Land Rich, Dirt Poor? Aboriginal land rights, policy failure and policy change from the colonial era to the Northern Territory Intervention

Abstract

This thesis examines the development of Aboriginal land policy in the Northern Territory of Australia, and uses a policy dynamics approach to analyse the policy decision making in this area over long time periods. This approach is useful in helping to uncover key areas of continuity, and gradual change, in Aboriginal land policy, since the early colonial era, and it draws attention to the ways in which policies framed around Aboriginal land rights in the current era have retained links to the earliest policies framed during invasion and settlement. The thesis argues that path dependency has been a very significant feature of Aboriginal land policy, and the Howard Coalition government’s recent amendments to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 in 2006 and 2007 are better understood as a part of a much longer policy trajectory. The thesis identifies five distinct (though overlapping) temporal sequences: (a) the early colonial era, marked by fear, brutality and misunderstanding between settlers and Indigenous people; (b) the humanitarian era, shaped by the Buxton committee report of 1837 which called for the creation of Aboriginal reserves as both compensation and a form of protection; (c) the later protection era which saw early humanitarian impulses turn to a greater focus on segregation and control; (d) the assimilation era, where reserves were closed in the southern parts of Australia, with the expectation that Aboriginal people join white society, while extensive reserves were retained in the north where Aboriginal people were understood to retain traditional customs and lifestyles; and (e) the land rights era, where activist campaigns in response to prominent conflicts over non-Indigenous use of Aboriginal land for pastoral and mining resulted in governments converting reserves into Aboriginal-owned land, under inalienable communal title. Two critical junctures, in the form of government reviews, are pinpointed as moments where substantial policy change has been rendered possible: the Buxton committee in 1837 and the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission led by Justice Edward Woodward in 1973-4. Outside these critical junctures, policy development has been incremental. The thesis explores the shifting frames used by policy makers around Indigenous land from the colonial era to the present day with respect to four themes: the purpose of allocating sections of land for Aboriginal use or recognition of ownership, access to Indigenous land, difference in terms of Indigenous expectations of ownership and relationship with land, and the governance or power to make decisions with respect to Indigenous land. It traces these themes from the initial formulations of Aboriginal rights to land in terms of humanitarian protection, social justice and economic development in the early colonial era, through to the rise of the land rights movement in the 1960s and the current focus on marketisation, economic development and the push to use Indigenous land to alleviate disadvantage. Careful tracing of each of these themes over time illuminates the path dependency which dominates in this policy area, and isolates the two critical junctures where substantial leaps in problem definition are discernible. The thesis considers Aboriginal land rights policy in the Northern Territory in the light of the current dominant debate around policy failure in Indigenous affairs, and reflects on the Howard government’s strategic use of the frame of policy failure to explain the need for the government to “wind back” land rights. The thesis uses contemporary theory concerning the politics of evaluation (including emphasis on short term contingency and political strategy) and the political use of evidence and expertise in policy making to explain the development of policy on Aboriginal land through each identified temporal sequence, up to and including the most recent sequence spanning the Howard government’s 2006 amendments and the implementation of the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007. The thesis observes the erratic and selective use of expert knowledge of Aboriginal people and their economic, social, spiritual and political relationship with the land, and the persistent triumph of settler ideology over Aboriginal interests in land policy.