Billions - Up for Grabs !

For the first time in its 118 year history, the High Court of Australia held a sitting in Darwin this week.  It actually reduced the amount payable by the Northern Territory government for land known as Timber Creek but upheld compensation  awarded by the Federal Court for loss of spiritual  attachment to the land suffered by traditional owners.   That ruling could be as significant as Mabo or Wik.

Basically, it codifies the process to determine the value to be paid by way of compensation for native title. The economic value of native title rights should be evaluated first and an estimate arrived to determine the non-economic or cultural loss resulting from " diminution " in - connection to country.
It seems that this ruling will not give traditional owners the right to prevent other persons from entering or using the land or to confer permission on others to enter or use the land.

The Federal court had determined that traditional owners should receive eighty percent of the freehold value of the land but this had been reduced on appeal to sixty-five percent.  This weeks High Court ruling reduced that again - to fifty percent, rejecting the argument by traditional owners that they be paid a hundred percent.

This decision will have " strong implications " for the 2.8 million square kilometres of native title land holdings in Australia - and it represents billions of dollars of public money that will have to be found to settle claims.   It will certainly also raise the question of who is entitled to lay claim to these payments.

Just who - or what - is an Indigenous person  ?  Apart from conceding that this applies to those who were living in this land before the arrival of the first fleet in 1788 it has so far not achieved a legal definition.  A claim by any person that there is a degree of Aboriginality in their blood is presently all that is needed for access to benefits available to Indigenous people.

There is a school of thought that insist that a claim to Aboriginality should require proof that at least one grandparent was fully Aboriginal, but that would disenfranchise all those with a lesser claim to Aboriginal blood in their veins.   Fortunately, we now have the blessing of DNA to resolve the genetic background of every individual by a measure that reaches back centuries.

It looks like the High Court has not fully done its job.  In deciding the degree of compensation Indigenous people should be awarded, it needs to set a standard to determine exactly who should qualify.  A small blood test is not a lot to ask to gain access to what is compensation offered to the original owners of this beautiful country.