Let’s share land

ON Wednesday Federal Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt gave a NAIDOC Week address at the National Press Club.

He presented a vision for relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia that was measured and modern. The emphasis was on working together in a context of respect for indigenous culture, identity and rights, and with a commitment to a shared Australian future.

This approach is one which has the goodwill and support of business and corporate interests, and of most fairminded Australian citizens.

On the same day that Minister Wyatt gave his speech, I read an article in the NT News by the CEO of the NT Cattlemen’s Association, Ashley Manicaros. It was called “Land tenure system really failing everyone in the Top End.”

Mr Manicaros went to town on the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (“ALRA”). He trundled out the same sort of ill-informed half truths about ALRA that antiland rights advocates for powerful vested interests have used to preach to the converted since back in the early 1980s. This attack is made on ALRA despite the fact that on both the “pastoral estate” (where Mr Manicaros’ members run their businesses) and on ALRA land, the primary unit of land tenure is the same. It is called a lease. Land Tenure systems run on the basis of leases rather than freehold can be successful (e.g. Canberra).

Mr Manicaros suggested that ALRA leases can’t be mortgaged because if the loan falls into default the lender couldn’t foreclose. It is true that ALRA requires an approval process to take place before each new lease is granted.

The main reason for this is to ensure that the traditional owners as a group consent.

Prior to 2006 complex legal drafting was required to provide for a lender to step in if a borrower who had been granted an interest in ALRA land defaulted on the loan.

The issue didn’t often arise, but was addressed, for example, in the commercial leasing documentation which underpinned the Alice to Darwin railway corridor.

The NT Land Councils proposed specific changes to ALRA that would make things simpler. Amendments were enacted in 2006. The result was that advance approval of a transfer to a lender (in the event of default, or in any other agreed scenario) could be easily written into the original lease. This gives a lender the same kind of security over mortgaged leasehold land that they would have anywhere else in Australia.

It appears that what Mr Manicaros would propose is the transfer of ALRA land to pastoralists. Where the 150,000 sqkm he wants opened up would come from is unclear. Most of the good grazing country in the Top End was carved up into pastoral leases long ago. Does he think cattle should be running in the stone country of Arnhem Land or in the already drought-ravaged desert? Mr Manicaros is right to note that the NT pastoral industry was built on the blood, sweat and tears of Aboriginal stockmen and women. In 1968 when those same workers were granted equal pay, most of them were pushed off the stations to small reserve communities or on the fringes of towns. Over the years since ALRA has been in existence, pastoralists have benefited from grazing licences over large tracts of Aboriginal land. These grazing licences are the expression of the free and informed consent of traditional owners. Mr Manicaros is wrong in his claim that grazing licences cannot be transferred on the sale of a neighbouring perpetual pastoral lease. Most, if not all of the current grazing licences – and those currently in negotiation – contain clauses that allow for the seamless transfer of interests in grazing licences on Aboriginal land.

What Mr Manicaros doesn’t mention in his article is that many of those Aboriginal people who were pushed off stations in 1968, and their descendants, have now clawed back some limited rights in those stations, thanks to the Native Title Act.

Pastoralists don’t “own” cattle stations. They have a legal right granted by the government to run a business on that land.

Aboriginal people whose ties to the same land go back to time immemorial have shared interests in it. Those interests include a right to be consulted and to negotiate about proposed new developments.

Since 2009, the NLC has tried to work cooperatively with the NTCA in relation to a range of matters, including trying to make native title work for the mutual benefit of native title claimants/holders and pastoralists.

I very much hope that a cooperative relationship with the NTCA can continue over coming months and years.

That will be better achieved through dialogue and discussion than by pre-emptive strikes like “Land tenure system really failing everyone in the Top End”.

“pastoralists have benefited from large tracts of Aboriginal land”