(You can hear this at http://www.4shared.com/audio/AdeiVl22/Ghillar_on_ILC.html)
By Michael Ghillar Anderson
The way the government’s Indigenous Land Corporation is handing over land is causing confrontation with Aboriginal communities right across this country. It’s causing all sorts of political wrangling, a lot of personal angst and a lot of social unrest.
The original concept of the Indigenous Land Corporation (ILC) when Labor prime minister Paul Keating introduced this act was to purchase land for Aboriginal people who would never have any chance of proving native title under the terms established by the Native Title Act, particularly those in the south-eastern regions of Australia and lower portions of Western Australia, where non-Aboriginal people have sort of expanded their population and taken over land.
Those who drafted the original native title act agreed with Keating on the need to enable persons affected by settlement to the greatest extent, that we have in the south, to get their land back through a different process.
That process was to introduce the Indigenous Land Corporation, which would allow them to buy land for Aboriginal people displaced as a result of invasion of the British.
It was originally intended that traditional owners were to apply to this organisation - and I emphasise the words traditional owners.
In the last 10 years, somebody in their - I suppose - centralist idea put up a proposal that they need to change that so that any organisation can apply to purchase land for Aboriginal programming.
I think this is a waste simply because of the fact that it doesn’t address the needs of those Aboriginal people who have been displaced and forced to live in fringe-dwelling situations as they have been doing for the last 100 and something years.
The ILC changed or had an amendment to the act and the amendment was that anybody can apply.
Now this is creating all sorts of problems, because if you’ve got Aboriginal organisations applying to purchase land in areas where they don’t belong, buying land for economic and social purposes without including in that traditional owners who have a say over that country.
This is causing all sorts of political wrangling, it’s causing a lot of personal angst , it’s causing a lot of social unrest because there are religious sites that Aboriginal people say are theirs, that some social organisations have applied for social purposes, and they’re using these properties without fully understanding the meaning of the country.
Not only that, they’re saying these people who are applying to buy these lands within country don’t even come from those territories.
That in itself is a fraud on the Aboriginal people and a fraud against common sense and goodwill; it’s causing confrontation with Aboriginal communities right across this country.
And I think to do that against Aboriginal people is in itself absolutely corrupt to the core.
We’re a pretty defenceless people in the main and we’re trying to do our best in a society that’s oppressing us; and then to have an Aboriginal organisation, or an organisation that has Indigenous in its name, to be doing this - that’s what I’d call a fraud.
There are traditional owners around the country where land is being released by the ILC.
The ILC state how many properties they transferred back to Aboriginal people but you should also have a look at the conditions upon which they gave lands back to those people.
Let me use an example. I’ve had discussions with various Aboriginal groups who were negotiating with the ILC to give land back. One condition for the transfer of land back to one particular property is to give the ILC the right to repossess, based upon any complaint from any one individual.
If there is some sort of query about your organisation, they demand the right to step in and take possession of the land and take possession of the organisation based on a single complaint.
If they don’t sign up to that agreement, the people won’t get the land transferred back to them and divested to them.
That’s dictatorship . Anyone in the world can run a complaint and it’s fairly well establishes that in regard to Aboriginal people you only have to ring up once and government will step in because, they say, ‘oh well, now you have division, we’ll take it back off you’.
That’s not a civil society; these people are under threat and so they’re not going to sign up on that and it’s going to create a problem.
Take the example of us taking over our land at Mogila Station in northwest NSW, which was already divested.
There was 25,000 dollars worth of fencing gear in a shed a week before we took over, and then 25,000 dollars worth of fencing gear in the week we took over disappeared off the place and we had a letter given to us by the ILC saying ‘we will give you 25,000 dollars to replace that fencing gear’.
That was ten years ago and we keep reminding them of the fact that that disappeared. The Aboriginal people in our community know who took that 25,000 dollars worth of fencing gear.
They were former directors of the company who came in with their trailers and took the 25,000 dollars worth of fencing gear, and the ILC have never ever in the last ten years given us a cheque or replaced it, as they said in writing to us that they would.
There’s also complaints about other properties by people prepared to testify and give evidence that they’ve had bores shut down and bulldozed down and sealed up with concrete in southwest Queensland; they’ve had movable relocatable houses removed off the property by the ILC people before they gave the land back to the people and the people couldn’t understand why they would want to take those houses off there; they’ve had airstrips where a bulldozer’s come in with its ripper on the back and ripped up an airstrip on one of the properties before they handed it back. There’s lots of complaints about this.
What we want to do is get the ILC back on track where it’s going to work for Aboriginal people and not be a government agent.
It’s supposed to be working for Aboriginal people but we need to see that come back into play.
We need more interaction by the ILC with the Aboriginal community and with the constituency that they say they represent.
If they’re a government body, tells us that they’re a government body and that they’re only doing this thing from the whim of a government’s wish to shut down any international criticisms.
The CEO David Galvin knows the circumstances of Mogila, he was the director at the time and he has full knowledge of all of this, so all we need is some honest leadership on these issues.
Aboriginal people are not asking for too much, all we want to do is have some honest leadership here and accountability, but the accountability has got to be to the Aboriginal people because after all there’s 40 million dollars plus being used in the name of Aboriginal people and we need Aboriginal people to see the benefits of this.
We don’t need ILC setting themselves up, running all these organisations , running these lands, as ILC trading as, we need Aboriginal people on the ground running these places and we need the ILC to work with Aboriginal people on this.
We don’t need ILC appointing directors and taking control and manipulating it from their bureaucratic offices.