Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Urban Development) Share this | Hansard source

One would have thought that this bill, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Amendment Bill 2005 [2006], could have been sorted out pretty quickly, but what we have found is a protracted process of review going back to Justice Elizabeth Evatt’s report of 1996. That report sought to examine the appropriateness of the current regimes with regard to Indigenous heritage matters and it made a series of recommendations. The government has received the report but has failed to act on it.

The government has produced a piece of legislation which is, at best, extremely disappointing and which only partially implements the recommendations of the Evatt report. This legislation was spoken of in terms of urgency three years ago. It was introduced to this chamber last October and now, in August 2006, we see the final vote being taken. So you could hardly say that the government has rushed to implement this proposition or that this is a matter that has been at the forefront of the government’s interests. It reflects the appalling attitude this government has to Indigenous heritage questions.

One saving grace is that the bill seeks to strengthen our commitments in terms of international borrowings of Indigenous heritage artefacts. I might say, though, that the government has been pretty slow on the uptake in terms of the return of artefacts from cultural institutions around the world. It is appropriate, though, that there be a strengthening of the legal regime with regard to borrowings from this time on.

A second saving grace is that the bill returns to Victoria the responsibility to administer its own Aboriginal heritage protection regime. If I remember correctly, back in the 1980s, in the Lake Condah and Framlingham affairs, the upper house of the Victorian parliament—which of course was dominated by some of the most slimy shellbacks that we had been able to produce for many a generation—sought to protect particular landholders in those regions with a bid to block the legitimate aspirations of Indigenous people to protect extraordinarily important heritage sites. We had the situation where one of the rare examples of Indigenous people building stone dwellings and providing extensive farming and aquacultural facilities was not being protected because it suited some of the local identities not to give Indigenous people the respect and dignity they deserved by protecting those sites.