The dead heart of the Wik backlash
by Mark Horstman
The bush and the outback are potent symbols in the collective environmental consciousness of Australlans. It is a fact not lost on the State Governments and the famers' lobby groups in their campaign to oppose native title. Their appeals for 'certainty' in elastic-sided drawls invoke the sacred images of pioneers battling against the elements, the city slickers - and the natives.
Many environmentalists and Aborigines believe the pastoralists and Premiers are talking through their Akubras. Their strident calls for the extinguishment of the common law rights of Abonginal people will do more than destroy reconciliation and compound dispossession. The proposed wholesale upgrading of pastoral leases to erase native title provides a windfall for leaseholders, and seriously threatens the environments of nearly half of te continent.
Land under pastoral leases covers 42 percent of the area of Australia, and supports a significant proportion of Australia's biological diversity (conservation reserves, by comparison, cover less than 7 percent). The leases to such vast areas held by only a few thousand people among them state and federal politicians, and politcal party officials - and several large companies. The pastoral lands of Australia are owned by the pubilc and leassd for the specific purpose of extensive grazing of sheep and cattle on vegetation. Leasehold tenure is a land management tool, a licence issued by governments to regulate various land uses, such as clearing. The rentals paid by leaseholders are so low that they do not cover the cost of their administration.
The leasehold system was developed in Australia as a way of controlling land use in areas where squatters had originally taken illegal possession of Crown land. Through conditions attached to the lease, governments have an important role in ensuring protection of the land and in managing the range of activities that pastoralists can engage in. Leasehold was also a useful form of tenure for areas where the best use for the land had not yet been determined.
A 1995 report by the CSIRO's Division of Wildlife and Ecology, "Landcover disturbance over the Australian Continent - a contemporary assessment", is one of the first environmental health checks for the entire surface of Australia. The report shows that natonal clearing rates on freehold land are twice as high as on leasehold land. Upgrading leases towards freehold removes land use from environmental regulation, such as in Queensland, where tree clearing controls apply only to leasehold and not to freehold.
The broad Australian community depends on the health of environments under pastoral lease for many benefits - the catchments of rivers for our water, the protection of productive soils, the animals and plants unique to Australia, the outback that we like to visit and want protected. A Federal response to the Wik decision that enables extensive lease upgrading to extinguish native title would massively undermine Australia's environmental health by removing the public's interest in the management of land.
The President of the Queensland National Party makes no bones about his support for freeholding, claiming that "state ownership of land makes no more sense than state ownership of most other business assets". This is startling to hear from a state where more than half of the land area is under leasehold tenure and public ownership. The Borbidge Govemment has tabled amendments to land legislation to enable the conversion of all leasehold land to freehold, at giveaway prices for title leaseholders.
The National Party and the National Farmers Federation are perpetuating the myth that pastoral leases are equlvalent to private ownership or freehold, and that the Wik decision is depriving pastoralists of their "right" to exclusive possession. Some even claim that leases are some kind of freehold on lay-by, with lease payments 'buying' the ultimate transfer of land into private ownership.
In reality, however, a pastoral lease is a lease to graze hard-hooved animals on public land nothing more, nothing less. The certainty that pastoralists are entitled to enjoy is limited to the duration and terms of their current leases.
But to appease the relentless calls for extinguishment, the Prime Ministers ten-point plan proposes to amend the Native Title Act to apply the definition of "primary production" to all pastoral leases in Australia. In a press conference (28 Apnl 1997), the Prime Minister made the extraordinary statement that 'primary production' is "a very wide definifon indeed ... that goes far beyond pastoral activities that are currently sanctioned under pastoral leases ... those activities wilI be able to be carried on without any let or hindrance from either native title claimants or indeed any other sectlon of the AustraAian communty." (emphasis added).
If passed by the Senate, this amendment of the Native Title Act would allow States to upgrade pastoral leases to a new form of tenure that allows a much wider range of land uses with no public recourse, akin to freehold title. If the Prime Minister meant what he said, the proposal would alienate land not only from its traditional owners, but the entire Australian community as well. The property rights of native title holders would be extinguished by encouraging land uses inconsistent with Aboriginal uses.
The capacity of governments to act in the public interest by adjusting stocking rates, setting logging rates, requirlng land rehabilitation, protecting endangered species, and reestablishing or conserving wildlife corridors and riparian vegetation, would be removed. The proposals would allow unsustainable land uses such as broad-scale land clearing, intensive irrigated agriculture, native forest logging, aquaculture and unregulated tourism to occur on an as-of-rght basis.
New kinds and levels of threats would be introduced to the ecological integrity and biological diversity of the Australian outback, already damaged by more than a century of sheep and cattle grazing. The rate of mammal extinctions in the Australian rangelands is already the highest In the world. Since 1788, teenty medium-sized mammals and their habitats have disappeared due to a combinatlon of scrub clearance, trampling by domestic stock, overgrazing, soil erosion, changed fire regimes, and feral animals.
Some argue that private ownership protects the environment more effciently than govemment regulation. One has only to look at the case of one Queensland developer, who had 42,000 hectares of pastoral lease converted to freehold and bulldozed millions of trees into the headwaters of the Mltchell River, to see how private ownership does not always act in the public interest
By 'rewarding' leaseholders with upgraded title regardless of their previous and current performance in resource management, the success of regional environmental strategies funded by the billion dollar National Heritage Trust will be impaired. Upgrading leases may increase the speculative value of properties, pricing them out of the range of state and federal agencies seeking to acquire land for new national parks in the National Reserve System.
Currently the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is reviewing Australla's environmental performance and preparing a report. In a presentation to the OECD review team, the ACF warned that the state and federal govemments of Australia do not appear to be aware of the serious environmental consequences of the ten-point plan on native title.
The 29 members.of the OECD are among Australia's most important economic and trading partners, and the review process demonstrates the OECD's recognition that environmental matters must be integrated with economic decision-making. The proposed ten-point plan is a knee-jerk political response that is economically reckless, socially unjust, and environmentally irresponsible. If Australia continues to make decislons that ignore long-term environmental and social consequences, our country will come under increasing scrutiny from the international community.
The effective freeholding of leases, under the guise of a Wik response, would be the biggest land grab since 1770, and represents the most radical transformation of the land management system in this continent since colonisation. It drastically weakens the ability of our national and state governments to look after Australia's environment ... for all of us.
Systematic extinction of native title would destroy the opportunities for negotiated regional agreements about land justice, economic development, and environmental protection. It would also hasten the demise of the Australian rangeland ecosystems that are the natural and cultural heritage of Aborigines and non-Aborigines alike.