Native Title's disasters.(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: John McDonnell has taken umbrage (June 2005) at Jenness Warin's and my paper "A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities" (Centre for Independent Studies) for arguing that Native Title legislation has become a barrier to Aboriginal development because it does not facilitate individual property rights in land.

We did not claim, as McDonnell suggests, that land leasing or business development were impossible under Native Title legislation, but that the present legislation enriches Land Council members and a supporting cast of lawyers and other consultants by creating a spaghetti of legal and bureaucratic entanglements that make it impossible for most Aborigines and Tones Strait Islanders to access and own land on the same terms as other Australians. Revelations of gross corruption and violence in East Arnhem Land (see Weekend Australian, June 11-12) that have followed from Native Title legislation are merely the tip of a huge Australia-wide problem.

John Cleary's "Lessons from the Tiwi Islands: The Need for Radical Improvement in Remote Aboriginal Communities" (CIS, May 2005) analyses the governance implications of Land Councils and Associations and also concludes that "The Land Rights Act should be amended to provide more flexible Indigenous land ownership, allowing individual property rights and commercial use of land."

Land Council members appropriate high land rents, notably from mineral royalties, but also from fishing, tourist access, filming and other sources, becoming an "Indigenous economic elite in the top three deciles of ...