Indigenous land rights in Australia
Indigenous land rights in Australia, also known as Aboriginal land rights in Australia, are the rights and interests in land of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia; the term may also include the struggle for those rights. Connection to the land and waters is vital in Australian Aboriginal culture and to that of Torres Strait Islander people, and there has been a long battle to gain legal and moral recognition of ownership of the lands and waters occupied by the many peoples prior to colonisation of Australia starting in 1788, and the annexation of the Torres Strait Islands by the colony of Queensland in the 1870s.
As of 2020, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights and interests in land are formally recognised over around 40 per cent of Australia’s land mass, and sea rights have also been asserted in various native title cases.
Indigenous land tenure by state and territory[edit]
Northern Territory[edit]
The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (see above) provides the basis upon which Aboriginal Australian people in the Northern Territory can claim rights to land based on traditional occupation.[34][35] The freehold land cannot be sold or transferred, but it can be leased.[35]
Queensland[edit]
In Queensland, the Aboriginal Land Act 1991 and the Torres Strait Islander Land Act 1991 provide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander freehold respectively. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander freehold land occupies 5%, or 59,489 square kilometres (22,969 sq mi) of northern Queensland. A Registered Native Title Body Corporate (RNTBC) can be trustee of this land, who can grant leases of up to 99 years for any purpose.[35]
A third type of land tenure, mainly held by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in remote and regional Queensland, is the Deed of Grant in Trust (DOGIT).[35] These were established primarily to administer former Aboriginal reserves and missions. They came about through legislation passed by the Queensland Government in 1984.[36] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander local governments hold trusteeship of the DOGITs, and land tenure under this type of tenure is held in collective title, held in trust for future generations. From 1 January 2015, some trustees, namely those classified as "urban" or "future urban") are able to convert parts of the collective title to either Aboriginal freehold or Torres Strait Islander freehold title.[35]
Mer (Murray) Island (the subject of the Mabo No.1 (1988) and No.2 (1992) cases) is Torres Strait Islander freehold and Aurukun is Aboriginal freehold land.[35]
South Australia[edit]
In the 2013 Review of the Aboriginal Lands Trust Act 1966, the powers of the Trust were reviewed and changed to modernise the Trust and the Aboriginal Lands Trust of South Australia Act 2013 (SA) was passed.[37]
Western Australia[edit]
The Aboriginal Lands Trust (ALT) of Western Australia was established by the Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority Act 1972. This body holds about 24,000,000 hectares (59,000,000 acres), or 10% of the State's land. There are different types of tenures held by different parts of this land, including reserves, leases and freehold property. There are many remote communities on this land, inhabited by about 12,000 people. Land reform is ongoing, to use the land in a way which benefits the Aboriginal people.[35]
Freemen/sovereign state movement[edit]
Since the 2010s, there has been a growing number of freemen on the land / sovereign citizen groups targeting Indigenous Australians, with groups with names like Tribal Sovereign Parliament of Gondwana Land, the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation (OSTF)[38] and the Original Sovereign Confederation. OSTF Founder Mark McMurtrie, an Aboriginal Australian man, has produced YouTube videos speaking about “common law”, which incorporate Freemen beliefs. Appealing to other Aboriginal people by partly identifying with the land rights movement, McMurtrie played on their feelings of alienation and lack of trust in the systems which had not served Indigenous people well.[39] Proponents of the original ideas are often related to far-right movements, whose core beliefs may be broadly defined as "see[ing] the state as a corporation with no authority over free citizens".[40][41]