I'd like to thank the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources for the invitation to present on the topic of indigenous engagement, and recognize the presentation that was just given for its focus on Australia. I'd also like to acknowledge the courage and resilience of sovereign first nations in the settler nations of Canada and Australia. In particular, I'd like to acknowledge the Algonquin Anishinabe people, the Kaurna nation on whose lands and waters I'm speaking today in Adelaide, and the Ngarrindjeri nation, the indigenous nation I will be talking about today.
I am a non-indigenous academic, but I've worked with the Ngarrindjeri nation for about 40 years on various programs and projects.
The Ngarrindjeri nation is in south Australia. It's at the bottom end of the longest river in Australia, in the Murray-Darling Basin region. Ngarrindjeri are water people on the coast, on the river and in the estuarine space. Ngarrindjeri draw on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and a set of promises that were made in 1836 by King William IV in the Letters Patent that proclaim the establishment of the colony of South Australia when negotiating with the Australian state.
In South Australia, there's no treaty. There has been some discussion about the possibilities of treaties in recent times, but that's been taken off the table. In general in Australia, no treaties are being negotiated at this time. Indigenous peoples rely on a weaker form of aboriginal title recognition called native title, which establishes a legal process and protection under aboriginal heritage. In some parts of Australia, there are land rights acts that also provide people with some protection, and veto rights in relation to mining.
Today I'm going to be talking about an example of an indigenous-led initiative in the Murray-Darling Basin region, which is the river basin that provides a huge number of resources to Australia in water and irrigation and food resources. It's in the midst of a drought at the moment, which has been ongoing, and a problem of overuse and over-allocation, so there's a crisis in that space, and a focus on trying to resolve issues about how to manage that water resource. The focus is going to be on water resource management, and natural resource management in general, and some of the innovations that led to the Ngarrindjeri nation winning the 2015 river prize for best practice in river management in Australia, the first time an indigenous-led program won that particular award.
“Ngarrindjeri” means belonging to the lands and waters. Ngarrindjeri understand the connection to country; Ngarrindjeri speak as the lands and waters, and not separate from lands and waters. One of the major things that Ngarrindjeri have been involved in over the last 20 or 30 years is trying to educate the border community on their relationship to country, have that wide impact on engagement with government and with industry around the development of resources in Ngarrindjeri country. When there's interest in developing water or mining exploration interests, one of the first steps is to try to educate those people who are interested in the way the Ngarrindjeri identify as country and how that impacts on people.
The Ngarrindjeri in 1995 tried to protect the mouth of the River Murray area, the estuarine area called the meeting of the waters site, in the face of development in that space. That led to a major controversy in Australia called the Hindmarsh Island case, which also resulted in a royal commission into the beliefs and interests of Ngarrindjeri people. Ninety-five Ngarrindjeri people were accused of being liars and fabricators of their own traditions in relation to the lands and waters, and were seen as almost a pariah nation in Australia, so it was very much a low point for Ngarrindjeri people. That particular case affected land rights and native title rights of aboriginal people across Australia.
In 2015, working with government, Ngarrindjeri won the Australian river prize for best practice in management, so there was quite a steep learning curve in indigenous engagement during that period.
Ngarrindjeri leaders decided to work on a campaign of education and negotiation, rather than using legislation and law to establish their speaking position.
In 2000 and 2001, Ngarrindjeri negotiated a new form of agreement with the local council in their region called the Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan agreement. That means, “Listen to what Ngarrindjeri people are talking about.” It's a contract law agreement that recognizes the Ngarrindjeri people as the traditional owners of the lands and waters, and it was groundbreaking in that it was the first time that Ngarrindjeri were recognized as traditional owners of their lands and waters.
In 2009, Ngarrindjeri moved to a whole-of-government agreement with the state of South Australia, a contract law agreement that recognized Ngarrindjeri as the traditional owners. It's like a treaty, in a sense, but it's an agreement that establishes a new relationship and a new set of terms of how to work together. It doesn't dictate what emerges from that agreement, but it sets out a new way of working together.
That agreement allowed Ngarrindjeri to come together with industry groups, government departments and others and start to work on a new regional way of doing business in relation to Ngarrindjeri lands and waters.
In 2009, it was in the middle of the real part of what was called the “millennium drought”. There were lots of proposals to conduct engineering projects and do major works in Ngarrindjeri country, so there was a need to establish a complex way of engagement.
The Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan agreement enabled Ngarrindjeri to meet regularly with the government ministers and the premier in a context of leaders to leaders. In Australia, it was revolutionary for indigenous leaders to meet directly with government and be recognized as leaders of their particular nation.
That led to the establishment of a task force that met every month and brought together government departments and industry groups to present projects and programs to be considered at an early stage by the Ngarrindjeri nation. Resources were provided for the establishment of a program to assess proposals, and then there was a strategic plan developed with the state of South Australia to move forward on managing issues in Ngarrindjeri country.
In a way, that was both a negotiation mechanism and an educational mechanism. Over 17 meetings every month were conducted for several years with government agencies from right across the spectrum. That allowed people to talk together and to start to understand each other and where they were coming from. It was co-chaired by Ngarrindjeri leaders and government, and it provided a great opportunity to start to understand the differences and the similarities between the government, industry and Ngarrindjeri. Ngarrindjeri leaders have seen that as a major success.
Out of that particular agreement there was also a cultural knowledge agreement negotiated with the state of South Australia. Ngarrindjeri negotiated an agreement whereby the state recognized that Ngarrindjeri own their cultural knowledge in any planning and negotiation contexts so that there is security for elders and others to share knowledge in projects where that knowledge is needed to make decisions about whether developments would occur, or whether particular issues would be considered. That provided some certainty for people in their sharing of knowledge. Remember, there is no treaty process in this context. Ngarrindjeri started from a position of wanting a new relationship with the state, a new appraisal of the major issues surrounding that relationship, a fresh consideration of the ways of addressing those issues, and a recognition of the need for Ngarrindjeri and the state of South Australia to sit down and talk differently to each other.
The government supported Ngarrindjeri in that over time. It was a major shift in relations that led to a policy of establishing regional authorities across South Australia and starting some discussions around treaties.
In recent times, we have been working on a process across the Murray-Darling Basin where indigenous interests are being taken into account in planning how water is allocated across the region. What Ngarrindjeri have developed, in that context, is a particular kind of risk assessment and risk management strategy where indigenous interests are factored into the state's risk management processes at the very earliest opportunity.
What we discovered, I guess, was that a lot of the planning that occurs around natural resources, in natural resource management and in other sectors, is governed by international standards around risk management. If those standards don't take into account indigenous nations' aspirations, values and knowledge and the consequences of acts on their country and people, then there's a part of the chain of planning that's missed out right from the beginning.
At the moment, we're trying to work on a way of adapting Ngarrindjeri risk management strategies to develop a new set of strategies in the state, where the state actually conducts risk management from the beginning that takes into account the effects that any particular decision might have on Ngarrindjeri lands and waters and on Ngarrindjeri people. That's considered as a holistic process.
In a way it's an assessment of the impacts of colonization.