FMG, traditional owners and WA government face off in $500m native title case

Brian Ross wrote on Aug 8^th, 2023 at 7:04pm:

Traditional owners are seeking upwards of $500 million in unpaid royalties and interest along with hundreds of millions of dollars more for cultural and spiritual losses.



What a farce.

What's the traditional Aboriginal word for '$500 million"?
For "cultural and spiritual losses"?


There is absolutely nothing authentic about any of these claims. If you were an authentic traditional Aboriginal, what value did money have for you for 30 thousand years?

What is the cultural and spiritual value they have lost? Spell it out. This has now become a catch-all gambit claim for filthy lucre.

Most Aboriginal cultural and spiritual values are either laughably primitive or grossly repulsive. Now replaced by money grabbing.

issuevoter wrote on Aug 8^th, 2023 at 10:57pm:


Whether the Voice gets up or not,  the parliamentary debate and the ongoing dispute over the legislated shape of an Aboriginal advisory body will be ongoing and ferocious. That's when the details will have to be discussed and will deepen the divisions even further.

Because it will be legislated by Labor, with or without constitutional change, even if the NO case prevails with a significant (60% +) majority.  Racial divisions and hostilities will not abate whichever way thd referendum goes.

Frank wrote on Aug 9^th, 2023 at 9:40am:


Which is why I agree with issuevoter’s post. Also I think the higher the NO vote the easier it will be to argue back AND put the fear of God into Labor because they will soon wake up to the probable reality of a bloodbath loss in the next election.

Well - they need to be questioned as part of the Royal Commission Into Malfeasance Surrounding Indigenous Affairs.... and set right so as to reflect the realities of modern day Australia.

Apres Albo La Deluge!

Robert Hill,  Oct 27 2025

On the night the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) was passed, Opposition Leader John Hewson called it “a day of shame for the Australian Parliament.” It was far worse than that. In an act of ideological abdication, the Keating Government forced the legislation through Parliament in record time, not to enshrine the fiction of Mabo, but to transform it into racial entitlement. What had been cautious judicial invention of rights that never existed was recast as a permanent statutory entitlement, binding the nation to a racial principle of landholding unprecedented in Australian law. It marked the moment when Parliament declared that rights may be conferred not by conduct or contribution but by descent.

If Australians truly understood the Native Title Act 1993 [NTA], they would be appalled. Behind its language of justice and recognition lies a festering legal fiction, a system that corrodes equality, divides the nation by ancestry, and sells that division as “reconciliation”.

Across the continent there once existed some 6000 distinct native clans or “hordes”, comprising perhaps 300,000 people in total. Each group averaged forty to eighty members, governed by kinship, taboo, and local totemic obligation. These were not systems of public law but micro-societies, familial, moral, and spiritual, governing internal relations rather than territorial sovereignty.

Custom or practice is not law: it is mutable, unverifiable, and incapable of generating enforceable rights beyond the family or horde. When British sovereignty was declared, all such local norms were displaced; no independent authority remained. What persisted, if at all, were fragments of culture, not systems of law. To speak of the continuity of traditional law is therefore to speak of a fiction.

Native title merely converts the residue of custom into the language of statutory recognition, an act of preservation that confirms extinction, not survival.

What was lost was not sovereignty but the authority of custom, the local rule of kin, the power of elders, the moral weight of reciprocity and obligation. These were the instruments of order in thousands of small societies, but they possessed no universal law, no written code, and no continuity beyond the memory of the living. When British sovereignty was declared, that authority ended. What remained was culture without coercive power, memory without enforcement.

Nothing now endures that the law should recognise. The NTA and its jurisprudence do not revive Aboriginal legal systems; they translate fragments of behaviour into supreme property rights at the Crown’s expense.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/the-law/sovereignty-surrendered-to-myth-an...

Native Title needs to be fully and totally clarified to state precisely what it is for any given handout...... not just be a loose non-definition with so many loop-holes you could drive a kangaroo mob through them one after another ...

Every time some idiot - with very few exceptions - hands out a freebie 'land grab' according to 'Native Title' - they fail to specify that 'Native Title' in that particular case either allows the same rights as are already exercised by all - freedom of movement, camping on free range, access to public sites etc, while adding the possibility that licencing for hunting and fishing etc are waived and that very clearly specified sites for genuine ceremonies might be preserved - OR that it is a totally freehold handover of a huge swathe of public land......

Both of those cause problems. 

FAILING to specify that it is NOT a freehold handout, but is bound by specific rules, creates trouble endlessly for everyone by giving latitude for conflict over interpretation of 'ownership' .....

Giving vast swathes of land out as freehold handout is untenable and quite illegal under the modern NATIONAL rules over lands and acquisition - and recognition of past colonisation by one small group in a much broader nation these days is totally untenable - and will become ever more so with the current artificial growth of overall population - as well as being vastly out of synch with history and modern ways.  It is frankly bizarre to suggest that the Western Colonisation is not valid, whereas every previous colonisation over thousands of years of death and destruction is valid. *

The REAL solution to 'land claims' is to give a reasonable amount as Freehold so as to establish a community etc and develop homes and such - while simply re-stating the UNIVERSAL rights to access, camping, licenced fishing and hunting, and everything else to the rest of that Crown Land (apart from very clearly set down and delineated GENUINE 'sacred sites' and not just this swathe is sacred to us BS which should be protected anyway under National Parks and icons).

I doubt very many have any real issue with shutting down climbing on Ayers Rock... but handing it over whole to a group that restricts even basic access while demanding money for a distant view is a hostile act.  On the other hand, there is zero argument for shutting down access to Mt Warning for its spiritual things, such as viewing the first New Year's dawn from it - things that affect everyone equally - and there is no safety reason to shut down what were effective walking tracks.

This needs to be resolved NOW - and it is clear that the only reason this portion of The Madness is allowed to persist is that those with an interest WANT to continue troubles and unrest and division leading to eventual civil war.

How long do you really imagine people are going to allow some government dickweed far away to dictate to them that their land, homes, towns, facilities and so forth are suddenly going to be handed over to some group you never heard of and whose only claim is that they say their ancestors once walked there on their nomadic trip?  Even if that were true - which in many cases it is not - that kind of ideology is Madness pure and simple.

It's 2025... not 1725, kiddies.  Get with the program or get out back to Indonesia or wherever your ancestors came from ... or start paying rent on all the facilities you get to use now built by the Civilisers.