Cr Bev Manton: “Land Rights in NSW – 25 years - Upwards and onwards”

Speech by NSWALC Chairperson Bev Manton
NSW Reconciliation Council
"Land Rights in NSW - 25 years - Upwards and onwards"

Surrey Hills, NSW
Saturday, November 15, 2008

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First, let me acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on whom we stand today, the Gadigal people and fellow members of today's speaker's panel.

Although it's drawing to a close, for me 2008, my first year as Chairperson of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, has been a momentus year.

It was the year in which I travelled to Canberra to hear the Prime Minister's National Apology to the Stolen Generations at Parliament House.

It was an extraordinary day.

I mention the national apology for one reason. With one simple word, Prime Minister Rudd changed the mood of this country. To me, it captured the spirit and movement of the People's Walk for Reconciliation across Sydney Harbour Bridge in 2000.

Prime Minister Rudd's sincere and heartfelt apology on behalf of the Nation showed a genuine desire to move forward together towards the future.

It also represented a clear statement of his desire as a nation to move forward as one people.

To me that is what Reconciliation is - moving forward as one people.

Twenty five years ago the then NSW Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Wran Government, Frank Walker, also took, in State terms, a step that was equally momentus.

It was a step that changed significantly opportunities for the Aboriginal people of New South Wales.

He introduced - and the Parliament passed - the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Rights Act. Yes, this year is the 25^th anniversary of the proclamation of land rights legislation in New South Wales.

Let no one underestimate its importance.

Today I want to delve further and explain the concept of Aboriginal Land Rights in New South Wales and in doing so explain the role of our individual, Local Aboriginal Land Councils within that concept.

This is necessary.

Believe me there are many even within the Aboriginal community - in particular our young people - and certainly most in the wider community, who have little understanding of the legislation, and what flows from it, including the powers and functions of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council.

Let me explain the preamble to the legislation, the purpose of land rights and the statutory objects and functions of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council.

Perhaps the most effective way of setting the scene is to quote what Frank Walker said when he introduced the legislation.

He said, and I quote:

"This proposed legislation takes the first step in this state towards redressing the injustice and neglect of real Aboriginal needs since Captain Phillip stepped upon the shore of Port Jackson in 1788.

"The Government has made a clear, unequivocal decision that land rights for Aborigines is the most fundamental initiative to be taken for the regeneration of Aboriginal culture and dignity and at the same time laying the basis for a self reliant and more secure economic future for our Continent's Aboriginal custodians".

One immediate effect that flowed from the proclamation of this legislation was that it repealed the Aborigines Act of 1966.

Mr Walker rightly told the Parliament that that Act was an act born of paternalism.

It's repeal saw the end of the now discredited policy of assimilation.

But it's also true to say that not everyone welcomed the proclamation of the new legislation.

It caused enormous controversy because many believed the Bill did not go far enough in implementing Land Rights - did not provide sufficient compensation for our dispossession and that it was introduced without sufficient consultation.

25 years on it's fair to say we did not get all we wanted. In politics when do you ever?

But when I look back over the hard won gains of the past 25 years we got a lot more than we ever had previously.

The compensatory regime enshrined in the Aboriginal Land Rights Act is a vehicle for the expression by our people of self determination and self governance.

It has delivered significant and valuable assets to the Aboriginal Land Council network and has provided our people with a degree of economic influence.

But one fundamental point needs to be appreciated.

Land Rights was never introduced as a panacea for all of the social, economic, political and cultural ills of our people.

It is not, and never was intended to be, a magic bullet in this regard. It was, as Frank Walker point out, a crucial "first step" to remedy 200 years of dispossession.

Twenty five years onwards the compensatory regime is just beginning to deliver real socio-economic benefit from the land base which has been accrued over the past quarter century.

However, I want to stress that seven rounds of amendments to the legislation that occurred between 1986 and 2006 have more and more shifted the transactional costs of land rights, and some aspects of service delivery, from State and Federal Governments onto the self-funded land council system.

It must also be acknowledged that none of these amendments have appreciably increased the accountability of government to Aboriginal people in New South Wales.

The return of land into Aboriginal ownership has been the sole form of compensation available under the Act for the past decade but validly claimed Crown land has been returned to Aboriginal people at a snail's pace.

But I'll return to that later.

Fundamentally, the objects of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council, are:

To improve, protect and foster the best interests of Aboriginal persons within New South Wales, and
To relieve poverty, sickness, suffering, distress, misfortune, destitution and helplessness of Aboriginal persons in New South Wales

We are also empowered to do such things as:

Acquire land on its own behalf or on behalf of, or to be vested in, Local Aboriginal Land Councils
Determine and approve/reject the terms and conditions of agreements proposed by Local Aboriginal Land Councils to allow mining or mineral exploration on Aboriginal land
Make claims on Crown lands, either on its own or at the request of Local Aboriginal Land Councils, and
With the agreement of the particular Local Aboriginal Land Council, manage any of the affairs of that Council
Make grants, lend money or invest money on behalf of Aborigines

We have other responsibilities, but I think the list I have given would, at face value, seem like a red light for us to improve the health and wellbeing of our people.

But they obscure a number of facts.

First, the NSWALC and the land council network has no statutory power to keep Governments (State or Federal) accountable for programs designed and delivered with the aim of improving the health and well being of our people.

No specific statutory mechanism exists for us to do so.

No funding was ever provided for the socio-economic and welfare roles that were originally assumed in the legislation, and by those who framed it.

Twenty five years on, no such social benefits or welfare funding has even been provided.

Yet land councils have valiantly borne the brunt of cost and responsibility shifting from all tiers of government.

We are, as I said, self-funding. Contrary to popular belief, and the misinformation often carried in some sections of the media, we have not received a penny of Government funding for more than a decade.

Let me explain further.

Under the legislation a NSWALC Statutory Investment Fund was established in 1983.

For fifteen years, from 1 January 1984 to 31 December 1998, the Act provided for guaranteed funding through the payment of an amount equivalent to 7.5 percent of NSW Land Tax ( on non residential land only, I repeat non-residential land only) to the NSW Aboriginal Land Council as compensation for land lost by the Aboriginal people of NSW.

During this period, half of the funds were available for land acquisition and administration.

The remainder was deposited into a statutory account to build a capital fund to provide ongoing funding in the future.

The total funds allocated from land taxes was $537 million, with a close to fifty fifty split between administration costs of the land council movement during that period and the balance of $268. 5 million deposited into the Statutory Fund.

Prudent management of those funds over the past decade has seen the value of this portfolio increase significantly - although like everyone else we've taken a bit of a beating over the last six months or so.

But it is from these invested funds that we have to find the money fund our administration costs and the costs of our 121 land councils.

Not quite the emphasis some media constantly take that that money simply sits in a bank account and grows. In fact last financial year we drew down $37.3 million to fund the operational expenditure of the land rights network.

Direct funding to local Aboriginal land councils was some $14 million while a significant amount of the balance also goes to the land rights movement in indirect funding.

Many Aboriginal land councils still have difficulty meeting their financial and reporting obligations and NSWALC must support those that are under-performing and supervise them closely.

We do so relatively successfully, despite the significant additional burden it throws onto the State body.

But our principal clients are our land councils.

Our core business is land, the return of land. After all, as one Aboriginal wit proclaimed recently 200 years ago we owned all of the land - now we own considerably less than two percent ( in NSW that is).

The core business of those individual Local Aboriginal Land Councils - or LALC's for short - is land management but many have expanded to include non-core areas.

These include:

Social housing
Social support
Economic development
Cultural and heritage work, and
Political representation

Many play a positive role in advocating for local constituents but, it must be conceded, a large number have performed poorly in some areas over the years due to inequitable and unjust responsibility allocation and cost shifting.

These divest resources away from core business and lead to operational difficulties which reflect poorly but unfairly on the entire land council system.

The new governance provisions of the Act have left l20 LALCs with more than 1,000 elected Board members and a minimum staff complement of 200 people. All must undergo governance training.

Each land council has separate reporting requirements. These include a requirement to develop individual community land and business plans and community benefit schemes, incorporating Social Housing Schemes.

Home maintenance is a significant and unfair burden

Totally, our LALC network owns and manages a social housing stock of more than 2,500 houses located on 60 separate reserves across NSW.

These came with the missions and reserves that were transferred from Aboriginal land Trusts - away from Government - into the control of individual LALC's.

Governments conveniently said the land was private land and the housing wasn't their responsibility.

Yet most of the houses were dilapidated and overcrowded.

The majority have never attracted one cent in recurrent Government funding unlike community or public housing which receives significant financial subsidy.

A travesty of justice,

Certainly

Tenants, justifiably, often refuse to pay high rents for often run down properties leaving LALCs to fulfill their responsibilities with limited rental income.

This is but one example of the inequity of the situation.

Many of those LALC's who manage former reserves are also burdened not only with normal costs associated with all other housing owners but the additional cost of providing essential infrastructure and services such as:

Water and sewerage
Roads
Street lighting
Garbage collect,
And the upkeep of large common areas that adjoin their lands.

Yet very few of the reserves have a formal town plan. Few have been properly surveyed.

Yet these houses on Aboriginal land comprises a third of all social housing stock in New South Wales. And they accommodate well over 12,000 people.

Many times task forces have said that this responsibility for social housing is not financially viable and must be subsidized on a recurrent basis.

Yet the situation doesn't change.

What does change is the health and well-being of our people.

For the worse, Dramatically.

Earlier this year Government department reports and surveys showed that the state of water and sewerage systems in many of our discrete communities was an absolute disgrace.

It was worse than third world

The NSW State Government then approached us to join with them in a partnership to change this.

By us I mean our governing council of nine elected councilors from nine regions throughout NSW. It was a huge dilemma.

We were newly elected and we knew many felt that this was clearly a State responsibility and not strictly one we should help fund.

We could have taken the easy way out and said no. We didn't.

We took the view that a situation that impacted so dramatically on the health and wellbeing of our people, particularly our young people, couldn't be ignored, Unanimously, and I think courageously, we decided to join this partnership.

It is a partnership that will cost us some $100 million over 25 years.

But what it will do is deliver is decent water and sewerage systems in over 60 discreet communities and just as importantly a system of ongoing maintenance and training.

Training that will involve the training of our people at the community level.

Training that will enable someone to maintain the systems once they are installed.

We our proud of this decision.

We are equally proud of our decision to also fund, from our invested portfolio, a $30 million Education Endowment Fund offering scholarships to Aboriginal people in NSW that fall outside of the scope and guidelines of existing schemes such as ABSTUDY.

We are just about to enter the second round of this program after being inundated with requests for scholarships in the first year. However, some ll5 people gained NSW ALC educational scholarships.

Under the wide-ranging criteria winners included

A Sydney student at the University of New South Wales studying for a Bachelor of Medicine
A Bass Hill student who is studying for a Bachelor of Physical Education
A Georgetown student who is studying for a Bachelor of Medical Radiation Science

But others included students with disabilities and mature aged students.

As a Land Council movement we are equally proud of the efforts of the great majority of our land councils.

Although significantly under-resourced they take on enormous responsibilities for a great many Aboriginal people. And as I said earlier their work load is increasing. One new imposition, and it is a difficult one, is how they deal with the pressure to adopt carbon credit trading.

I know you will appreciate for small, under-resourced organizations getting ones head around this issue is complex. Jumping in too early without knowing all of the facts could, for many of our local land councils, be disastrous. For some, however, it might hold good news.

We, as a State representative organization, are rightfully undertaking the task of getting the best possible advice for our members on this issue.

All, though, is not doom and gloom.

I said earlier that after 25 years of land rights there were solid signs of the system of land rights beginning to achieve significant socio-economic outcomes.

Not yet for all, but for a significant proportion.

We no longer hold our hand out to government for core funding and haven't done so for nearly a decade.

Partnerships extend beyond water and sewerage initiatives or initiatives such as Educational Endowment Funds.

They include major work to monitor the business and industry environments to identify suitable and viable commercial enterprise opportunities for our people.

We want - and are - pursuing partnerships with key industry groups to build commercial and economic sustainability for our people

We pursue them every day.

In 2008 alone we were involved in more than 80 proposed or completed land dealings.

This involved land with an estimated value of more than $200 million.

These land dealings ranged from the sale of individual lots owned by individual land councils to rezoning and residential subdivision of major land holdings.

It also involved dealing with applications for retail development of land, sand mining and exploration of petroleum drilling and LALC land.

Tourism is another area which many LALCs are now looking at.

While I cannot talk of individual projects I can assure you there are many of them.

We are moving forward. But there is much still to do.

I said earlier I would come back to the issue of successful claims over land.

This is a source of considerable frustration and annoyance for the whole of the land council movement.

Let me explain further.

As at 30 June of this year there had been a total of 81,637 hectares of land granted since the enactment of the Land Rights Act in 1983, which is less than one percent of the total land mass in New South Wales.

And as I emphasized earlier, land is now the sole form of compensation available for dispossession under the Act. Also as at 30 June there have been 16,083 land claims lodged since l983. A total of just 2, 304 (14 percent) have been granted. 4,276 have been refused.

9,107 land claims still await determination despite the fact that several hundred of them were lodged more than eight years ago.

Yes more than eight years ago.

The time taken to determine these outstanding land claims is what causes the level of annoyance, anger - and extra work - for land councils.

The number of granted land claims awaiting survey and Certificate of Title issue by the Department of Lands is also a continued source of concern.

The delays deprive land councils of the use of the land granted for a lengthy period of time.

We are currently doing all that we can to see a significant improvement in lessening this totally unacceptable backlog.

I am sure you will wish us well in our endeavours.

Just, as I am also sure, that you will agree that before any nation occupied the way Australia was occurred can truly move forward and have a reconciled future it must come to terms with its past - and deal with the results of that past.

Australia must accept that the health and wellbeing of my people is irretrievably linked to our legitimate claim to our land.

Our land and our culture is our survival.

Those hundreds of thousands of other Australians who support that unstoppable force that is reconciliation will respect our rights and our fight to obtain them.

In essence it is Australia's unique "fair go" in practice.

Thankfully, most Australians live by that.

Unfortunately some still don't. They seek to divide, rather than unite. They practice racism, not reconciliation. They trade in fear and in ignorance.

Those who like reconciliation are the exception. We want a united and a reconciled Australia,

I hope we in the Aboriginal Land Rights movement have your support to achieve our little slice of justice.

Thank you.