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

As a member of this committee, I would most certainly like to talk to this very important report, titled Never again: inquiry into the destruction of 46,000 year old caves at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia—interim report.It contains seven extensive recommendations around what happened when Rio Tinto blew up the 46,000-year-old rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara, devastating the traditional owners, the PKKP, who had indicated that these were extremely important caves. The process failed so badly that, every single way along the process, they were failed, absolutely failed.

This is a multipartisan interim report. These recommendations are powerfully supported by the members of this committee. We made recommendations around Rio Tinto, whose internal processes completely failed. For a long time, Rio Tinto's name around the world was pretty poor because of the way they dealt with Indigenous peoples. Their name improved in Western Australia in terms of their commitment to First Nations cultural heritage. They had their internal processes and then they went downhill. They went downhill to such an extent that they thought it was okay to blow up these 46,000-year-old rock shelters, when, in their administration block at the mine, there is a soil profile that demonstrates that 46,000-year-old history. It has little stickers on it that mark the ice age, that mark where the pyramids were and that mark other memorable points. So this was there. Rio knew this was in the admin centre. Some people walked past it every day, and their executives—some of them, not all of them—had visited it and seen it. They still blew it up. So there are recommendations for Rio Tinto. The first dot point in recommendation 1 is:

The report then talks about full reconstruction, to try and recover those rock shelters. It then makes recommendations to the Western Australian government, who oversaw this destruction and knew very well that their processes were flawed and that they needed to improve the act. There are a series of recommendations there. There are a series of recommendations to all mining companies, because, for all mining companies, reputation is on the line here. There are still 100 sacred sites—important cultural heritage sites—that have current section 18 approvals over them. There are many other sites; there are many other section 18s. But there are 100 sites that still have section 18s over them.

Do you know what happened at Rio Tinto? When they got approval to destroy the Juukan Gorge, the two rock shelters, the indicators came off the maps. Just because you get approval to destroy them, the indication of them being in certain sites comes off their maps. So there is a recommendation to all mining companies to:

The interim report goes on to make a number of other recommendations. It makes a recommendation to the Australian government to:

That's because mining companies in Western Australia—and Rio Tinto is not the only one—have participation agreements, and other agreements, that have gag clauses in them that stop people exercising their rights under, for example, our Racial Discrimination Act, our environmental protection laws or our human rights laws. That is appalling—absolutely appalling. So, even though the PKKP were raising objections and raising their concerns about this, they had no legal mechanism with which to act, because our ATSIHP Act, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984, is barely worth the paper it is written on. And recommendation 7 of the interim report says:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984

Recommendation 5 is:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984

Recommendation 6 is:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972

I urge all senators to read this report. It has many very important points that people need to read to see what's going on in this country. I agree with the title of this report: Never again. Never again.