Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Up until the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs moved this legislation, I was the only living minister who had moved land rights legislation which purported to deliver ownership to Aboriginal people. For those who may be younger than me, the legislation in Queensland was the subject of five very laudable 60 Minutes reports during those years. The Queensland legislation on landownership is the subject of two textbooks, one by Roslyn Child and one by Frank Brennan, and those textbooks are in universities throughout Australia. The whole front page of the Weekend Australian said one weekend ‘The Elders Wept’. It showed the elders at Yarrabah all jumping for joy in front of stacks of little kids waving Aboriginal flags on the handing over of the deeds of grant at Yarrabah. We were lauded from all sides and from all parts of Australian society.

To what do we owe this magnificent achievement of which I had the honour of being one of the centrepieces? We simply went out to every community in Queensland where we called public meetings. We had to do a lot of work to get people to turn up to those meetings. We then asked them for a vote. I said, ‘At the present moment, all of the six million acres in Queensland are owned by trustees appointed by the Governor in Council. Effectively, therefore, that land is owned by the state government.’ A lot of them chirped a bit at that. They said, ‘We own it,’ and quite rightly so. I said, ‘Settle down. We believe morally and legally that you do own it. That means we have to hand it over but, in handing it over to Yarrabah, I have to put somebody’s name at the bottom of this piece of paper. I want to ask you people: do you want traditional ownership?’ I regret to say that my honourable Independent colleague the member for Calare, for whom I have very great respect, and the member for Lingiari both talked about traditional ownership. You have a choice: either you can look back and be chained and manacled by the past or you can look to the future and ask, ‘What are the mechanisms that we need to carry us into the future?’ Traditional ownership is manacling people to the past.

I asked Yoshi Hattori, the head of the Bank of Tokyo, ‘Did the MacArthur Constitution change Japan?’ He said: ‘Absolutely. Before the war, no matter how dumb or stupid or lazy you were, no matter how arrogant or objectionable you were, if you were Samurai’—or of upper class—‘you ended up rich and powerful. After the war and after the MacArthur Constitution the world changed. Those that were lazy, indolent and arrogant fell by the wayside and more deserving people moved forward to positions of power and ownership.’ When you talk about manacling people to the past, you are talking about feudalism. You are talking about a feudalistic land tenure system. Do we think that in the year of our Lord 2007 we should be looking to a feudal regime where the traditional head of a family, the eldest son, effectively owns all of the area under the feudal regime of the particular lord or baron?

We asked the people whether they wanted traditional ownership—we explained to them that traditional ownership meant that the original tribe would own the land—or whether they wanted land council ownership. They were very well aware of their land councils. We said they could have shire council ownership because we were setting up local shire councils; the Yarrabah Shire Council was being set up. We said they could continue with government ownership or they could have private ownership—where their own family owns their own house, farm, cattle station, shop, service station or whatever. All of the questions zeroed in on private family ownership. When we took a vote and asked, ‘All those in favour of traditional ownership?’ three hands were raised. A total of 3,800 people attended the meeting. Only three hands were raised out of 3,800. When we asked, ‘All those in favour of land council ownership?’ not a single hand was raised by people from any of those 28 communities in Queensland. No hands were raised when we asked who was in favour of shire council ownership. No hands were raised when we asked who was in favour of government ownership. When we asked who was in favour of private family ownership, all 3,800 hands were raised—except for the three people I mentioned earlier.

The wonderful, incredible, exciting thing we did was to simply to go out and ask the people what they wanted. It was no surprise to me that they wanted to own their own home, their own shop, their own farm or their own cattle station. As we were not a proper body we handed it over to the shire council, to the state government, to decide who should own which property, house, farm or station. We felt the local shire council should do that, with a mechanism to devolve it.

The previous two speakers made a good point when they said that there is an element of compulsion in the minister’s approach to this issue. One of the mistakes we made was that we did not include an element of compulsion in the bureaucratic process. Applications just got bogged down with machinery, and people had to shoulder the burden of suddenly becoming part of a shire council and having to run their own affairs. The huge and colossal administrative burdens slowed down the process dramatically. That is when the government needs to intervene to speed it up. But there does need to be some element of compulsion in this speeding up. It is not a case of forcing somebody to do something but, if a person applies to own his own home, the onus of proof should shift to the council. There was then in the old legislation an avenue of appeal—for the sake of better words—to tribal elders for the area.

I am sure the situation in the Northern Territory is not greatly different to that in Queensland. Native title was absolutely disastrous for us in Queensland. Arguably, 40 per cent of Australia’s Aboriginal population is in Queensland. When you talk about Aboriginal affairs, the vast bulk of the people you are talking about live in Queensland. Of the 28 communities—and I exempt the Torres Strait Islands—there are about 15 or 16 communities in towns very much separated, in every sense, from every other town. Yarrabah may be close to Cairns but it is across the inlet, so it is a million miles away from Cairns. These communities are very different from other towns in every sense of the word. Each of these communities was artificial; it was set up by the government or by a mission. In fact, only about seven or eight per cent of the population of those 16 communities are from the original tribe. At Yarrabah only about 60 are from the original tribe. On Palm Island only about 12 are from the original tribe. Yet there are some 3,000 or 4,000 people living in those two communities. So 4,000 people should be dispossessed to deliver traditional ownership? Give me a break here! The native title regime has caused endless trouble. Because I am not entirely white and I come from Cloncurry, I am considered one of the mob. I am very proud to be able to say that. They confide in me ‘It is a plot by the migaloos’—the whitefellas are migaloos—and many say, ‘To get us to kill each other, like in the old days’, which was substantially true; most of the killing in Queensland was done by black troopers.

There were other issues which the leadership wanted to pursue. We had already set up the shire councils at that stage. The Aboriginal Coordinating Council in Queensland wanted inalienability, so you could sell to another Yarrabah resident but you could not sell to an outsider. Who was a resident was a matter to be determined by the council, with an appeal to two tribal elders. One was an appointee of the government and one was a magistrate from the conventional magistrates system. That was the body that was set up that you could appeal to.

There has to be some compulsion here because to my knowledge not a single, solitary case ever went through to a magistrate. Many people desperately tried to get their houses through but it got bogged down in the machinery of the shire councils. The councils were trying very hard but they had an enormous amount of work to do in order to learn how to run their own affairs.

The only thing that I disagree with the minister on here is the 99-year leases. I cannot for the life of me see why fee simple cannot be given to an individual while tying in the inalienability clause. He did not have the advantage that I had of having shire councils set up in each of these communities, and I was dealing with a much better educated group of people in Queensland. There was hardly anyone in these communities who had not worked for whitefellas or outside communities at one time or another and held down very responsible jobs. We were dealing with a much more sophisticated group of people than the minister is dealing with in the Northern Territory.

As has been rightly said in this place on a number of occasions during this debate, the blackfellas of Australia are very distrustful of the whitefella, particularly whitefella governments of Australia. And they are entitled to be, because this is a pretty sad story that I am telling here. The legislation was greeted with the second longest filibuster in Queensland parliamentary history. Like today, everyone was getting up and saying that all sorts of dreadful things were going to happen under private ownership and how it was some sort of government plot to do something or other. We met with the black leaders. A number of them came down and had a press conference. They said that they gave the legislation guarded approval. It was stridently condemned by Father Frank Brennan and, rather ironically, he later wrote a book stating that everyone should follow the Queensland example. I do not want to criticise him for that, because I think he had the same suspicions as everyone else of the Queensland government at the time.

As I said, we held meetings in Hopevale, which was then the most sophisticated Aboriginal community in Australia. Of course, that community produced Noel Pearson, and for those who follow the great game of Rugby League it also produced the person who should be playing fullback for Queensland tonight, Matty Bowen. The first black member of parliament in Australian history, Eric Deeral, who I had the privilege of serving with, also came from there, as did one of the first Aboriginal ministers of religion in Australia, Pastor Rosendale. It is a very sophisticated community. The Lutheran Church at Hermannsburg have done a remarkably successful job, which is in very sharp contrast to other religions which were not very successful at all.

We went to Hopevale, and Lester Rosendale, the brother of Pastor Rosendale, was effectively the clerk for the little community organisational group that they had there and which worked with the church. He said, ‘We already know what we own.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘We have already got this place broken up into family ownership. We have private ownership here.’ I said, ‘On the government register it says it is a trust area.’ He said, ‘I do not care about that. Come over here to this map.’ He had a map of Hopevale and they had already divided the place up into their blocks. It was nothing to do with government. Under the leadership of the Rosendale family, all the people decided that they would have private ownership. So Hopevale had already headed down that pathway with an agreement between the people and the mission, who were the trustees of the area. They had already moved to private ownership.

The next place, Pormpuraaw, was more ‘primitive’ in the sense that a lot of people did not have any education at all and they still spoke in language. They were not primitive in the sense that they were backwards, but primitive in the sense that they were still very much in a tribal regime. Pormpuraaw was then called Edward River. Jackson Shortjoe met us there. He said that he would like to have a shot at the cleanskins. Let the truth be known: his cousin—I will not mention names—was already mustering the cleanskins on the place. There is nothing wrong with that; in fact I would highly commend them for it. But he reckoned that, if someone was going to clean up the cleanskins on Edward River, it should be him. That is where his family came from. I said to him, ‘If you want to do the job properly you have to build yards, Jackson. You’re not going to be able to get those wild cattle together if you have not got yards, yard wings and some fencing to hold them.’ I said, ‘We cannot put up the money for that.’

This is the nub of it at all. This is where the rubber meets the road. If we want to make these communities commercial areas where people can look after themselves then they have to get some money from somewhere. Government will not give it to them. The government’s fingers have been burnt a thousand times, so it will not give money for commercial operations. Because a huge amount of money is needed to take maybe 50,000 to 100,000 people forward and to finance, for example, these cattle stations, they have to go to the banks. A bank will not loan you money unless you have a mortgageable document. What the minister is doing today should be absolutely applauded. This is a historic event. This is the first recognition by this parliament that these people need the same machinery that the British people were given in 1272 in Quia Emptores when they effectively abolished the feudal system. That enabled the English to get ahead of the rest of the world commercially. It is the same system that Lincoln gave to the people of America under the Lincoln Homestead Act—and we have all seen the movies where they race to put the stake in the ground—that made them the great juggernaut of agriculture in the world. Roberts Ardrey, in his book The Territorial Imperative says that one person at the plough in America can free up 30 people to work in other areas. It takes 30 people at the plough in Russia to free up a single person.

Mr Deputy Speaker, 42 per cent of Australia is technically owned by the Aboriginal people. Believe me—and I was brought up in the town that was half Aboriginal in descent; I have played football with these people and it takes a lot of organisational capacity to run a football team onto an oval, as I have done all my life—there is no reason why these people should not be standing equal to everyone else in Australia, except because they are not allowed to own land. If we lock them into traditional ownership then all I can say to you is that we are locking them into a feudal regime and they will have the same results as Russia and all those other countries that had feudal ownership until very recently—last century in most cases in Europe. When the MacArthur constitution came in in Japan, that country was a moderately backward Asian country. It was the most advanced of them, I suppose, but it was still moderately backward. Within 40 years under that constitution they became the richest people on earth. Their income was $US32,000 per person. The American income was $30,000; the Australian was only $19,000. That is the sort of constitution that the minister is delivering today.

I take the point made by the member for Calare and the member for Lingiari—it was a good point—about the oversighting group that holds the headlease. I ask the minister to look at that and I will talk to his officials about ways that this model can be refined. The local people who live there—I am not talking about traditional owners—should have something. When we argued the point of traditional ownership in the halls of power with the black people of Queensland again and again it was decided unanimously on every occasion— (Time expired)

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