2016-11-08
MR BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — The Greens will be supporting this bill. In fact it was the Greens' support of the original version in 2010 that saw that bill passed in the very last week of sitting before the end of that Parliament. As I tried to suggest earlier in the debate, the Liberals and Nationals opposed the bill at the time, with some fairly tawdry politics. I remember them waving around pictures of the MCG, suggesting that that was somehow going to be taken off us as a result of the passage of that legislation, whereas the legislation itself was actually really nothing more than a good news story.
As Ms Tierney characterised it, it was a way of effectively creating an out-of-court settlement that did not require the state of Victoria and traditional owner groups to drag themselves along to make every agreement through the federal native title court. Instead the legislation allowed them to actually sit down, person to person, group to group, nation to nation, sovereign body to sovereign body, and just agree on what it is that we want to do — what it is that we, the state of Victoria, working with our traditional owner groups, want to achieve to enhance life here in Victoria and to strengthen the bonds between our communities so that we can learn from Aboriginal people, so that Aboriginal people can learn from us and so that we can go forward, correcting some of the historical injustices that we are all so familiar with here.
That is why we supported the native title settlement framework, which did not create any new rights for Aboriginal people but opened up new possibilities, giving certain bodies, state government entities — generally land management groups such as Parks Victoria and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning — the ability to enter into certain types of agreements as part of settling out some of these traditional owner claims without having to do every single bit of it through a very expensive court process.
The bill before us today, which I think is getting some sort of grudging support from the coalition, does a number of those things. It simply expands out in many cases the options available to us, which through various discussions and agreements have been found to be lacking. Therefore we are seeking some new powers for the state government to enter into new types of agreements.
These agreements generally run in parallel with native title claims. A commonwealth process creates court determinations that can be used to guide the negotiations. Settlement agreements may vary, but they will at least include consultation rights for government activities on public land. Some settlements, like the historic Dja Dja Wurrung agreement of 2013, which is still being processed, may include a grant of Aboriginal title over areas of public land. Aboriginal title is a highly conditional grant of freehold title by the Victorian government over public land. The suite of conditions ensures that the land continues to be available as a public asset, with the same rights as previously existed when it was Crown land, but it gives the traditional owners greater power in the management of the land in conjunction with the Victorian government.
That is the rhetoric that often gets thrown around these days. At public events we acknowledge the traditional owners as the custodians of the land, and we do so even now in the Parliament itself. But if we bring a piece of legislation to the Parliament to enact exactly that principle, people are like, 'Oh, I don't know what this means. I'm getting a bit worried about this'. It is a very grudging kind of support, when in fact we are just walking the talk. Frankly, I do not want to hear those acknowledgements of traditional owners at every event if we are not going to actually put them into practice, so I am glad that we are doing it here today with a bit of extra legislation.
Some elements of the bill came about because there were some technical problems that prevented the Dja Dja Wurrung settlement from being completed, some elements are a tidy up to fix unclear provisions that have come to light during the actual operation of the original act and some just give greater autonomy to traditional owners for agreed-to activities on country. The creation of the bill was also driven by the need to sort out an existing right to an agreement for an Esso pipeline in the Gippsland Lakes Coastal Park associated with the Gunaikurnai native title settlement package of 2010.
So we have got the Aboriginal title for the Greater Bendigo National Park. We have got clarification about existing rights and interests at clauses 8, 9 and 10. That is just in relation to certain statutory authorities, contracts and agreements relating to the management of land, so that they survive the grant of Aboriginal title.
We have got some resolution of disputes and enforcements via the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal at clauses 11, 16 and 17. Disputes between parties might be, for example, about whether an activity is a significant land use activity, which triggers the need for a negotiation, or about whether negotiations are being carried out in good faith. So there are still some legalistic elements in what is meant to be a free-ranging negotiation where all sorts of options are on the table.
There are natural resource agreements, including the rights to hunt, camp and carry out activities on country in a settlement area — for example, for gatherings that would otherwise need a permit. The general effect of the change is that natural resource agreements will be part of the settlement, with the source of power coming from the agreement rather than being something which has to be negotiated with the minister after the settlement.
The government has been working on this bill for a while. Stakeholders are Native Title Services Victoria, who represent most of the claimant groups, and the Federation of Victorian Traditional Owners Corporation, who tell us they were happy with the process. They did not get everything they wanted, but the government acted in good faith to improve the operation of the act and that has led to the bill that we see before us. If there is anything for me to complain about, it is that the government have not been making full enough use of the provisions of the act to date and that they have not moved fast enough or in my view acted generously enough in relation to these traditional owner settlements, but some of that will be dealt with over time.
Public works do extinguish native title, unless there is an agreement — for example, traditional owners agree that the works may be carried out and the authority agrees that the works do not extinguish native title. An example of this type of work from another jurisdiction is the Alice Springs to Darwin railway. It is also possible for the authority to decide that certain works are not public works, which also means there is no extinguishment, and so on and so forth.
That is the feedback that we have received on this process from native title services and the federation of native title organisations. I would just like to make a few personal comments. I gather we are going to the committee stage on this bill. If that is the case, we might ask for some update to the house on the Eastern Maar settlement process if the minister is able to give us some information on that. That has been a rather long running process, and it is a major and important claim representing a good part of the state of Victoria and also some very important cultural assets. Rather than talk about that now, I might seek a bit of clarification from the minister during discussion of clause 1 of the bill.
Just a personal note: I have noticed that the government — we have read and I have been told — is seeking to negotiate a treaty with Aboriginal people here in Victoria, which I think is long overdue. I understand the government is proceeding in good faith on that. However, there are some questions that I think we should ask about what the government's intent is in that broader area. The issue relates directly to this bill though, because this framework is obviously a major framework that is setting out how we deal with traditional custodianship of the land.
The Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 is another major plank in how we deal with that, and then we have a range of funding and services agreements particularly for the delivery of services — housing services, children's services, health services — with what are generally known as ACCOs, or Aboriginal community controlled organisations. Those are three major planks that are in place — three bodies of work that are ongoing. My question for the government in a general sense is: is a treaty meant to cover more than that? Is it going to cover just those three things, is it going to simply endorse those three things or does the government have a broader aspiration here for a historic process of reconciliation?
The other thing I would say — that is, from where I sit — from the non-Aboriginal side of this community is that if this is meant to be a treaty, it is a treaty between the state of Victoria and Aboriginal nations. It is not a treaty between the government of the day and Aboriginal nations. It is not a treaty between the Labor Party and Aboriginal nations. It is a treaty between the state of Victoria and the Aboriginal nations of Victoria. Therefore ultimately it has to be endorsed by the Parliament, and we would hope that it receives total endorsement by the Parliament. We do not want this to become a contested political issue, where we come in here and ram through enabling legislation with 21 votes out of 40 one day.
This has to be a much larger process of building consensus so that the aspirations of both sides — the Aboriginal community and the non-Aboriginal community — are met. There is great value we can create for future generations by bringing together that historic reconciliation; by correcting some past wrongs; by providing reparation for many, many years of disadvantage; and also by building the great opportunities that we will inevitably get to add — I hesitate to talk about it as multiculturalism — a whole new plank of the richness of life here in Victoria by understanding that great long-living civilisation, where tens of thousands of people occupied this land for tens of thousands of years, lived in harmony and left behind an incredible richness of stories, culture, land and law that can really add to our life as we move forward together as two communities.
So I would like to hear a lot more from the government about what they see as the possibilities of a treaty. I would also like to see them broaden out and open up the process so that all Victorians, and certainly all parliamentarians, are given a clear role or at least an opportunity to participate, because this is going to be a treaty between an entity, the state of Victoria, ultimately endorsed by this Parliament, and the Aboriginal nations. It is not about the government of the day signing some funding and services agreement with certain groups. From my side of the negotiation table, that is what I am looking for. I am looking for a much bigger view here, rather than simply a re-endorsement of a number of arrangements which are already in place, including quite notably the important traditional owners settlement framework.
The Greens are very pleased to support this bill. As I noted, when we get to the committee stage I will ask the government to put on the record some of its progress in relation to the Eastern Maar claim. I have sought a bit of information from the traditional owner groups, and I would like to hear a little bit from the government about their view on how that is progressing.
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