Indigenous

According to a report in today’s Cairns Post, the Federal Court of Australia has made a consent determination, handing over a major management role of 126,000 hectares in the Daintree, to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji native title holders.

The determination has resulted in a major reconfiguration of land ownership and management arrangements across a complex array of World Heritage tenures.

The report states that 33,300-hectares of state-owned land has been declared for the exclusive occupation and use of the native title-holders. 96,600-hectares has been recognised for non-exclusive rights, including rights to the water and to fish and hunt in the water, the right to camp, hunt, gather resources for personal (non-commercial) needs and to conduct ceremonies. 16,500-hectares of Aboriginal freehold land has also been declared for residential and economic development.

The determination took over thirteen years to finalise. A range of benefits, negotiated under the broader indigenous land use package, will include a greater role in managing parks and reserves and a veritable doubling of national park estate between Cooktown and Mossman.

According to Zoie Jones of ABC News, University of Western Sydney Researcher, Sarah James has found that attitudes to climbing Uluru have changed, and the time might be right to close the climb altogether.

Interesting that it has taken so long to come to such a reckoning, when Uluru – Kata Tjuta National Park became only the second property in the world to be listed as a cultural landscape in 1994.

Australia nominated the property in recognition of its cultural heritage importance and committed to manage those values in accordance with its international obligations as defined within the World Heritage Convention.

The fact that it has showcased for the world its reluctance to prohibit climbing, despite World Heritage obligations and also the stated wishes of the traditional owners, is indisputable.

The progress of the Cape York Conservation Agenda is carving a deepening rift between indigenous interests and those of metropolitan-based ‘green’ groups. Whilst the former lobbies for social engagement within real economies, the latter crusades for an often over-simplified notion of environmental protection. Over-arching this ideological tussle, government verily executes authority for the political rewards of popular support.

Considered a significant conservation achievement by the Wilderness Society, Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act was declared in 2005 for the stated purpose of preserving the natural values of rivers that have all, or almost all, of their natural values intact (in Cape York could have sufficed).

The more recently introduced Cape York Peninsula Heritage Bill 2007, purports to provide for the identification and cooperative and ecologically sustainable management of significant natural and cultural values of Cape York Peninsula. It also restores rights to the exercise or enjoyment of native title, under the amended provisions of the Wild Rivers Act and establishes a new class of protected area under the Nature Conservation Act 1992; namely national parks (Cape York Peninsula Aboriginal land).

The Queensland Government has offered an indigenous economic and employment package, including confirmation of 100 indigenous ranger positions and support for indigenous arts, culture and tourism enterprises. Of course, the nature of this support will greatly influence the outcome of the package.

Current arrangements on Cape York merely provide the public with an illusion of conservation for significant natural and cultural values. Reserves have been declared and land management agencies provided with statutory authority and budgetary allocations, but much of Cape York’s natural and cultural heritage is excluded from subsidized economies and tourism markets tend to go where the getting is more profitable.

The Cape Tribulation section of the Daintree National Park is a relevant example: Half-a-million visitors per year cross the Daintree River ferry, but commercial activity entitlements are almost exclusively held by operators from the abundantly developed accommodation hubs of Port Douglas and Cairns, whilst independent travelers are completely subsidized to enjoy access entitlements without any payment whatsoever.

The full gamut of government influence, including permit allocation and moratoria, subsidization on a tenure-exclusive basis and ecologically protective development impediments on non-government tenures, ensures that very little economic benefit goes to the community within the attraction. This paradox is fundamentally important to Australia.

If isolated communities are required to conserve their natural and cultural heritage values, without reverting the landscape to the kind of conflicting development that underpins the economies of regional accommodation centres, they must be provided with prosperous conservation economies.

Such a requirement would be achieved with far greater success, with the removal of contradictory influences. Indeed, if Australia was to invert its influences, so that commercial activity entitlements were exclusively issued to local operators and full-cost-recovery was required on public reserves only, whilst off-reserve conservation land-uses were subsidized to the full extent to provide visitors with the illusion of free-entry, change in tourism economies would swiftly swing in favour of the communities at the centre of conservation significance.

I have long held the view that the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia is self-defeating. Belonging to the same landscape; bound together in territorial respect for the aspirations, life and memory of our own constituents; surely it can be agreed that the dislocation of indigenous peoples from their living cultural landscape is as abhorrent as the eviction of non-indigenous Australians from Australia.

Nevertheless, Australia had little choice but to refuse to ratify the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by its General Assembly last week.

ABC News quotes Prime Minister Howard as saying, “We do not support the notion that you should have customary law taking priority over the general law of the country.”

Upon closer consideration, however, elements of the declaration reveal far more insurmountable implications.

Article 28 (in particular):

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that can include restitution or, when this is not possible, of a just, fair and equitable compensation, for the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent.

2. Unless otherwise freely agreed upon by the peoples concerned, compensation shall take the form of lands, territories and resources equal in quality, size and legal status or of monetary compensation or other appropriate redress.

Mr. Gerhardt Pearson (Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation CEO), Professsor Tim Flannery (2007 Australian of the Year) and Ms. Tania Major (2007 Young Australian of the Year) introduced the Cape York Conservation Agenda at a public seminar yesterday, at the Shangri La Hotel in Cairns.