Patrick Dodson (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

DODSON () (): I rise to speak on the response to the Juukan Gorge inquiry. I was a member of the committee that did the inquiry. On Thursday, the Minister for the Environment and Water tabled the government's response to the interim and the final reports of the inquiry into the destruction of 46,000-year-old caves and Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The destruction of the rock shelters at Juukan Gorge was a wake-up call for the nation It was absolutely necessary that the parliament thoroughly interrogated how such an atrocity could occur within existing legal frameworks. As a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, we had the important task of finding out what went wrong. We needed to understand how to stop it from happening again. I want to acknowledge the resilience and the strength of the PKKP throughout this inquiry. Their integrity and capacity to leverage opportunity by participating even when they had every right to be disengaged has been commendable.

As a committee, we adopted a unique process to ensure cultural safety for witnesses and to show respect for what had been lost. We went on country to hear directly from the people so tragically affected by the needless destruction of culture and the causing of pain to themselves. We held roundtables so that hearings were more accessible and less formal and encouraged conversations and knowledge sharing. As a result, all the committee members could see and feel in person the deep impact of lost culture. I commend the work of my fellow committee members, particularly chairman Warren Entsch, Warren Snowdon and Rachel Siewert for their care and commitment to this inquiry.

The inquiry's interim and final reports demonstrated quite clearly that this incident was endemic of a broken cultural heritage system. Rio Tinto's failures were appalling and systematic of a 'don't care about culture' approach. But they were also legally entitled to do what they did. This destruction could happen anywhere, by any mining or development company and even by governments. There are still existing section 18 notices under the Western Australian Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act that are active in Western Australia, and there are sites that are just as much at risk. We currently have a system that doesn't protect First Nations culture but equally isn't clear for the proponents of development. We have a scheme that allows destruction of heritage that runs very close to destroying evidence of 60,000 years of First Nations history. While it is legal, proponents should not presume that they have a social licence to cause harm within an existing broken system. In public protests and outrage, Australians showed what occurred at Juukan Gorge should not have been legal and was definitely not moral. They must adopt processes of free, prior and informed consent. They must do better.

I'm proud the Albanese government has accepted seven of the eight recommendations to reform the Australian cultural heritage system. The future cultural heritage system needs to be strong, and it needs to protect that culture for our families and our communities. We have committed to developing standalone cultural heritage legislation in the future. It will be developed in partnership with the First Nations Heritage Protection Alliance. It will holistically adopt reforms to address the existing flaws. In this co-design process, we're working through the final recommendation about ongoing portfolio responsibilities. Federal leadership on this is critical to sustaining the preservation and protection of our ancient cultural heritage. That is why there must be minimum standards in federal legislation for states and territories to live up to. Those minimum standards will be rigorously adopted in our future standalone Commonwealth cultural heritage legislation. That is because there has to be a floor—not only aspiration—if we're to protect culture.

Many of the cultural heritage protections are currently to the detriment of the free, prior and informed consent of First Nations peoples. Clauses that enable such disregard to exist, such as section 18 in the Western Australian heritage act, should be rooted out and replaced with positive provisions. The operations of our future legislation should not be constructed with commercial obligations which force First Nations peoples to negotiate under duress. We found there were clauses in these negotiations that, basically, amounted to putting people's right to express their concerns at risk. We need to ensure that negotiations between First Nations people and resource development companies are not conducted so that compensation is simply to offset the cost of operations. The new regime needs to set the expectations for resource developers to be that they need to win the social licence from traditional owners and the public, not find ways to work around the statutory requirements. First Nations cultural heritage is precious. It is interconnected to who we are as a community. It is the flipside of the commercial bottom line.

I am proud that this government will address the long overdue reform. The PKKP's strength throughout the inquiry will lead to greater protections for all First Nations cultural heritage across these lands. My hope is that we do justice to the PKKP's resilience with real reform to ensure the destruction we saw at Juukan Gorge is never allowed to happen again. If we continue to allow it to happen, it will be the way to incrementally devalue, destroy and eradicate the presence of the Aboriginal peoples of these lands.