be able to prove a historical connection with the land which would be confirmed by a tribunal. Once that occurred negotiations between Aboriginal representatives and pastoralists would take place.
But the Wik decision coincided with the election of the Coalition who immediately denounced the High Court and the decision saying it destroyed pastoralists ‘certainty’ and proposed to legislate to extinguish native title rights and at the same time upgrade pastoral leases to the same level as a freehold lease thus giving pastoralists a windfall property gain.

The pastoralists’ representatives, the National Party and most State governments called for a one point plan in response to the High Court’s ruling — extinguishment, that is taking away the property rights of native Australians. Howard, who has since said he entered into a covenant with the pastoralists and the miners, developed a ten point plan in response to the High Court, but which in effect is a one point plan with nine points of camouflage.

That ten point plan became the revised Native Title Bill which went to the Parliament for approval in late 1997. The bill is racially discriminatory in that no other group of Australians would ever face the permanent extinguishment of their property rights and never on the basis of their race. The bill also removes all rights to negotiate government or commercial activities on traditional lands; prevents applications for native title unless there is a proven physical connection with the land, thus preventing those peoples who were forcibly removed and locked out from their land from applying for recognition, and sets a six year time limit on applications during which time they are locked out of their land pending the tribunal’s decision.

The remarkable thing is that despite historic legal breakthroughs in overturning terra nullius, recognising the existence of native title and the co-existence of native title with pastoral leases, Indigenous Australians have lost most of their new found property rights. Each of the High Court’s decisions, while confirming that native title exists, sets out to limit its application. For instance, in the landmark Mabo decision freehold property extinguishes native title, while in the Wik decision native title co-exists to the extent that it doesn’t conflict with the pastoralists activities, but where it does the pastoralists rights take precedence. Yet the government has set out to portray Indigenous Australians who claim what the High Court acknowledges is their right as making a land grab.

It is unlikely that the Senate will pass the bill unamended when it is returned there in March after the required three month delay. And the amendments gut enough of the bill’s obnoxious clauses to make it unacceptable to the government in general and to the National Party and pastoralist groups in particular. In the background waiting to wreck havoc on the Nationals among their rural constituency is Pauline Hanson’s openly racist One-Nation Party.

Howard’s government has deliberately fostered and pandered to racist prejudice ever since coming to office. Its very first act was to cut funding to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) claiming widespread fraud and incompetence which a subsequent inquiry found no evidence of.

In addition there has been the growth of Hanson’s ugly racist and xenophobic party which has appealed not only to the undercurrent of racism in Australian history especially in rural areas but also to those who have been affected by economic restructuring and job loss.

But the most damning behaviour of the government has been in response to the report on what has become known as the ‘Stolen Generations’. A national inquiry held into the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their parents through much of the twentieth century in order to assimilate the children with white society thus wiping out the Aboriginal population released its report in early 1997. It found that between 1910 and 1970 as many as 100,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families by State and Territory authorities and church groups. It set out in great detail the horrific consequences to those children and their families of their removal and demonstrated that the practice was still occurring up to the 1970s.

Howard first of all during the inquiry refused to allow any Department to make a submission to the inquiry and then following the report refused to so much as issue a formal apology from the government on behalf of the white Australian population. And now the government has entered into a ‘covenant’ (Howard’s words) with the miners and pastoralists to extinguish indigenous land rights less than five years after they were belatedly recognised.

Going to an election on such a volatile issue is a big gamble for Howard. Even if the Coalition is returned (which opinion polls currently show is uncertain) the depth of anger and bitterness will take a long time to overcome. For Australian exporters such as miners and many pastoral industries who are now orienting more to Asia the prospect of a race based election could have disastrous consequences as Australia is once again portrayed as ‘White Australia’. Howard is painting himself into a corner over native title and race.

He is gambling also on Labor folding under the pressure of not wanting to fight an election on race. When the native title bill was first being discussed Beazley and Evans gave every indication they would compromise also wanting to give ‘certainty’ to the pastoralists. However they have been pushed by the growing groundswell of opinion in favour of reconciliation and land rights, by Indigenous activists campaigns, and by the Australian Labor Party left into taking a much harder line than they would have otherwise. There is still the possibility that they will back down when the Senate debates it a second time but at the moment that doesn’t appear to be an option.

In early 1998 the Parliament will once again vote on the native title bill. If it is rejected again an election is likely. If it is passed it will be challenged in the High Court. But either way the issue of race and white Australia’s reconciliation with the indigenous population will be more and more a central feature of Australian politics.

Gerry Bates

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