Uniting for good
THE dominant issue overshadowing Reconciliation Week has been the focus on deaths in custody, radiating from Minneapolis to countries outside the US, including Australia.
It is worth remembering that the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody were extremely broad-ranging. They were not restricted to police and prisons. The intention was to try to address the underlying causes of the high rate of indigenous arrest and incarceration, including dispossession of land.
For many years after the RCIADIC report was handed down in 1991, state and territory governments routinely assessed all kinds of policies and actions against the RCIADIC recommendations checklist.
The death in police custody of a young indigenous man in Yuendumu highlighted there is unfinished business in this space, but the focus should not be just on how police interact with Aboriginal people and communities.
The issue is much bigger and more challenging than that, and in the Territory context includes the need to take into account the valuable (although limited) autonomy which many Aboriginal Territorians enjoy due to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (ALRA).
The enactment of ALRA, as part of what was in the late ’70s a push for a national system of land rights, was the high point in a process which has for the most part been underwhelming in terms of what it has delivered for Aboriginal people.
At the heart of ALRA is the capacity to grant or deny entry onto Aboriginal land. The significance of this property right underpins the High Court’s Blue Mud Bay decision, and the method of implementing that property right is via the permit system (established under a piece of NT legislation – the Aboriginal Land Act (ALA).
Only Aboriginal people with traditional interests in ALRA land do not require ALA permits. The permit system provides a clear and documented mechanism for checking authorisation to be on land, but it is essentially a formalisation of rights that private landowners everywhere have to exclude trespassers.
When it became clear that Australia was facing a pandemic, the NLC decided to stop issuing non-essential permits. This was before the internal travel restrictions began.
When internal travel restrictions kicked in, the NLC (and the other three land councils) worked closely with the NT Government and the police to ensure the health protections provided for under the Commonwealth Health Minister’s Biosecurity Determination were effective.
NLC staff worked tirelessly to help more than 800 Aboriginal remote residents travel to and from their communities and outstations during the lockdown to sort out urgent family or medical business.
Those NLC staff also issued more than 3000 emergency worker ALA permits to make sure that doctors, nurses, health workers, police officers, council workers and other essential service providers could keep our remote communities running and safe.
This was particularly important in the early weeks of the biosecurity restrictions, when the NT Government had not yet developed its own essential worker form for processing access applications.
At that time it fell to the land councils to ensure our internal documentation ticked both the ALA permit and biosecurity screening “boxes”. It was the land councils who were vetting and facilitating essential travel and protecting communities from infection.
The health screening aspect of this work was undertaken with assistance from Dr Christine Connors and her staff at the Top End Health Service.
The NT Police, with assistance from the AFP, manned checkpoints throughout the Territory and ensured compliance with both the Biosecurity Determination and the ALA permit system.
As this Reconciliation Week comes to a close, it is appropriate to acknowledge that we were all able to work together in an exercise of constructive reconciliation.