Page 3472 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 11 October 1994
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proposed grants over native title land. The Commonwealth's Native Title Act also enables State and Territory governments to validate their past grants with certainty, provided they adhere to the standards set out in the Act. However, the Act goes further than this. As the Prime Minister, Mr Keating, said in his second reading speech on the Bill:
... the Mabo decision gives little more than a sense of justice to those Aboriginal communities whose native title has been extinguished or lost without consultation, negotiation or compensation. Their dispossession has been total, their loss has been complete.
That was also a point that Mr Kaine made in his remarks to the Assembly this evening. The Prime Minister continued:
The Government shares the view of ATSIC, Aboriginal organisations and the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, that justice, equality and fairness demand that the social and economic needs of these communities must be addressed as an essential step towards reconciliation.
While these communities remain dispossessed of land, their economic marginalisation and their sense of injury continues. As a first step, we are establishing a land fund. It will enable indigenous people to acquire land and to manage and maintain it in a sustainable way in order to provide economic, social and cultural benefits for future generations.
Madam Speaker, I understand that the size and disposition of this land fund is currently the subject of negotiation among the various parties in the Senate.
Over the last few years the Commonwealth has introduced a package of measures to address the range of issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. While each can be considered in isolation, in many ways the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The Native Title Act is a clear example of this, with the measures it introduces being critical to the process of reconciliation and also having their part to play in addressing the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The interrelatedness of these issues should be of no surprise, given the central role that the land plays in Aboriginal culture. In the report of the 1974 commission on land rights Justice Woodward said that possession of land alone made possible "the preservation of a spiritual link which gives each Aboriginal his sense of identity and lies at the heart of his spiritual beliefs".
Madam Speaker, I elected to dwell on the Commonwealth Act and its background at some length because the ACT Government's Native Title Bill of 1994 effectively makes the ACT a part of the national scheme that is established by the Commonwealth Act. The Chief Minister said in her presentation speech:
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