Tony Abbott vows to turn back Wild Rivers legislation

TONY Abbott is proposing a private member's bill to strike down the Queensland government's controversial Wild Rivers legislation.

TONY Abbott is proposing a Franklin dam-style federal overthrow of state laws with a private member's bill to strike down the Queensland government's controversial Wild Rivers legislation.

The Opposition Leader will today detail his proposal to use federal powers to support the revolt by indigenous communities on Cape York Peninsula against the state law. He will invite Kevin Rudd to back his private member's legislation or frame a law "to bring about the same outcome" of quashing the Queensland Wild Rivers Act.

Mr Abbott said he intended to introduce his legislation when parliament resumed next month.

Throwing down the gauntlet to the Prime Minister, he insisted Canberra could not continue to ignore the problems the Wild Rivers law was creating for indigenous communities on the cape.

"A national government which fails to become involved in a serious problem of a state government's making, where it has ample capacity to do so, becomes complicit in the original error," Mr Abbott said.

"Where the commonwealth has the constitutional authority, intervention is possible. Where a state's failure is sufficiently grave or far-reaching, intervention arguably becomes necessary."

Queensland declared as wild rivers the Archer, Lockhart and Stewart systems on Cape York, banning most economic activity on them, allegedly after Premier Anna Bligh did a deal to clinch Green preferences for last year's election. Aboriginal leaders Noel and Gerhardt Pearson have led the fight against the law. Attacking it for crippling economic opportunity for indigenous communities, Noel Pearson said the state government was "foreclosing on a future for our people".

Mr Rudd's silence on the Wild Rivers law and moves to World Heritage-list Cape York has been contrasted unfavourably with his professed commitment to boosting economic opportunity for indigenous people to close the gap with other Australians.

Mr Abbott said yesterday he had been influenced by Noel Pearson's "ferocity" on Wild Rivers, as well as his personal experience with conditions in Cape communities.

Last August, Mr Abbott spent 10 days working as a school truancy officer in the peninsula-top township of Aurukun, and three weeks as a volunteer teacher's aide in Coen in 2008.

"Whenever a state government does something which runs so completely counter to what I would have thought is good public policy, I think a responsible federal parliament has got to look at what it can do to improve things," Mr Abbott told The Australian yesterday.

The opposition has legal advice that federal law overturning the Queensland provisions would be constitutional.

Mr Abbott said Section 51 of the Constitution, from which federal parliament derives most of its lawmaking powers, allowed the commonwealth to make special laws concerning "people of any race".

"Such laws can be geographically confined in their operation," he said. "My legal advice is that this power would support commonwealth legislation to overturn or to limit the operation of the Wild Rivers Act in Cape York."

Writing for The Australian today, opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis argues that the external affairs power in Section 51 could also come into play.

This was used by the Hawke Labor government in 1983 to slap down a decision by Tasmania to dam the Franklin River, and Senator Brandis says the similarities with Wild Rivers in Queensland are obvious.

"Both were essentially concerned with land-use decisions by a state government -- indeed, both were specifically directed to the management of river systems," Senator Brandis writes.

Noel Pearson quit his post with the Cape York Institute to campaign against the Wild Rivers legislation, and is implacable in his criticism of the state government's handling of the issue.

Ms Bligh, however, insists that "terrible lies" have been told about the impact the law will have.