Page 3763 week09 2004 - 5th Assembly Hansard

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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Tuesday, 17 August 2004) . . Page.. 3763 ..

Mr Speaker, this is another one of the issues that arose in the last week. This amendment requires consultation. That, of course, was always an inevitable process, as demonstrated in the work bringing this legislation forward, but we are happy to write it in.

MRS DUNNE (6.26): This amendment is a most welcome improvement on what was originally a fairly flawed clause. The clear intent of that, as one indigenous member of the community said to me, was that a white minister was going to decide by himself what was a representative Aboriginal organisation. That is the clear reading of the words here. We have now actually worked in a mechanism to ensure that the white minister does not do that. I still have one concern; that is, that there is no overt scope here for an individual to be considered as a representative Aboriginal organisation. I need to place that on the record.

There are people who are most influential in the Aboriginal community and who are not members of any of the Aboriginal groups that have been referred to in Mr Wood’s consultation document or elsewhere. They are still influential members of the community and I think that we should be ensuring that an individual who says that he or she wants to be a registered Aboriginal organisation for the purpose of the operation of this act should be able to do so, and that the minister’s criteria should be able to be flexible enough to ensure that individuals can be registered as a representative Aboriginal organisation.

MR WOOD (Minister for Disability, Housing and Community Services, Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for Arts and Heritage, and Acting Minister for Health) (6.28): If I am right, I have to table in this Assembly a list of those organisations. I suppose that it would be a disallowable instrument and capable of debate in this place. There are a number of organisations and sometimes one of the issues in all this work is the healthy competition between them.

MS TUCKER (6.29): This amendment ensures that the minister must invite Aboriginal groups to put themselves forward as representative organisations and that, in addition to informal circulation of such an invitation, it must be notified in the Assembly and be published in the daily newspaper. This protects groups who want to be representative Aboriginal organisations from being left out of consideration. This amendment ensures that RAOs, as they’re called, are established under this act and that the process of identifying them is from the first instance an open one.

The latest version of the legislation also requires the minister to consult with Aboriginal people who have a traditional affiliation with the land, and with the Heritage Council, before setting the criteria for deciding who can be declared to be a representative Aboriginal organisation. Furthermore, the legislation will now state that the minister must exercise the power to appoint representative Aboriginal organisations.

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