Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also would like to speak about the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007. The Greens would have liked to have seen this referred to the committee and the committee being given an opportunity to examine it. When we briefly touched on this issue during estimates, I felt a great deal of concern about the fact that I could not be provided with clear answers to a number of my questions. Take, for example, the issue of $5 million that is to be provided from the ABA to the traditional owners on the Tiwi Islands. This is the issue we were specifically talking about. That $5 million was being given from the ABA to the traditional owners in advance of any lease money that was coming back. When I asked where that $5 million goes once the lease money has been received—nobody knew what I was talking about at first—I was told one answer and then, two hours later, I was told a different answer. The different answer was that once that money that was originally given, because it is not a loan, by the ABA to the traditional owners had been received in lease money it was then given to the entity to then fund the leases and the lease process in other towns. That sort of information and that sort of process needs to be examined. The department could not tell us the answer straightaway, nor could the minister. It took hours to get that information.

I think that is important information. I think that sort of detail is the sort of detail the committee needs to be asking about, and I am certainly not reassured that they have got this right. This legislation has been rushed, and I agree with Senator Ludwig—that is, that communities in the NT should have been able to examine this legislation and should have been able to appear before a committee to give us their opinion. This affects not only the Tiwi Islands; this also affects other areas in the NT. I bet the NLC and the CLC have fairly strong opinions on these issues. These are very significant issues that should be examined.

The other thing is that the minister said that an agreement had been reached between the traditional owners on the Tiwi Islands and the government. There was a big brouhaha about it, there was a media release, but in fact no such agreement has been reached. An MOU has been signed, with, I understand, still quite a bit of further work to be done. Information that was given to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs during estimates turned out to be incorrect. That is the information we found out about; we do not know how much more of that was incorrect. We do not know the full implications of this legislation, and we certainly will not be able to find it out in the short time that this place will have to consider it without it going to the community affairs committee to be examined.

I do not think enough information was provided by the government to justify why this lease has to be rushed through. It is the same sort of thing that was done last time with land rights legislation. It was rushed through, despite the government saying they had done extensive consultation, and everybody knew that large parts of that legislation had not been subject to consultation. It was the same thing with native title amendments: many of those changes were not subject to consultation. Now we have yet another repeat of the government rushing through legislation and not giving us adequate time to consider it and not even having the answers themselves.