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Overlooked by the boom, by Victoria Laurie - 30th January 2007
(Credit: The Australian)

Land access deals have failed to deliver jobs and benefits to Aborigines, writes Victoria Laurie

IN the southeast mining region of Western Australia, the mining boom is passing the locals by. Goldfields Land Council executive director Brian Wyatt says hundreds of medium and small land-use agreements between Aboriginal people and mining parties exist in the Goldfields, but few have translated into jobs or skills training. Wyatt estimates that only about 50 Aborigines out of an indigenous population of about 3000 are employed in the mining sector. An estimated 1900 local job vacancies exist, "but you'd be lucky if any Aboriginal people will fill them".

Aboriginal unemployment in Kalgoorlie is nearly 15 per cent, or three times non-Aboriginal levels, "and what's really frightening is that our population is growing at twice the rate of non-Aboriginal people". In a state where even cleaners can earn $100,000 a year on mining sites, Wyatt says it's shocking that the resources boom is bypassing the Aboriginal population. "We don't want to be given bread, we want to be breadwinners," he says.

When Ciaran O'Faircheallaigh, Griffith University professor in politics and public policy, studied 45 indigenous land-use agreements or ILUAs between indigenous groups and mining and government partners across Australia, he found half were either "basket cases" that should not have been entered into by indigenous groups, or were deals that have delivered few benefits.

"Some NSW mine agreements have offered a total of less than $100,000 over the life of the mine," O'Faircheallaigh says. "There is a big problem with agreements not delivering and a lot of people are missing out.

The study has found that 15 years after the High Court's Mabo decision, most land-use agreements between native title claimants and mining companies had failed to deliver significant outcomes for indigenous people.

One major disappointment was Murrin Murrin, a large nickel deposit in WA, where mining entrepreneur Andrew Forrest signed a complex agreement with 28 indigenous groups. The deal was praised at the time, generous in its promise of up to 20 per cent Aboriginal employment and a payment of $1million a year into an Aboriginal trust fund.

But the mine changed hands in 2002 and the Goolburthunoo and Bibila-Lungutjarra peoples (two of the claimant groups) have taken new owners Minara Resources to court over their alleged failure to pay nearly $12million. The company has indicated it will vigorously defend the proceedings. The Murrin Murrin agreement should have been a landmark, Wyatt says, "but it's turned out probably one of the worst. "The agreement was all over the place, no finesse about it. It was policy on the run."

Almost every day, news emerges of an agreement between Aborigines and a mining company, a pastoral leaseholder, a national park administration or local government. This month the NSW Government signalled that 19 national parks and state forests covering about 6000km in northern NSW would be jointly managed with the Githabul people as part of a native title settlement.

Across Australia, there are now 264 ILUAs. Introduced in 1998 under amendments to the Native Title Act, ILUAs permit Aboriginal claimant groups to negotiate access to land in return for negotiated benefits.

Most ILUAs have been signed in Queensland (138), followed by the Northern Territory (78) and Victoria (27). That relatively few ILUAs exist in other states - South Australia (10) WA (seven) and NSW (four) - masks the fact that huge tracts of land can be involved, such as the sparsely-populated Ngaanyatjarra traditional lands and the Pitjanjatjara homelands in South Australia. In WA, 167,000sqkm of Ngaanyatjarra traditional lands are subject to three agreements covering mining, Telstra access and landing strips for air traffic.

Some ILUAs are multimillion-dollar agreements resulting from complex negotiations, like the landmark 2001 deal between Comalco and the western Cape York peoples, or the 2003 Argyle Diamond mine agreement in WA.

ILUAs are subject to a degree of scrutiny because they are registered with the National Native Title Tribunal and are invariably driven by a desire by commercial interests for access to land and Aboriginal groups' need to get a stake in any future prosperity. A large proportion are deals with companies seeking prompt access to mineral resources.

A typical example is at Koolan Island, off the northwest coast of WA, where Aztec mining has signed a "co-existence agreement" with the Dambima-Ngardi people of Derby. In return for Aztec's access to the island's iron ore (the first shipment is due to leave at the end of 2007), Aborigines have been promised a 30 per cent share of 220 jobs by the mine's eighth year. Wayne Bergmann, executive director of the Kimberley Land Council, has participated in dozens of negotiations, including Koolan Island. He says the Aztec deal was carefully structured to ensure benefits were not handed out as "finger money" to individuals but pooled as community wealth to fund business development.

Further east, in the water-rich Ord River region, Bergmann and the KLC oversaw the largest Kimberley agreement. The Ord Stage Two agreement gave the green light to agricultural expansion, in return for recognition of native title ownership by the Miriuwung Gajerrong people, a $50 million compensation package, jobs and indigenous involvement in environmental management.

While it's early days, Bergmann is confident benefits will materialise at Koolan Island and the Ord River. But he's not so sure about the promises of other business and mining executives beating a path to the KLC's door, especially as WA's resource boom escalates.

"The general talk is 'we'll give Aboriginal people employment and business opportunities and all this', but that's a company talking at largesse level," Bergmann says. "When you talk about making it a commitment, it's like 'we can't do that'."

The National Native Title Tribunal's deputy president Fred Chaney admits some agreements are flawed and points to one of the first ever struck back in 1979 under Northern Territory land rights legislation between uranium miner Narbalek and the Gagadju people. "They handed over $14 million, a large sum at that time, and little was used for long-term investment," Chaney says. "It's largely gone and it's a sorry story of the mistakes of the past. It was a good faith agreement and there were attempts to set up indigenous businesses, but they failed."

Chaney worries about the incidence of "wildcat agreements": deals hastily cut by miners who prefer to short-circuit the native title process by paying out traditional owners. But he says many current agreements deliver what Aborigines living in remote areas need: real jobs. He cites the case of Argyle Diamond Mine, where 25 per cent of the work force (about 120 workers) is Aboriginal, with a target of 40 per cent in coming years. Only six years ago, the indigenous work force was a mere 5 per cent. Argyle is routinely praised as the gold standard in native title agreements.

Royalties are divided into different funds earmarked to set up a tourism industry, traditional business and community infrastructure, and an Aboriginal trust has so far funded renal health and school development.

"The structure of agreements is very important and Argyle is very prescriptive about what money can be used for," says ex-Rio Tinto senior mining executive Ian Williams, now a trustee of the Argyle trust fund and another BHP-Billiton indigenous agreement in the Pilbara.

Williams says indigenous agreements represent a huge change in company attitudes towards Aborigines. "When Mabo happened, I was in the Pilbara and I saw industry people say, 'This is the end of industry as we know it."' In 1997, Williams led the negotiations for one of the earliest and biggest land use agreements in far north Queensland, over Rio Tinto's Century Zinc mine. After protracted negotiations, three native title groups signed up to a $66 million package, with compensation money held in a legal trust for creating indigenous businesses.

"We said we'd also put aside $1 million a year for training of Aboriginal people," Williams says. "In fact, it cost $2 million a year for the first three years to train indigenous workers, so the company will have ended up spending more than the $66 million. And there are six full-time people involved in implementing the agreement."

The investment has paid off: Century Zinc, now owned by Zinifex, has 25 per cent to 27 per cent indigenous staff.

"If they're done properly, agreements can help with the solution of intractable problems of health and employment," Williams says.

"In remote Australia, there's very little opportunity for Aboriginal people to become independent of handouts and welfare."

An ABARE report estimated that 2450 Aboriginal people were working in the mining industry in 2002.

"That would certainly have increased to at least 3000 now, with possibly another few hundred or even up to 2000 more employed by contractors," says Marcia Langton, a professor in indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne. Langton, coauthor of the forthcoming book Settling with Indigenous People, says Comalco's western Cape York agreement, signed in 2001, has spawned Aboriginal success stories such as Gina Castelain, a western Cape York woman who at 22 is a director of an earthmoving company, a wetlands charter company, and sits on two trusts. "Where (agreements) do work, they work well," Langton says, adding that Pilbara mining agreements have spawned two Aboriginal-owned earthmoving businesses, Ngarda Civil and Mining and Gumula.

"Both of them got financed from agreements with Pilbara Iron, and they are both good outcomes." Ngarda has a work force of about 160, of whom 85 per cent are Aboriginal, and is set to double its revenue to $88 million in the next year.

Dodgy agreements do exist, Langton says. "The local traditional owners who negotiate them don't understand how royalty arrangements are arrived at. Aboriginal people think $100,000 is a lot of money," she says.

"The problem is some companies keep their agreements confidential, and nobody's going to give me access to a dodgy agreement.

"But we do know the good ones, because they are not afraid to stand up in public and say what they are."

Victoria Laurie is a senior writer with The Australian.

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