Rights

The first Argument of the year and what a cracker! Congratulations to all those involved, particularly the three panelists, John Burton, Jon Altman and Jess Weir, and the convenor, Sango Mahanty.

I would like to briefly expand on the comment I made about indigenous resource rights and sustainable development using logging in Solomon Islands as an example. I should have prefaced my comment by stating that Solomon Islanders are some times described as living in harmony and balance with their environments. The anthropologist Edvard Hviding, for example, has been criticised for his overly romanticised portrayal of human-environment interactions in the Marovo lagoon area. While some Marovo villagers may well be busy harmonising with nature, others are busy inviting in the rapacious Malaysian logging companies.

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Indigenous peoples living as a minority within nation states use rights language to articulate aspects of their relationships with their lands and culture.  Rights arguments are an important avenue for redress for Indigenous peoples stymied by political systems determined by majority rule.  Since the 1992 Mabo decision the recognition of Indigenous rights in Australia has focused on native title.  However, native title has very limited applicability in terms of rights to economic resources, as Jon has presented.  What I want to raise is the limited way in which Indigenous rights have been framed in Australia, and alternative processes that complement rights arguments.

I will do this by examining the often unacknowledged assumptions held about Indigenous peoples and their rights, particularly in relation to economic development.  I will further discuss the pros and cons of rights arguments through examples of Indigenous peoples pursuing alternative agreements with states that go beyond the current limitations of native title.

Securing rights to their own resources is only a beginning for Indigenous groups. For the reason that winning this right in court or through legislation is usually subsidiary in importance to winning political campaigns about identity, few Indigenous groups are well prepared for what follows.  In many parts of the Asia-Pacific where resource economies dominate, including remote parts of Australia, weak governance structures hamper the value of newly won rights, low work skills limit participation in the higher value parts of the economy, and the difficulty of turning identity politicians into business leaders to ‘forge spears into shares’ means internal conflicts often eat away at resource income streams before they can bring about meaningful social development.