2015-12-01
Questions by Greens Member for South Metropolitan Lynn MacLaren MLC have confirmed that the Aboriginal Affairs Minister knew a committee that advised him on whether Aboriginal sites in the path of Roe 8 should be disturbed had initially advised against their disturbance, yet he gave final approval for them to be disturbed anyway.
“The Minister is now implicated in the entire sorry story of how the Aboriginal Cultural Materials Committee initially recommended that Aboriginal sites in the path of Roe 8 should not be disturbed because of their great spiritual significance and then later reversed its position, supposedly on the basis of new information provided by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs,” Ms MacLaren said.
“That new information turned out to be nothing more than an internal site assessment report by Departmental staffers who walked across a registered site considered by archaeologists to have subsurface cultural material and dug a single 20-centimetre test hole, which unsurprisingly, led to no artefacts being found.