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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-03-20 Daily Xml
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Aboriginal Housing Strategy

The Hon. B.R. HOOD (15:19): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs regarding home ownership.

Leave granted.

The Hon. B.R. HOOD: One of the six strategy pillars of the South Australian government's Aboriginal Housing Strategy 2021-2031 document prioritises home ownership. The inability to buy a home on traditional lands was cited as a key concern by those who were engaged. It has been suggested that enabling home ownership on traditional Aboriginal lands would reduce reliance on social housing and incentivise and attract investment to build new industries on country.

The governments in the Northern Territory and Western Australia are pursuing home ownership schemes on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders living in remote communities held under Aboriginal land trusts. My questions to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs are:

1. What legal impediments currently exist to enable home ownership schemes in South Australia's Aboriginal communities?

2. What investment has the state government made to date to deliver on strategy pillar 6 to overcome the inability of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to buy homes on traditional lands?

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Attorney-General, Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector) (15:20): I thank the honourable member for his question. Certainly, it is something that is occasionally raised and something that I know the former Labor government has undertaken some work in having a look at. There are a number of different types of ways of, effectively, communal ownership of Aboriginal land.

I think what the honourable member is talking about is most closely reflected in the Aboriginal Lands Trust, the historic piece of legislation in 1966 that was the first Aboriginal land rights legislation we saw anywhere in Australia that continues to this day that has about half a million hectares held in trust for the benefit of Aboriginal communities.

I think I have informed this chamber before that a large portion of those lands held in trust are former missions around Australia—Point Pearce, Davenport, Point McLeay (now Raukkan), Yalata, Gerard, and many of the early missions. There are very different views and it is a very complicated area about whether you seek to disturb that, effectively, communal title that sees land protected.

There are concerns raised that once it's no longer held in trust it can be lost for ever for the benefit of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal communities, but it is certainly something that there are members of communities who would like to investigate some form of, whether it's fee simple Torrens title land or land held by the Aboriginal Lands Trust, or whether there is something in between those two forms of landholding that might be possible.

The other one that is even more complicated is the freehold lands in South Australia: Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands or the Maralinga Tjarutja lands that are held by legislation for the benefit of Anangu in those areas. That would require very substantial and complicated legislative change to consider those. But it is something that has been raised and I know it's something that governments have considered.

As the honourable member pointed out, particularly in Western Australia there is a program of work that is designed to look at where there are opportunities for lands held in trust, which is more akin to our Aboriginal Lands Trust in South Australia, to see if there is a form of landholding that might give greater opportunity, particularly to borrow against the land to unlock some of the wealth that Aboriginal people have in landholdings that's not reflected in the advantage they face in our community today.

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