Bush Summit: Cultural heritage laws ‘a mistake’, says Adam Giles

Former NT chief minister Adam Giles says WA’s Cook Labor government did the right thing by scrapping its contentious Aboriginal cultural heritage laws.

Hancock Agriculture chief executive Adam Giles with Gina Rinehart on Monday. Picture: Philip Gostelow

Former NT chief minister Adam Giles says WA’s Cook Labor government did the right thing by scrapping its contentious Aboriginal cultural heritage laws as one of the chief critics of the laws likened legislating for the protection of Aboriginal culture to inflicting one person’s religion onto others.

Western Australia’s Pastoral and Graziers’ Association president Tony Seabrook said the Cook government’s cultural heritage regime – abandoned five weeks after it become law – wrongly conflated Aboriginal heritage and Aboriginal culture. The laws required landowners to check for Aboriginal cultural heritage on their properties before carrying out a range of works, with exceptions.

“Let’s be careful – heritage is one thing and culture is another,” Mr Seabrook said.

“Nobody wants to destroy ­Aboriginal heritage, that’s a given. But culture is like a religion. It’s something that you believe in personally and it is outrageous to think that anyone should want to inflict their religion onto someone else.

“I respect their right to have that belief, that’s fine, but what was beginning to happen here is we were entering an area of very variable things, unmeasurable things. River serpents and landscapes.”

Adam Giles, who was NT chief minister from 2013 to 2016 for the Country Liberal Party and is now chief executive of Hancock Agriculture, said: “Fortunately, I think Premier Cook has done the right thing listening to people”.

“We knew that if we wanted to put a water trough in or build a shade over a trough, put fence lines in, the disturbance of 4kg of dirt and drilling a hole for a fence post was going to be a problem … we had hundreds of staff all over WA running around to comply.

“That is not to say that we aren’t firmly committed to working with Aboriginal people on the ground in WA and around the country, but we are very firm on talking with local Aboriginal people at the local level and forming those important conversations, potentially forming joint ventures … (looking at) what you can do particularly economically to drive change and create jobs.”

Other speakers at the Bush Summit outlined confusion over the laws across a range of sectors, from vignerons to real estate agents.

Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association chief executive Samantha McCulloch said the WA government made the right call to go back to the 1972 legislation governing the protection of Aboriginal cultural heritage, with amendments. There had not been a lot of consultation on the laws that were scrapped five weeks after they became law.

“It was clear that there was a lot of uncertainty around the new requirements,” she said.