Article by Josh Zimmerman courtesy of the Australian.
In the ultimate sign of chaos over the implementation of new Aboriginal cultural heritage laws, backlash against updated survey requirements resulted in a one-year reprieve — largely benefiting miners — being hastily written into guidelines just days before they were released.
The West Australian can reveal guidelines published last Tuesday — then yanked offline within hours — originally applied new, more rigorous requirements to any Indigenous heritage survey undertaken from July 1 of this year.
But when the guidelines were republished 72 hours later on Friday, the start date for stricter heritage surveys had been pushed back by a year.
A comparison between the original guidelines — obtained by The West — and the updated version reveals a series of important amendments.
The biggest of those was the start date for more prescriptive survey requirements being delayed a year.
Proponents with existing surveys that are less than a decade old will also have an another year (up until July 2024) to secure agreement with the relevant “Aboriginal party” that no updated assessment is required.
Additionally, surveys more than 10 years old that did not originally include any input from an Aboriginal corporation or native title body will not need to be redone, provided they have subsequently been endorsed by the appropriate group.
The raft of major eleventhhour concessions came despite the Cook Government steadfastly resisting widespread calls calling for the implementation of the entire Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act to be pushed back by six months.
Liberal leader Libby Mettam said the “last-minute changes” to the guidelines illustrated both a double standard and “just how messy the Cook Labor Government’s handling of (the Act) has been”.
Indigenous Affairs Minister Tony Buti did not directly address questions about whether the decision to remove and substantially update the guidelines came after feedback from the resources sector.
“As I said in the Parliament, the publishing of the survey guidelines was an error. Consultation with the industry was ongoing at the time,” he said.
“(We) committed to publishing the final survey guidelines, which has now been done, and (it) reinforces our consultative and collaborative approach.”
