Court: Aborigines No Mineral Rights (crikey!)

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - Australia's highest court ruled Thursday that Aborigines do not have rights to oil or minerals found under tribal land now being used by mining companies.

The ruling was part of a complex decision by the High Court in Canberra on a 1994 claim by the Miriuwung-Gajerrong tribe for a special property right known as native title over 3,050 square miles of land and water.

The area in northwestern Australia includes the Argyle diamond mine, the world's largest.

Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said that "at face value" the decision appeared to say that native title rights did not exist over minerals and petroleum under the ground.

"It appears to establish a great precedent in providing some ... confidence in terms of resource exploration and development," he said, adding that government lawyers would be studying the 406-page decision over the next week.

Wayne Bergman, a senior Aboriginal leader, called the ruling, which allowed Aborigines limited rights to hunt and visit sacred sites on the land, "offensive and discriminatory."

He said the court was saying to Aborigines, "nice little black fella, you can go hunting but you don't have any control over who goes on the land."

Bergman called on the government and mining companies to sit down with Aborigines to set up a better way of sharing land.

Ian Head, a spokesman for Rio Tinto, which owns the mine, said the company was still studying the ruling and had no immediate comment.

Chris Davie, a lawyer with the law firm Clayton Utz, said the ruling was a disappointment to both Aborigines and mining companies because it did not answer many questions over native title rights.

Native title is a form of property right that was only outlined by the High Court in 1992. In that year, it overturned a 200-year-old legal fiction known as terra nullius — which said Australia was unoccupied before Europeans arrived.

Native title does not give Aborigines ownership of ancestral lands, but rights of use for traditional practices such as hunting, fishing and visiting sacred sites. Aborigines had hoped the Miriuwung-Gajerrong case would also give them ownership of minerals under their lands.

Under laws passed in 1993, Aborigines have the right to negotiate with mining and tourism companies for a share in profits, but cannot veto development.

Although Thursday's ruling covers only a part of Australia, the case is expected to set precedents for dozens of land rights claims by Aborigines throughout the country.

Aborigines, who number about 400,000 among Australia's 19 million people, are the poorest section of society.

An excellent example of the attitude of the world's legal class towards its subjects. One would have thought that in this day and age, shenanigans of the sort that went on in 19th century America with the Native Americans would be unacceptable.

If anyone has any illusions about what our American legal class will do with our Constitutional Rights when they've got the courts stacked with black-robed "Living Document" liberals, they should read this article carefully.

Huh? They can have royalties, but they can't veto development by claiming "gee, people I don't even know the names of but who are distantly related to my mother's aunt once lived on the same continent as that gold deposit". Where is the injustice? I understand perfectly why environ wackos and build-absolutely-nothing-anywhere-near-anybody nutjobs and multicultural "please let us rule the world by pretending to speak for the grass" gurus are put out by it. Why Freepers would fall for such a load of rubbish is however a puzzle.

My point is that the legal system makes its own rules to deal with "wealth distribution" and "power distribution".

An example of this in the American legal system:

Did you know that most of American judges and lawyers believe in a "collective rights" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment? The percentage is probably greater than 90%.

Do you understand what this seeming non-sequitur means?

It means that they can collect your guns anytime they want to. They just haven't gotten around to it yet. They, of course, can carry anywhere they want to, because they're the legal elite, and they've also got armed protection when enforcing their judicial tyranny.

How does that relate to abos and American Indians, you ask?

The same crowd of a**holes who stole land from the Indians and abos after signing "binding legal documents" are treating us the same way. You and I are going to get told the same thing when they confiscate the guns and parcel out your tax dollars for reparations to Je$$e and the Reverend Al. "You little people don't understand the words written in the Constitution, or how to interpret legal documents, that's why we do it for you."

It's amazing how their "interpretations" have funneled billions in tobacco money into their private pocketbooks, ain't it? You ain't seen nothing yet.

We may not like the original occupant claims of the aborigines or the American Indians, but we should also be wary of phony legal arguments used to justify the strong-arming. Just call it what it is: "Our society is the dominant one, and we believe that your society is not making the best use of the land, so we're taking it."

If you allow the legal Sophists to pull this on the natives, sooner or later the Sophists, being well-pleased with themselves, will turn on the fellow members of their society, as we see even this day in the United States.

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