Native title funds must be put to work, says Mabo Centre leaders

The private market is the place for traditional owners to ­invest native title payments rather than in trusts, Marcia Langton says.

Artist Gail Mabo, whose father Eddie Koiki Mabo led the High Court case that resulted in the native title laws, helped launch the Mabo Centre. Picture: Colin Murty

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The private market is the place for traditional owners to ­invest their native title payments rather than in conservative trusts where the money effectively loses value, ­esteemed Indigenous researcher and University of Melbourne ­associate provost Marcia Langton says.

At the launch of the Mabo Centre in Perth, Professor Langton told business leaders and representatives from Indigenous communities there was an emerging understanding that native title holders can and must “participate more fully in the economy”.

The Mabo Centre would research and offer advice on this while involving a new generation of Indigenous Australians in that change.

The centre is an alliance between the National Native Title Council and the University of Melbourne. One of its first tasks is to begin training young Indigenous people for jobs, including in the effective management of ­native title funds and for roles in business and as entrepreneurs.

“We believe that economic ­development is the future for young people and we want to give them that capacity,” Professor Langton said.

“So we are developing training programs and masterclasses for the young leaders to come through and the National Native Title Council has developed a special program to give young people that capacity. We can deliver that through the University of Melbourne.”

Professor Langton said native title payments ended up “stalled in conservative trusts” because early in the development of land use agreements, miners wanted assurances about the compensation payments they would make to traditional owners – colloquially called royalties.

“The mining industry captains said ‘we want the native title payments to be responsibly managed and we want all the money put into charitable trusts’,” Professor Langton said.

“The primary aim of charitable trusts is the relief of poverty – handing out the 10 per cent to beneficiaries each year. But (there is) no regard for the potential of community development or investment of funds.

“So the money was forced into an accumulation mode in these charitable trusts … fund managers approached the problem with a very conservative investment ­approach and, as a result, the money has been losing value. That is what happens with money over time if income streams are not created and investments are not created and it is very difficult to get money out of a trust and into business development and economic development.”

Professor Langton and Nat­ional Native Title Council chief executive Jamie Lowe share the view of modern-day resource sector leaders that a new vehicle for these payments – a category of Aboriginal corporation with fewer restrictions but more oversight – is necessary. They believe it can begin to address decades of under-development of Indigenous communities and create generational wealth.

Mr Lowe said the size of native title payments was frequently overstated or misunderstood. Lump sums reported by media were often for agreements over many years, even decades.

A significant portion of payments were used to run the corporations that represented native title holders. While the payments were not as high as many people believed, Mr Lowe said there was still enormous potential for those payments to work harder and get results. “There is a future ahead of us,” he said.

“We are thinking ‘what is next for our young people?’ If we continue to just ask the Australian governments to kind of do right by us then we could be here for quite a long time and be quite exhausted by that.

“We need to think how to ­approach this and we think economic and self determination and empowerment is key to this.”