Australian Politics

Huge dispute erupts over a massive plot of land due to Aboriginal heritage laws

The future of a major open-cut gold mine in western NSW has been thrown into doubt after its owner said the project had been rendered unviable by a federal protection order.

ASX-listed Regis Resources said a decision by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to protect Indigenous heritage at the McPhillamys Gold Project, central-west NSW, would stop the mine going ahead.

The NSW Independent Planning Commission in March approved Regis's application to mine gold in the area despite opposition from some in the local Aboriginal community.

Regis chief executive Jim Beyer said the company was 'extremely surprised and disappointed' that, after nearly four years of assessment, Ms Plibersek had decided to effectively block the development.

'(This) declaration shatters any confidence that development proponents Australia-wide (both private and public) can have in project approval timelines and outcomes,' he said in a statement.

The minister's Indigenous-heritage protection declaration covers part of the Belubula River, which falls within the footprint for a proposed storage facility for cast-off material.

Regis has argued there are no other viable options for the facility and developing alternatives would require it to restart the lengthy assessments process.

'This decision does impact a critical area of the project development site and means the project is not viable,' it said.

Under the Regis proposal, an 11-year open cut mining operation would be set up in the Blayney-Kings Plains district, near Bathurst.

The project would create almost 1,000 jobs in the region, the company said.

The Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, an industry lobby group, said the government order 'lacks reason and commonsense'.

'(It) sets a truly terrible precedent for investment risk in Australia,' association chief executive Warren Pearce said in a statement.

Ms Plibersek had ignored the views of local traditional owners, the Orange Local Aboriginal Corporation, who did not oppose the project, he said.

'They could see the value and future prosperity that this project could bring to their people,' Mr Pearce said.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13756361/NSW-McPhillamys-Gold-Project-Aboriginal-heritage-laws.html

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Universal child care would only end up on Labor’s spending pyre

Judith Sloan

Anthony Albanese has foreshadowed on a number of occasions that universal childcare will be a centrepiece of his campaign for a second term in office. His stated intention is that universal childcare will become available midway through that term.

My strong advice to the Prime Minister is: don’t do it. It is ill-considered, badly targeted and unaffordable. And the biggest winners will be high-income earners who currently receive proportionately lower childcare fee subsidies than those on lower incomes.

It’s hard to see how that aspect will be a vote winner. The backdrop to this is the commissioning of a report, A path to universal early childhood education and care, from the Productivity Commission. A draft was released last year; the final report has now been sent to the government and is awaiting release.

One of the key findings of the draft report was that the U-shape that once characterised women’s workforce participation – there was always a dip during women’s early child-rearing years – has almost disappeared. To be sure, only a small proportion of children under the age of one attend childcare. But after that, the proportion rises significantly.

We can’t infer that this outcome is simply the result of the preferences of career-minded women. Rather the financial needs of most families to have two sources of income means a great many parents have no choice but to use childcare, particularly as cost-of-living pressures have escalated. This distinction needs to be borne in mind when thinking about policy options.

Another important distinction is between childcare and preschool. There are currently in place governmental agreements that guarantee 15 hours per week of structured preschool for three- and four-year olds. In many instances, these preschool programs are delivered by childcare centres, but there are still many dedicated preschools – around 4300 in 2022.

The developmental and educational benefits of childcare and preschool are not the same. Preschool does what it says – prepares little ones for school. The idea that there are developmental and educational benefits for one-year olds in childcare is much more fanciful.

The world’s leading academic in this area, James Heckman, has made the obvious point that the only real developmental and educational benefits for children attending childcare are for those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Chaotic family environments, inadequate income, an absence of consistent nutrition, a lack of books and being read to – these are contextual features of children who benefit from childcare.

For other children, however, there is no beneficial effect on average. Indeed, they can be worse off because they are deprived of the constant attention of at least one parent, which would greatly benefit them. When Albanese claimed there are educational benefits from childcare because he observed some children playing with lettered blocks, he was merely demonstrating his ignorance in this field.

But here’s a key point: the participation of children from disadvantaged backgrounds in childcare is low compared with other children. Out of every 100 children who take up a subsidised early childhood education and care place, only 23 are from low-income families. As the Productivity Commission notes, “early childhood education and care is positive for many children but those who benefit most are least likely to attend”.

The under-representation of children from disadvantaged backgrounds is the result of a number of factors, including the relative dearth of childcare centres in poorer areas as well as the activity test, which many parents fail to meet.

The reality is that the benefits of government-subsidised childcare are largely snaffled by the middle class. Note here that this government extended eligibility for childcare fee relief to those families earning up to $533,000 per year, although the rate of fee subsidy is scaled down as income rises.

Another interesting fact about childcare is the dominance of private, for-profit centres, a dominance that has increased over time as community-managed centres have either closed or failed to grow. Family daycare is a relatively small part of the mix, at less than 6 per cent of childcare places.

What this means is that government childcare subsidies are mainly directed towards private businesses, which must meet capital and labour costs as well as deliver a return to shareholders. This is a very different beast to government funding of public schools.

In its draft report, the PC recommended that 30 hours or three days per week of quality early childhood education and care should be made available to all children aged between up to five years.

A 90 per cent subsidy rate would apply across the board save for those families with income less than $80,000 for whom there would be no fee charged. The estimated cost of this exercise is more than $4bn per year or around one-third on top of current outlays. But the main beneficiaries “would be higher-income families, as many low-income families receive subsidies at 90 per cent or higher rates”. In other words, this feature of the policy should give the Labor government reason to hit the pause button.

No doubt, government ministers will point to the supposed broader economic benefits of further subsidising childcare, particularly greater workforce participation. The modelling is clear that any impact on participation will be modest, perhaps as low as an additional 17,000 effective full-time workers. There are a variety of reasons for this outcome, including the shift towards centre-based care away from other forms of care, as well as the fact cheaper childcare means parents can work fewer hours and achieve the same net income.

The cost of providing three full days of universal care works out at more than $200,000 per job created. This is a very poor use of taxpayer dollars. As for any impact on productivity, it would almost certainly be negative as the most productive workers are already working long hours.

In the meantime, the government has committed to spending even more taxpayer dollars topping up the wages of childcare workers in line with a potential ruling from the Fair Work Commission. The cost of this exercise is put at $3.6bn over two years and, in exchange, centres must agree to enter into union wage agreements as well as keep fee increases to 4.4 per cent for one year. Topping up wages is likely to become a permanent commitment.

The bottom line is that childcare is yet another area in which government spending is out of control. In 2018-19, childcare subsidies cost less than $8bn; this financial year, they are expected to come in at $14.5bn, before adding in the wage subsidy package.

There are very serious questions about both the effectiveness and fairness of the policy settings, both current and proposed. For private providers, however, it’s a lucrative industry.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/universal-child-care-would-only-end-up-on-labors-spending-pyre/news-story/e04211ee233bb13f02ff6d14c5870969

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Colourblind test: the word that must be uncancelled

Last year, Australians rejected a referendum to establish an Indigenous voice by a margin of 20 percentage points. The referendum came four months after a similar decision in the United States: the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

Without overstating the similarity between Australia and the United States, both the referendum and the Supreme Court decision brought to light an ideological fault line that has existed in both countries for at least a half century: colourblindness or race-consciousness?

As I discuss in my book, The End of Race Politics, not seeing race is the surest way, these days, to signal that you are on the wrong side of this divide. Indeed, the term “colourblind” has become anathema in many circles, and if you live in elite institutions – universities, corporations, the mainstream media – the quickest way to demonstrate you just don’t get it is to say, “I don’t see colour” or “I was taught to treat everyone the same”.

Once considered a progressive attitude, colourblindness is now seen as backwards – a cheap surrender in the face of racism, at best; or a cover for deeply held racist beliefs, at worst.

But colourblindness is neither racist nor backwards. Properly understood, it is the belief that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.

Though it has roots in the Enlightenment, the colourblind principle was really developed during the fight against slavery and refined during the fight against segregation. It was not until after the civil rights movement achieved its greatest victories that colourblindness was abandoned by progressives, embraced by conservatives, and memory-holed by activist-scholars.

These activist-scholars have written a false history of colourblindness meant to delegitimise it. According to this story, colourblindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

It was, instead, an idea concocted after the civil rights movement by reactionaries who needed a way to oppose progressive policies without sounding racist. Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, has criticised the “colourblind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neo-conservative ‘think tanks’ during the ’70s”.

Although this public relations campaign has been remarkably successful, it bears no relation to the truth. The earliest mentions of colourblindness come from Wendell Phillips, the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the man nicknamed “abolition’s golden trumpet”. In 1865, Phillips called for the creation of “a government colourblind”, by which he meant the total elimination of all laws that mentioned race.

In the decades that followed, the idea of colourblindness propelled the fight against Jim Crow. Exhibit A: the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v Ferguson, in which the court – outrageously – ruled 7-1 that “separate-but-equal” was constitutional. The lone dissent in Plessy, the lone flicker of hope, which was written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, features the immortal sentence: “Our constitution is colourblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens.”

Decades later, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Thurgood Marshall was battling segregation in the courts, an aide recalled that he considered the Plessy dissent his “bible” and would read aloud from it when he needed inspiration. “Our constitution is colourblind”, his favourite sentence, became the “basic creed” of the NAACP. Among the main goals of the civil rights movement was the elimination of laws and policies that used the category of race in any way.

In fact, that was the first demand made by the original March on Washington movement of the 1940s (which successfully pressured Franklin Roosevelt to integrate the defence industry). It was also the first argument made by the NAACP in its Brown v Board appellate brief.

To paint colourblindness as a reactionary or racist idea – rather than a key goal of the civil rights movement – requires ignoring the historical record.

Yet this is precisely what today’s most celebrated public intellectuals have done.

Ibram X. Kendi, MacArthur Genius and best-selling author of How to be an Anti-Racist, argues that “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one”. In Australia, opponents of the voice referendum were often labelled racist, even as they articulated a belief of equal treatment under the law.

Critics of colourblindness argue it lacks teeth in the fight against racism. If we are blind to race, they say, how can we see racism?

Robin DiAngelo, in her hugely successful 2018 book, White Fragility, sums up the colourblind strategy like this: “Pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end.” But this argument is no more than a cheap language trick. It’s true we all see race. We can’t help it. What’s more, race can influence how we’re treated and how we treat others. In that sense, no one is truly colourblind.

But to interpret “colourblind” so literally is to misunderstand it – perhaps intentionally.

“Colourblind” is an expression like “warm-hearted”: it uses a physical metaphor to encapsulate an abstract idea. To describe a person as warm-hearted is not to say something about the temperature of that person’s heart, but about the kindness of his or her spirit. Similarly, to advocate for colourblindness is not to pretend you don’t notice colour. It is to endorse a principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our public policy and our private lives.

In the American context, that meant rejecting policies such as race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In Australia, that meant, among other things, voting no on the voice referendum.

Colourblindness is the best principle with which to govern a multiracial democracy. It is the best way to lower the temperature of racial conflict in the long run. It is the best way to fight the kind of racism that really matters. And it is the best way to orient your own attitude toward this nefarious concept we call race. We abandon colourblindness at our own peril.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/end-race-politics-lets-get-serious-about-embracing-colourblindness/news-story/d32a8ae6cc2985f57e5c7e076d6cd9c1

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Activists ‘stand in way of Indigenous economic empowerment’, says Roy Ah-See

Green activists are abusing land rights acts at the cost of economic empowerment and Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is failing to listen to the Aboriginal authority on the lands of a vetoed $1bn gold mine, one of the most respected leaders of the Wiradjuri nation warns.

Despite her own department originally approving the project and the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council challenging the grounds of her decision, Ms Plibersek has said she declared an Indigenous protection order over a Regis Resources goldmining project near Blayney because of its importance to the Wiradjuri people of central NSW.

Ms Plibersek was holding firm on Monday as she came under attack from both the Business Council of Australia and the Coalition for her decision. BCA chief executive Bran Black warned of an investment drain and opposition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price called the veto a “serious threat to economic development for Indigenous Australians”.

Last Friday, Ms Plibersek said: “Because I accept that the headwaters of the Belubula River are of particular significance to the Wiradjuri/Wiradyuri people in accordance with their tradition, I have decided to protect them.”

Roy Ah-See – one of the most senior Wiradjuri leaders on the national stage and the former chair of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council – said the Labor frontbencher was wrong to prefer the views of opponents over the written advice of the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council.

Mr Ah-See said he was not speaking on behalf of the group, but wanted to speak up for the recognised cultural authority of the local land council.

“If it’s got the support of the local Aboriginal land council that should be enough for the minister to listen to the recognised Aboriginal party,” he said.

“If you don’t have that structure, you have chaos … We can have anyone ringing up saying they’re Wiradjuri and it doesn’t feel right to me. That’s why the land council is so important because in order to become a member there are certain requirements and restrictions. They are the statutory authority.”

Mr Ah-See said environmentalists believed Aboriginal lands should be locked up.

But economic empowerment for Aboriginal people in Blayney should come first, he added.

“The green attitude is that all our land should be locked up for environmental national parks and that wasn’t the intent of the NSW land rights legislation,“ the Wiradjuri leader said.

“The environmental view is that Aboriginal people should be environmentalists, that’s not true. That shoe doesn’t fit. We are balanced. It is about economic empowerment for us.

“We want to create economic opportunities for the future generations and we are not going to do that by locking up our land and using them as environmental corridors or offsets for other developers. That’s crazy.”

The BCA predicted an investment drain due to unwieldy planning and regulation in the wake of the Albanese government’s eleventh-hour decision to stop the $1bn goldmine.

? Orange Land Council’s own heritage committee “truth tested” claims about the impact of the McPhillamys project, finding “they could not be substantiated”.

“The proposed development would not impact any known sites or artefacts of high significance,” the land council wrote to the NSW Independent Planning Commission last year.

Mr Black said that if projects were approved under federal and state law they shouldn’t then be put at risk by activist inspired lawfare. This followed an extraordinary statement to the Australian Stock Exchange by Regis Resources on Monday, criticising Ms Plibersek’s decision to declare an Indigenous protection order over the project, despite the minister having approved it under commonwealth environmental laws.

The resources sector has warned of a dangerous precedent set by Ms Plibersek’s intervention last week to accept a section 10 application under the 1984 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Heritage Protection Act to protect the land on which a tailings dam for the mine had already been approved by the NSW and federal government.

“I constantly hear from CEOs that Australia is missing out on major investments because our planning and regulation systems are difficult to navigate, duplicative and cumbersome,” Mr Black said.

Sky News host Chris Kenny says resource projects being blocked because of “Indigenous heritage claims” has the mining industry “worried” about the sovereign risk of trying to invest in Australia.

“We need an approval system which balances economic, environmental and social benefits of projects and provides transparent decisions.

“If projects are supported by communities and meet all the approval requirements, they should not be put at risk by activist actions or lawfare.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/indigenous/activists-stand-in-way-of-indigenous-economic-empowerment-says-roy-ahsee/news-story/9309442394be1996f4026bd3430ab19f