■ ILUA (Indigenous Land Use Agreement) = Indigenous Land Under Attack'
■ ILUAs trick First Peoples into surrendering their homelands forever
4 October 2019
Ghillar, Michael Anderson, Convenor of the Sovereign Union, last surviving member of the founding four of the Aboriginal Embassy and Head of State of the Euahlayi Peoples Republic provides an insight into the way true common law holders of Country are overridden through the outcomes of the Native Title processes.
After the Native Title Act 1993 was introduced in the Federal Parliament, Western Australia introduced complementary State legislation, which was not a process for justice, but rather a template for corruption to rob the Peoples of their lands, waters and natural resources. The First Nations Peoples of Western Australia became stuck with Native Title facilitating bodies, which quickly manifested a very rotten strategy, supported by government, to wind back the clock so that the government could take control of all the lands from the Peoples and unjustly deprive the Peoples of all that was set aside for them and their future descendants.
In Western Australia this corrupt activity is referred to by many grassroots Aboriginal people as being totally owned and controlled by a group of gangsters and fraudsters, whom they refer to as the ‘Purple Circle’. No matter where you look in Western Australia their fingerprints are everywhere.
So from 1994, the Western Australia government and the Commonwealth government encouraged the development of Native Title organisations to facilitate and service a strategy to win back at least 28%, if not more, of Western Australia, from First Nations People following the High Court Mabo decision. Clearly, this included a working relationship with the Western Australia Aboriginal Lands Trust.
The irony is that the Aboriginal Lands Trust held in trust enormous pastoral leases for Aboriginal families and clan-land ownership groups. The Aboriginal Lands Trust, however, failed to obtain exemptions from having to pay Land Board levies and local government rates. Unfortunately, the costs are enormous and the people are paying thousands of dollars a year for the rights to live on their own land, despite the land being freehold lands, or land reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of First Nations People only.
In the book Aboriginal Autonomy, the late H.C. Nugget Coombs describes how he was the architect of the Federation of Aboriginal Land Councils in the early 1980s, and created a vehicle that would take control of Aboriginal decision-making at a regional level, where the power was vested in a few. This template is now used as the controlling factor in manipulating people and situations that dictate who gets control of Native Title.
What is more insidiously evil is that ceremonial Elders and Law men and women, who retain Stories and Songs of Country, are used to show that at least one person has a continuing customary cultural spiritual connection under First Nations Peoples’ Law and culture to lands where Native Title claims are lodged. But, after a determination has been made, these knowledge-holders do not remain members of the nominated Prescribed Body Corporates (PBCs) that are created under the Native Title Act by the Land Councils and often these knowledge-holders are no even put on the roll as members and are, in fact, discarded.
The PBC constitutional framework under ORIC [Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations] allows for opposition claimant groups, (created and supported by these land and sea councils and mining companies at times) to gain the majority control of these PBCs and cancel membership of key knowledge-holders and ancient owners. The opposition groups thereby gain absolute control of all that happens on and within those Native Title determined areas, while the remaining true ancient owners and common law holders’ interests are outweighed by people who were brought into the areas through government displacement and the slave trade in the sheep and cattle industries of the 1900s.
I have also learned that the well co-ordinated 1946 Pilbara Pastoral workers’ strike partially orchestrated by Don McCloud won national attention and resulted in many Aboriginal pastoral workers coming in from isolated remote regions, where they had been workers on the stations.
The descendants of these displaced people are now used and abused by the Native Title service industry and are in fact put up in opposition to the very few ancient owners who are left in these regions, having survived the genocidal policies and actions. This provides the ability for those with an ‘historical connection’ to outnumber the ancient common law holders in decisions and once again creates more destitute families, who are the real and only true owners of the land areas in question.
Court transcripts and documents where litigation has occurred demonstrate how corrupt anthropologists are engaged to manipulate data by way of the whiteman’s records, in order to override the ancient owners’ oral history, which talks about how people came from 100s of kilometres away in the early 1900s and 1940s.
On another side of the coin the true ancient owners, who are few, tell of how people came into their Country, not only through the slave traders and the Pilbara pastoral strike, but also by government policies of displacement.
The government and the courts do not want to hear of the criminal activities of the State authorities who used the police military to round up and ‘clear the lands’ of obstinate resisting Blackfellas, who objected to whites invading their lands. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ enabled the white squatters and sheep and cattle herders to have some degree of certainty and be free from attacks by the existing ancient owners, who were defending their Homelands. Thus, there exist the many pictures of police and Black trackers proudly displaying their catch in neck chains and ankle chains.
Many of these captives did not necessarily make it to Rottnest Island, or other purposely build prisons along the Western Australia coastline. Evidence shows that some were hooked up to a horse and led out to sea, where they drowned with the chains around their necks and ankles and so too did the horse. Those who managed to stand and survive were shot. Others were taken up on hills and everyone attached to the chain were pushed over cliffs into the ravines, where their skeletons remain to this day beside the chains that connected them together.
Today some families now have manacles and chains in their safe-keeping, because their grandfathers or great grandfathers managed to escape and hide back in their Country. Not only did they hide, but they hid their families away from the treacherous squatters on their land.
It therefore follows that the few ancient owners who survived, by having their ancestors hide in caves on and within their ancient lands, are now being outnumbered but those Aboriginal people who were locked up on government and church mission stations and through the assimilation policy became more acquainted with white habits and language than their own and only a few found their way back to their ancient Homelands.
It is these Native Title service organisations, aided and abetted by government, lawyers and corrupt anthropologists, which now falsely create various types and levels of connection to Country to secure an association with the lands that they are fraudulently claiming, while the true ancient owners, who hid out in caves and ravines are yet again being cast aside by this very flawed Native Title process.
This process of fraud and corruption is to facilitate, yet again, the theft not only of the land itself, but also of the rich resources, minerals, petroleum and gases.
In the early 1980s an international gathering of mining company lawyers and CEOs in Europe established what essentially could be called price-fixing, thus denying independent negotiations, because all the big mining industries and other gas and oil cartels had already concluded collectively that their position for royalties in respect of First Nations People in Australia would be no greater than 3%. Talk about price-fixing - this is how you do it.
Some groups get as little 0.5% e.g. from Rio Tinto and Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest, Chair of Fortescue Metals Group (FMG), in 2011 offered a 0% royalty on the $280 billion Solomon Hub iron ore project 200km south of Roebourne.
The Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation was seeking a 5% annual royalty from FMG, while Wirlu-murra was prepared to accept an offer of $4 million in royalties, plus additional financial support for housing, businesses and training. Report
The Wirlu-murra was prepared to accept less than the equivalent of a 0.001% royalty.
Such is the un-magnificent negotiation skills of these so-called Native Title representative organisations.
This year, 2019, a Chinese mining company off the Northern Territory coast broke this mould and negotiated a 50:50 deal for the extraction of rare earths.
Interestingly enough, the Native Title service organisations became concerned about the possible vested interests and conflict of interest when they realised that they were being paid by the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s office to lodge and fight for Native Title interests on lands throughout Australia, but after 1998 John Howard 10-Point Plan was legislated the corrupt operators of the land councils and Native Title service organisations registered subsidiary agencies for the purpose of giving the impression that they are independent from the Native Title process.
These agencies were set up for the purpose of negotiating all future act regimes. These future act regimes are triggered by Section 29 Notices known as RTNs, the Right-To-Negotiate. An example of this abuse and corruption can be well illustrated by the NSW Native Title Service Corporation, which worked with certain First Nations People groups in the Hunter Valley to registered Native Title interests over mining tenements only, merely to get the Right-To-Negotiate and a select few become the recipients of mining royalties and other benefits for the life of the mine, without any Native Title determination being decided.
In Central Australia, the Land Council (CLC) has a practice of first charging a fee to individuals and corporations to simply talk to Native Title claimant groups or the Applicants of the those claim groups. These facilitation fees can be enormous e.g. $25,000 for the initial contact for negotiations over land for cattle. In one case, after the meeting was cancelled due to Sorry Business, the proponent sought another meeting date but was told he would have to pay another $15,000 for the CLC to facilitate the next meeting, with no refund for the cancelled meeting.
In the Kimberley, the Kimberley Land Council (KLC) and its subsidiary agency Kimberley and Resource Enterprise Development (KRED) demanded an upfront payment of $14.5 million to commence negotiations for the James Price Point gas project 52km north of Broome.
Now I find the fingerprints of the ‘Purple Circle’ operation in the cattle business in the Kimberley; commercial-in-confidence carbon-trading programs; Indigenous Protected Areas (IPA) programs. On top of this the Native Title service organisations and their agencies now get money from other Commonwealth government agencies, such Indigenous Business Australia (IBA), the Indigenous Land and Sea Council (ILSC) and Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) to develop, among other things, the so-called ‘Empowering Communities’ projects, while the royalty funding from mining companies is controlled by private trust accounts, which according to Australian law are not transparent, nor is there even a register kept of them - another story of corruption that is yet to be told.
In concluding this statement, the abuse of Elders and Senior Law men and women represents yet another crime against our Old People. This time the perpetrators are frequently other First Nations people, just like the Black trackers who worked for the State troopers, but are controlled by the colonial Hidden Hand.
* The name Pilbara (region) is a colonial derivative from the Nyamal and Banyjima word 'bilybara'