Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

Chapter 2.2: Challenges at the National Policy Level
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interference.
Aboriginal Australians are over-governed by a bureaucracy that is unable
or unwilling to allow Aboriginal people to make their own decisions or have
control over their own corporations, thereby denying them their right to
plan properly and invest in the future for themselves, their families and
their communities. At the same time, governments continue to doggedly
contest traditional owners’ connection to country to settle native title
claims, denying them crucial links to their past, their culture and their
identity. Paternalism remains alive and well in Australian Indigenous
Affairs and it continues to be a source of anger and frustration for many
Aboriginal people.
Although Australia’s stolen generations eventually received an apology
from Prime Minister Rudd, traditional owners continue to seek justice
through recognition of their rights to traditional lands.
If we pursue the analogy with Prime Minister Rudd’s apology, we should
be asking ourselves how the native title system can say sorry to those
people who are deemed by the courts to have lost connection to their
traditional lands and resources. What we would need is an apology for
the Social Darwinism that lives on in our native title jurisprudence. This
is a fundamental issue for the resolution of native title claims and it was
put very well by Prime Minister Keating in his Redfern speech of 1992.
According to Keating, the issue turns on recognition—recognition of who
did the dispossessing, who took the traditional land, and who broke the
continuities of law and custom. 34
Back in 1992, we heard that the Mabo ruling marked an historic turning
point that would become the basis of a new relationship between
indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Yes it was an historic
turning point, and although we’ve taken a few positive steps since then,
opportunities to acknowledge the positive aspects of native title—such as
reconciliation and economic opportunity—are still being lost. Everyone is
repeating the mantra of “negotiation not litigation,” yet there are a large
number of native title claims being choked by litigation.
Mabo
In 1992, the Mabo decision 35 determined that indigenous peoples had their
own system of law and ownership before European settlement, ultimately
recognizing that indigenous communities have native title over their
traditional lands. Since then many Federal Court decisions have impacted