Talkback radio lately has been full of the native title debate. Predictably
there's been much familiar describing of indigenous rights as 'special
privileges' and 'unequal rights' driven by the 'Aboriginal industry' and
so on.
But when the real picture, of which native title is a crucial part,
is put clearly to the audience, there's not much a shock jock can do but
back-off and behave reasonably, even when trying on the old interruption
trick.
Such was the case when 6PR's Howard Sattler spoke to Glenn Shaw of the
National Indigenous Working Group over the phone from Canberra on 3 December.
Here's part of that interview in which Mr Sattler put the question of
compensation, usually a sign he's about to rant and rave about about money-grabbing.
Sattler: Glenn, how much of the compensation that's been talked
about is monetary compensation?
Shaw: You cannot buy native title, you cannot buy a ...
Sattler: [interrupts] But you can use it can't you, to extract
dollars?
Shaw: You can use it in many forms, compensation could be compensation
for say infrastructure works to increase the health within a particular
community...
Sattler: [interrupts] Yeah hospitals and schools and that sort
of stuff.
Shaw: Yes, that could be a form of compensation...
Sattler: [interrupts] And what about jobs?
Shaw: Jobs are most certainly a form of compensation. At the
end of the day we want to be able to move the Aboriginal community from
a welfare state into a self-sustainable collective of people around
the country.
Sattler: Well I'm aware that some particularly mining companies
are prepared to go along with that.
Shaw: And power to the mining companies. There have been and
there will continue to be agreements where Aboriginal people and mining
companies get very good agreements, and we would not want that to cease.
The trouble is that under the current process that we have and the current
[government] amendments that we have, they're removing some of the rights
of indigenous people to negotiate and stop us from getting those forms
of agreement.
