Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

For continuity and so that the minister can summarise the debate, I will just say that Labor will support the Democrats in opposing schedule 3. I know we are coming to the close of this debate on the Native Title Amendment Bill 2006, but I think it is worth doing at least some recapping. I will not take up very much time. The aim of the Labor Party, the Democrats and the Greens in respect of this bill, and it has been almost the same refrain, was to improve the bill. That has not been successful in this debate. The government has resisted nearly all of the amendments that have been put forward by the Greens, the Democrats and Labor. They were about trying to improve a system which is under stress and which the government does acknowledge is tied up by red tape and requires assistance.

The direction the government is pursuing will not, in Labor’s view, assist the native title system. It will not remove the red tape. It will not create a streamlined system. It will not improve the system to the extent that the parties to claims can obtain a reasonable outcome from it. The government and the Labor Party disagree on those points that we have made throughout this debate. I am reiterating them because of the disjointed way in which we have unfortunately had to conduct this committee stage of this bill—effectively, last week and this week; and even today it was broken up by question time. Rather than speaking during the third reading debate, I want to make a brief contribution now. We will also be seeking to divide on the third reading. Labor have indicated that we do oppose this bill, so I will not take up too much more of our time.

We have now come to the position where shortly this bill will ultimately pass. By the look of things, it will have to at least be returned to the House for consideration of the amendments that have been agreed to and then come back to the Senate, as it has to be dealt with this week. It is certainly on the list of legislation to be dealt with this week. So it will come back to us with a message from the House of Representatives. If I am wrong about that, the minister can correct me. I thought there were some amendments, but the debate has come along.

The native title representative bodies do not agree with this bill and the direction in which it is going. The Federal Court has indicated it has concerns about it. The social justice commissioner does not support much of the bill. The WA state government has expressed key concerns about it. The Minerals Council of Australia, although providing some conditional support, have also indicated that there are many parts of the bill that they have not warmed to—perhaps I can use that phrase rather than verbal them on the record.

The report on the bill by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs summarised the positions of all of those stakeholders in the bill in its final recommendations. Labor in its minority report outlined where it believes improvements to the bill would come from. However, they have not been, as I said, agreed to by the government. That is why—without reiterating the points that I made during my speech in the second reading debate, to which I would refer people—Labor will ultimately oppose the bill: there has not been sufficient improvement to the bill, especially without the amendments that Labor proposed to schedules 1 and 2. What I can say, though, is that we did examine all of the schedules, including schedules 3 and 4. Although they were generally acceptable on the whole, when you take a look at the final form of the bill which we are now seeing, it is an unacceptable bill and it will not help the process.