FAIRA CONDEMNS ALP DEAL ON NATIVE TITLE Spokesperson Charmaine Carroll FAIRA Aboriginal Corporation expresses its concern and dismay at the outcome of the ALP DEAL on Queensland Alternate State Provisions (NATIVE TITLE) legislation. The laws approved in an ALP Deal mean that Native Title holders in Queensland have had their rights and interests even further eroded. The laws approved by the Senate yesterday are based on the internationally condemned Native Title Act Amendments (1998), which will continue the discrimination against Indigenous Australians. In a clear victory for the mining industry the new laws open the way for less than satisfactory procedural rights for Native title holders, and once again demonstrate how Indigenous interests still come last in settling the Native title issues. Rather than provide certainty the new laws threaten to steamroll Indigenous interests in favour of miners. The deal, which Premier Beattie foreshadowed even before the Senate had voted yesterday, show that party politics and seals still prevail over Indigenous interests; the ALP could not even adhere to its own policy when dealing with the issue. Premier Beattie has made further hollow promises to ensure by his own words that his s26A laws are improved before they are implemented in Queensland. FAIRA would also like to congratulate the Australian Democrats for their rock solid support the Indigenous opposition to the laws. FAIRA and other Native Title Representative Bodies in Queensland now face even more uncertainty as Premier Beattie decides how and when to implement his new laws, Native Title holders in Queensland will no doubt be inundated as the Queensland Government sets about using the new laws to overcome the Industry and Government Exploration strike which has built up over the past four years. This organisation would like to remind the ALP that it was happy to criticise the Federal Liberal Government over its contemptuous reception of the UN CERD Committees finding that the Native Title Amendments were racially discriminatory; we now find the ALP in contempt of the UN findings as well. 1 September 2000 ------------------------------------------------------ RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznet2%40paradigm4.com.au/
