1. Indigenous communities, miners and the state in Australia

Economic globalisation, as noted in the previous chapter, has served Australia well in recent years. Until 2008 this rich developed country was in the grip of an export-oriented resources boom. Even as much of the country was in severe drought, the economy continued to expand uninterrupted for 15 years. Australia, a country of only 20 million people, is the world’s fifteenth largest economy. This good economic fortune has not been shared by all Australians. The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) (2006) notes that 60 per cent of minerals operations in Australia have neighbouring Indigenous communities, but is concerned that the Australian Government is not doing enough to support the development of Indigenous representative structures or investing enough in community infrastructure and social services in remote and regional Indigenous communities. The MCA has identified a need for 70 000 additional employees by 2015 and an opportunity for an alliance between government, the private sector and Indigenous communities that will allow social, employment and business opportunities in mining regions to be taken up. While 2008–09 has seen a substantial number of job losses in the mining sector as a result of the global recession, demand for mining workers is likely to rapidly increase during the next phase of global economic growth. As noted in Chapter 1, an optimistic employment outcome is shared by the Australian Employment Covenant, although it too might be dampened somewhat in reality by the global financial crisis. Nevertheless, in recent years the MCA has shifted its rhetorical emphasis from litigating native title to building sustainable Indigenous communities.

This perspective can be contrasted with the somewhat paternalistic state approach to Indigenous engagement with the mining industry—promulgating a monolithic and mainstream development approach and trajectory. Historically, wealth creation for most Australians has been predicated on expropriation of Aboriginal lands, initially for agriculture and then also for mining from the nineteenth century. In the 1970s, new and progressive land rights laws in the Northern Territory saw much land returned to Aboriginal people, but without mineral and other resource rights. At most, Aboriginal traditional owners were accorded free prior informed consent provisions, but even these could be overridden by national interest provisions.

Since then, and despite the 1992 Mabo No. 2 Australian High Court decision and native title laws, Indigenous resource rights have been diluted: the Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth) (NTA) framework provides a statutory right to negotiate but no requirement for Indigenous consent to mine. In the last decade, and especially between 2004 and 2007, the Howard Government controlled both Houses of Parliament and moved to disempower Indigenous communities and to depoliticise their institutions. Counter to emerging international conventions, especially those in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (paradoxically supported by the Rudd Government on 3 April 2009) special Indigenous rights to land, livelihoods and resources are not given much support by the Australian state.

The dominant development approach is now focused on statistical equality for Indigenous Australians. An emergent narrative has looked to pillory the past policies of ‘self determination’ as the cause of the contemporary Indigenous absolute and relative socioeconomic disadvantage that can be tracked with statistical social indicators from each five-yearly census since 1971 (Altman, Biddle and Hunter 2008). The new emphasis in situations where there is mining activity is to emphasise the development opportunity that this presents to Indigenous communities.

The Indigenous response to this development focus has been mixed. In some situations mainstream opportunity has been embraced, in others fiercely opposed: to some extent the two extremes have resulted from the absence of an alternate development discourse where diverse Indigenous views about development can gain a legitimate hearing. Such extremes have also been structured by the nature of statutory provisions for engagement that provide incentive to leverage benefit from adversarial opposition. The absence of support for alternative livelihood options has contributed too, with Indigenous communities often facing the choice between mining or welfare dependence—and increasingly even welfare is being withdrawn if the mining option is not taken up.

The historical legacy of neglect, poor health, poor housing and poor education will make Indigenous economic and social integration into the mainstream mining sector extremely difficult. Somewhat paradoxically, to be in a position to reclaim traditional lands, claimant groups under the NTA framework must demonstrate before the courts continuous connection to the land and the maintenance of custom. At the same time active engagement with the mainstream mining sector could jeopardise the maintenance of custom and connection bases for claim, while the latest case law indicates that mining leases extinguish native title and that the ‘bundle of rights’ that constitute native title do not include contemporary commercial mineral rights.^[1]

This chapter examines the development situation of Indigenous people in Australia, focusing on the interactions between them and mining sector multinational corporations in a developed nation state; and the mediating, regulating and limiting role fulfilled by state governmentality. In a somewhat inconsistent manner that will be investigated, the Australian state—that is committed to economic liberalism in such processes—seems to be voraciously pursuing a strategy to further disempower Indigenous people in an extremely uneven power relationship.

Initially, I will provide an analysis that focuses separately, and at a general level, on the historic and current approaches of the state, miners and Indigenous people to economic development. I will then draw more specifically but briefly on case study material from the three major mines: Yandicoogina in the Pilbara, Western Australia; Ranger (and the adjoining Jabiluka prospect) bordering Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory); and the Century mine in the Gulf region of north Queensland. These three major resource development projects respectively mine iron ore, uranium and zinc and lead.

Whether the opportunities presented by these major mines on Aboriginal land have generated development outcomes, and according to whose criteria, is a major issue that animates the analytical section on development contestation. The notions of ‘power’ and ‘identity’ loom large in this analysis. A final section challenges the currently dominant view of development focused on ‘practical reconciliation’ (a term coined by the Howard Government largely to discredit the symbolic aspects of reconciliation) and Closing the Gap (that is, socioeconomic equality) by exploring an alternate view that emphasises choice, self determination and cultural continuity, possibly at the expense of material prosperity (Altman and Rowse 2005: 176).