The Guardian 27 April, 2005
Aboriginal communal ownership
not to blame for poverty
Prime Minister John Howard made a very rare visit to a remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye recently. Situated 350km from Darwin, the 2500 strong community has no doctor. It is impoverished and an average of 17 people live in each house.
It was during this brief visit that John Howard signalled the changes in Aboriginal land rights by abolishing communal title in favour of individual long-term leases or private ownership. “I’m not talking here about reducing the opportunities for Indigenous people”, he said. “I’m talking about giving them the same opportunities as the rest of their fellow Australians”.
That’s not how Aboriginal people see it. The Koori Mail (April 20) told of the real situation on the ground. It wrote:
The Central Land Council (CLC) has poured cold water on Prime Minister John Howard’s home ownership plan for Aborigines, saying those living in central Australia “simply cannot afford home ownership”, with the average income for Aborigines living in the central remote region being $9,133 a year.
CLC director David Ross says that while his organisation is not opposed to private home ownership, hailing the scheme as the end of disadvantage for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory is a “simplistic debate” which would only “cause chaos to communities already handicapped by extreme disadvantage”.
“The first assumption that is being made is that land rights are a cause of poverty and an impediment to individual home ownership”, Mr Ross said.
“This is patently not the case, as is graphically and tragically illustrated in the Northern Territory”.
“While nearly half the NT is Aboriginal land, the other half is not. Aboriginal communities on non-Aboriginal land suffer just as extreme cases of disadvantage and poverty as those on Aboriginal land.
“Secondly, inalienable Aboriginal freehold title does not exclude private home ownership.”
Like in Canberra — where people are on long leases rather than freehold title — people can obtain leases on land that is owned by land trusts. There are many cases of these leases negotiated by the CLC for commercial interests.
“Thirdly, the reality is that many Aboriginal people in our region are simply not in a position to consider a mortgage. The average income of Aboriginal people living in the central remote region is $9,133, or 25 per cent of the average annual income of a non-indigenous person in the region”.
Mr Ross said the way out of poverty is through education and health, not crippling debt.
“As the case of Wadeye shows, for every dollar spent on a kid’s education in Darwin, only 25 cents gets spent on a kid in Wadeye”, Mr Ross said.
“There is a direct correlation between how much is spent on a child’s education and their subsequent adult income levels”.
Living standards
“Not surprisingly, the issue of individual home ownership is not raised as an aspiration of traditional landowners living on Aboriginal land. Perhaps if living standards and income levels were to rise, it may become an aspiration for future generations.
“Solutions to the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal people from the social, political and economic mainstream are multi-layered and complex, but it is ludicrous and simplistic to lay the blame on land tenure”.
Mr Ross said the CLC had proposed reforms to the Land Rights Act which include simplifying leasing arrangements, improving access to public housing on Aboriginal land through housing leases, and further expedition of mining procedures and governance issues.
“The CLC is strongly of the view that the key to increasing economic development does not lie in abolishing the customary tenure system; it lies in adapting this system to resolve any specific and genuine problems with the consent of title-holders”, Mr Ross said.
“It would seem that the original rationale for land rights — the recognition of Aboriginal people’s perpetual spiritual ties to their land, and restitution for past injustices, have been deliberately swept under the carpet.
“Suddenly, land rights are blamed for entrenched poverty, alienation from the ‘real’ economy and extreme social dysfunction in most Aboriginal communities”.
Acknowledgement to Koori Mail