 Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My first task this evening is to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are gathered, the Larrakeer people, and provide my personal appreciation to Richard for that warm welcome this evening. I would also like to acknowledge the presence of the Right Worshipful, the Lord Mayor of Darwin, Katrina Fong Lim and Vice-Chancellors of the Co-hosting Universities, Professor Brian Schmidt, I am of the Australian National University and Professor Simon Maddox and Charles Darwin University. I would also like to acknowledge Professor Mick Dodson, PDU, Margaret Harding and Wendy Ludwick, and other distinguished guests here this evening. I thank both hosts for inviting me to give this 8th Nugget Coombs Memorial Lecture. The invitation is indeed a great honour and I am mindful of the contribution of previous lectures all immigrant Australians. And I am mindful of the distinguished record of public service of Dr Nugget Coombs whom we continue to honour 19 years after his death and more than 110 years after his birth. I never knew the great man personally but I pay homage to his enduring legacy born of a gigantic intellect and capacity to bring multidisciplinary approaches to solve some of the nation's biggest questions, mostly to do with the place of Australia's first peoples. One Aboriginal leader whom I respect described this man as the father of public policy that had at its heart reconciling the great Australian dream, identity and love of Bush with the people that lived and owned this country. Nugget Coombs' great leadership of post-war reconstruction was matched by his contribution to Indigenous affairs, which was about a post-contact reconstruction of the country's relationship with Indigenous people at the heart of the nation of a fair go. On my reading of history he was a public servant whose frank and fearless advice drove good public policy. This evening I would like to highlight just a few of the policy failures that litter Indigenous affairs today and point to some opportunities as well. I want to salute Nugget's legacy as it relates to his thinking about remote employment. But my ultimate message is that Indigenous people must take control of the agenda if we are to crawl out of the assimilationist and the paternalistic mess that stains the nation and ignores the uniqueness of Indigenous people in this country. As a public servant Coombs straddled the Prime Minister's ships of Curtin, Chiffley, Menzies, Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam and Fraser. He was in his 60s when Prime Minister Harold Holt in late 1967 coerced him into accepting the chairmanship of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, which would survive for the next decade as a primary source of advice to governments about Indigenous policies. Holt died before the Council for Aboriginal Affairs could even find its feet. The record is that any hopes that the Commonwealth would seize the chance to pursue progressive Indigenous policies in the wake of the 1967 referendum disappeared with Harold Holt. The Liberal Party Prime Ministers who followed Gorton and McMahon were indifferent to the influence of Coombs and the other two members of his Council for Aboriginal Affairs, the anthropologist Bill Stanner and the public servant Barry Dexter, who headed the Office of Aboriginal Affairs within the Prime Minister's Department. Gorton and McMahon were prisoners to their Country Party Coalition, colleagues who commanded the Administration of Aboriginal Affairs. With like-minded bureaucrats, especially within the Department of the Interior, those Country Party Ministers ruthlessly strangled the efforts of Coombs and his Council for Aboriginal Affairs, especially on the matter of land rights in the Northern Territory. The Country Party mindset infected local politics here in the Northern Territory. It helped fester a biting opposition to the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which was passed by the Commonwealth Parliament in December 1976. That opposition endures to this day in the ranks of the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory. The recently ousted CLP government represented just another iteration of the racism and ignorance that characterised the successive CLP governments that ruled the Northern Territory for a quarter of a century after the Territory was granted self-government. The Commonwealth granted self-government to the Territory on the 1st of July in 1978, and CLP governments would spend tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to sustain their relentless and reckless campaign to oppose every claim that they could challenge. They whipped up baseless fears among the non-Indigenous population that backyards were under threat, and the climate of fear benefitted the CLP at many, many elections. As we mark the 40th anniversary of the passing of the Land Rights Act this year, it's worth asking how far have we progressed as a polity over that time? Well, the CLP has never given up hope that the Commonwealth might one day surrender the Land Rights Act to the Northern Territory. Only last year the Territory's Attorney General, yet again, made a pitch to have the Act so-called repatriated, not that it's ever been in the Territory's domain. Land Rights, he said, had become a wall of imprisonment, blocking Aboriginal people from participating in Northern development. This is a tight old refrain, and you'll hear echoes of it later in this lecture. But the latest, most serious echo was heard during the Northern Territory government's review of its Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act, which was delivered in April of this year. Dr Ben Scambri is Chief Executive of the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, or ARPA, which administers the Sacred Sites Act. Ben gave an illuminating address at the North Australian Research Unit just a couple of months ago, where he described the political context in which the Act came to be reviewed by a team of external consultants. I'll come later to his revelations, but first I need to paint some background to that review. Hanging over it, indeed a major catalyst for it, was the proposed development of Ord Stage 3, the pie in the sky plan to extend the Ord River irrigation area into the Northern Territory. Ord 3 was one of the projects identified in the White Paper on developing Northern Australia, which would enhance the regional economy. It would develop 14,500 hectares of irrigated farmland in the Keat River Plain, the Knox Plain and Milligan's Lagoon in the Northern Territory. It stands today as a monument to failure, a failure of planning and a failure of the Northern Territory government to engage in good faith with Aboriginal people. And today, I can tell you, Ord 3 is going nowhere. The CLP government in the Northern Territory was too cute by half in the way it proceeded, with headstrong intent to get Ord 3 moving. The scheme was first punted in the 1990s and caused great consternation amongst traditional Aboriginal owners. The proponent walked away in late 2001 after anthropological research by the Northern Land Council established the entire Keat River Plain, or Balangari, was a sacred site. Ord 3 was revived in 2012 when a Chinese investment company took it over. Again, the traditional owners rose up and in 2013 a delegation travelled to Darwin to inform the CLP government ministers of their total opposition. The government was undeterred. It then applied to ARPA for a certificate, which is the authorities' issues when it's satisfied that work won't risk damage to sacred sites or if a proponent has reached agreement with Aboriginal custodians. But on the day in 2013 the authorities board met to register the Keat River Plain, the Northern Territory government withdrew that application. Now we come to the tricky part. The government then broke up the Ord 3 project into three blocks and proposed first to develop a parcel to the south, which it called Ord 3A. It would have required the extinguishment of native tidal over more than 4,000 hectares of which 1,800 hectares was earmarked for irrigated agriculture. Plainly the government's intent was to soften up the native tidal holders, even though the government's monetary compensation package was inadequate in the eyes of the native tidal holders who were being asked to have their native tidal rights extinguished forever. Nonetheless, the NLC had the responsibility as a native tidal representative body under the Native Tidal Act to consult with those native tidal holders and we proceeded to do that job. We actually secured their consent to negotiate an agreement for Ord 3A, although everyone knew that as a standalone project the economics would never stand up. And then out of the blue, the government without explanation announced in April of this year that Ord 3A was off the table, that it would be inviting bids from the private sector to develop the whole of the Ord 3. It would be left to a successful proponent to negotiate land use agreement and ARPA clearances. The timetable was unrealistic. The CLP government said it would execute an agreement by the end of July. That CLP government, as we all know, was spectacularly ousted in the general election here in the Northern Territory on August the 27th. And I understand Ord 3 went out the back door with them. As a post script to all of that, let me refer you to a damning report last month by the West Australian Auditor-General about Ord Stage 2. The state originally budgeted $220 million for the Ord Stage 2 expansion. The Auditor-General estimates it will end up costing $334 million, an increase of 52%, and it was delivered three years late. And although 27 social infrastructure projects worth an estimated $195 million came in on budget, their delivery too was three years late. So where is the accountability here? The West Australian Auditor-General reports that the sustained social and economic benefits underpinning the decision to proceed with this extraordinary investment, $529 million in total, have not been realised. The justification for the whole Ord is Kimberley development, as it's known, relied heavily on addressing socio-economic disadvantage, and for that, read Aboriginal disadvantage. But the Auditor-General says there's no plan to track and assess any improvement of that disadvantage, and I can understand why, because that would be a source of continuing embarrassment. Sure, there were jobs and plenty of training during the construction of Ord Stage 2, but as the Auditor-General reports, this has not been sustained. Nugget Coombs biographer, Professor Tim Rouse, records in his book, Obliged to be Difficult, that in August 1967, nearly 50 years ago, Coombs toured Northern Australia to inspect the sites of mining, pastoral and agricultural investment. At that time, he was about to resign as Governor of the Reserve Bank, and construction was well underway to create the first stage of the Ord River irrigation area. Aboriginal people were being displaced everywhere, and the sacred sites, not directly destroyed by construction works, would later be submerged by the waters of the newly created Lake Argo. Rouse records that Coombs returned from his survey, wondering how Aboriginal people would survive the incipient boom in the north. Coombs told his colleagues he could not rejoice in Northern development, until he knew how Aboriginal people would find an honourable place within the coming prosperity. His misgiving were well held. I personally travel to Kananara often in my job, and I can tell you it's the same sad old story for Aboriginal people, abject poverty and misery. That is what Coombs was deeply concerned with. God knows how Coombs, an economist by training, would have received the Bleak Assessment of Ord Stage 2 by the North Australian Order of the General. This is why he established the North Australian Research Unit to provide the research capability so that informed public policy decisions could be made, based on the economic, social, cultural and the political realities of the region. If Ord Stage 2 has been a scandalous investment of government monies, Ord Stage 3 has been a cruel curse. It has caused much distress for native land title holders who have been treated as mere pawns, and its promotion by the Territory CLP Government almost destroyed the Aboriginal Area's Protection Authority. Ben Scambri in his paper at Nauru describes how ARPA's assessment of the Keep River Plain as a sacred site was questioned by the Joll's Government. The site was characterised as a dreaming trap, instead of a sacred site, with the implication that ARPA was acting beyond the sacred sites act. The notion that the capital of ARPA could stifle a major development initiative of the government was met, Ben Scambri says, with outrage, that quote, permeated, permutated and seeped through the Northern Territory Government agencies. The Chief Minister himself, Adam Giles, even when so far as to suggest that some sacred sites were in effect not real, being used by ARPA as a way of delaying projects, often in opposition to what traditional owners wanted. Worse, he accused custodians of inventing sacred sites to maximise financial benefit to them from the developments. I know Ben Scambri and work alongside him and his agency closely. I completely accept his description of this behaviour, having encountered it by myself. Further, it convinces me that the CLP at its heart is as ignorant and racist today as it was 40 years ago when it voraciously opposed the introduction of land rights legislation. The real dirty work to subvert the work of ARPA through the Ward Stage III saga was done by the Chief of Staff to the Minister for Community Services, who had responsibility for the sacred sites act and its agency ARPA. That Chief of Staff, a CLP member, weighs war against ARPA. Ben Scambri has characterised his behaviour as a campaign of harassment and intimidation that included personal threats, unlawful directions, negative dispersions against ARPA board members and accusations that the authority was anti-development. The campaign by that Chief of Staff abated only after he was charged with corruption, charges that are yet to be dealt with by the courts. The sort of prejudice demonstrated by the attacks on the integrity of ARPA does not belong just to the elected arm of the CLP and its former army of party hack advisers. It lies also in the heart of the bureaucracy here in the Northern Territory. Scambri identified a traditional culture of bureaucratic opposition to Indigenous land administration frameworks that has its foundations and the earliest conflicts over the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, the Sacred Sites Act and the Native Title Act. Nugget Coombs in 1976 reflected on the persistence of such attitudes when he reviewed his work during the previous decade as chair of the Council for Aboriginal Fears. He questioned whether the dominant white society might lack the spiritual qualities to recognise the reality and virtue of Aboriginal identity and the right of Aboriginal people to assert it. Until the arrogance, the prejudice, the fear that still largely determines their attitude towards Aborigines gives way to humility, generosity and human warmth that can be little grounds for hope of a quick resolution, Coombs said in a lecture 40 years ago. And he continued, if there is a taste of the ashes on the lips of white Australian civilisation, it is because while we have mastered a continent and subordinated a proud people, we have remained in spirit aliens and strangers to it and to them. Ben Scambri iswithstanding the barbarians who wanted to undo the Sacred Sites Act reveal an entrenched culture of opposition by politicians and bureaucrats to Aboriginal rights and interests. And that opposition continues to colour the Northern Development Agenda. In many speeches over the past few years I have lamented the exclusion of Indigenous interest in the public policy discussions about developing the North. We continue to not have a proper place at the planning table even though we all know how critical planning is. We have been mere bystanders as the likes of Andrew Forrest argue that Aboriginal land tenure is an impediment to advancement. Forrest was recruited by an enduring Prime Minister to report on Indigenous training and employment programs. He managed to turn that exercise into an opportunity to tackle Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory and criticise land councils, the Northern Land Council in particular. It galls me that a West Australian billionaire miner who has brought trouble on himself by the way his company has negotiated native title agreements with the Yinjibongi people in the Pilbara gets the imprimatur of the Commonwealth Government to lecture the country about land tenure being an impediment to home ownership on Aboriginal land. Anyway, where is the interest in home ownership in remote Aboriginal communities? Where is the market in communities which are home to some of the most impoverished people in this land? For the record, let me tell you this. The Northern Land Council has received and processed only one application for a private housing lease across its whole jurisdiction. That was for a 99-year lease at an outstation called Banyala in North-East Arnhem Land. And do you know what? The lease can't be fulfilled. And not because of any fault of the Northern Land Council, the NLC's full council readily agreed to the grant of the lease in May 2014. The whole lot, the hold up lies with the Northern Territory Government because of the dictates of its Planning Act. Under that law, a lease with a term of more than 12 years is considered to be a subdivision, which in turn requires a plan of survey to be completed and approval of the Development Consent Authority. In remote areas of the Northern Territory, these requirements add considerable administrative burden, cost and uncertainty. That's the regime bequeathed by the former Chief Minister who managed to convince Prime Minister Tony Abbott back in October 2014 to have an urgent investigation under the umbrella of co-ed into Indigenous land administration and land use. The investigation was born behind closed doors without any prior consultation with Indigenous people who would have no input into the terms of reference. Indigenous people and organisations fear the worst that the investigation would result in further erosion of land rights and native title legislation through so-called more efficient processing of land use proposals by third party interests. Finally swayed by those apprehensions, the Commonwealth appointed an expert Indigenous working group to work with the bureaucrats assigned to the co-ed investigation. The Chief Minister's attempt to go through the back door of co-ed to attack the land councils was checked by the safe input of the Indigenous working group. Their statement attached to the final investigation is still worth quoting. They argued that an approach on Indigenous land and waters that does not properly recognise and respect traditional ownership of that land will only lead to ill feeling, project uncertainty and delays. Such an approach, they said, has the effect of diminishing hard fought gains and well established principles around the human rights of traditional owners. In such an approach they continued also has the effect of entrenching the current cycle of welfare dependency and poverty by creating a culture of dependency on government. I could not have put it better myself and I would like to play homage to the late Brian White for his profound contribution to that working group. So in my short term as CEO of the Northern Land Council, I've been in the job for just under three years. Feels like ten. We've had to endure three calculated attempts by the Commonwealth to chip away at our hard fought rights. First the Andrew Forrest review in August 2014, then a month later the report of the Australian Parliament's joint select committee on Northern Australia called Pivot North and the subsequent White Paper on Developing Northern Australia delivered in June 2015 and called Our North, Our Future. And I'd like to ask who's north and who's future. And finally there was the COAG investigation delivered in December last year. This is just the Commonwealth's meddling. Don't forget the Northern Territories meddling too with this review of the Sacred Sites Act which we referred to earlier. And for an organisation like the Northern Land Council, underfunded and under resources we are, responding to those incursions has been needlessly distracting and a cause of constant anxiety for our constituents. The incessant in post of reviews, inquiries and investigations saps a very essence of Aboriginal identity because bureaucrats and politicians refuse to reconcile their relationship with Australia's first peoples. Just what Dr Coons was attempting to settle in the wake of the 1967 referendum. Most importantly, and it's a refrain from some of our council members, in the four decades since the Land Rights Act was enacted, we Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory have spent so much time gaining and then defending our rights that we have not yet secured our future. That's why we at the Northern Land Council want Aboriginal people themselves to have greater opportunity to develop their lands and waters in accord with their aspirations and values. And only a few weeks ago in the run up to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Wave Hill Walk-Off, the Northern and Central Land Councils came together for an historic meeting at Calcurringi where Northern development was high on the agenda. The joint full councils criticised the White Paper on developing Northern Australia for its lack of support for Indigenous-led developments and for failing to recognise the aspirations of Aboriginal people to drive themselves the development of their lands and their waters. Because we are intrinsically entwined in the future of the North and want to play a significant role in that future. And there's obvious we own and or have legally recognised rights over more than 90% of the North. Our meeting at Calcurringi called on governments to establish a comprehensive strategy to deliver economic, ecological, social and cultural benefits to Indigenous people in Northern Australia. But we cannot live and hope that governments will deliver. Only last month the management teams of the Northern and Central Land Councils came together in Alice Springs to map out an economic development strategy that meets the diverse needs of Aboriginal people in our regions. The goal is to establish Aboriginal-owned and controlled commercial economies using parts of the Aboriginal free-holder state across the Northern Territory. The aim is to enable true self-determination, having the knowledge to make decisions and the power to enact them in accord with the aspiration and wishes of landowners. What we are seeking to create is a pilot capital fund that will develop in the first instance, farming enterprises on six selected sites of Aboriginal land across the Northern Territory. We seek initial government investment to leverage private investment because security is a key for investors. The best security that traditional owners in the Northern Territory can provide are leases under section 19 of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. The financial sector has confirmed for us that section 19 leases are able to be used as security. Commercialising a section 19 lease turns Aboriginal landowners into landlords. It enables them to use the land to generate income without losing control over it. This is a fundamental step towards self-determination and self-responsibility. The realisation will depend initially on goodwill and upfront investment by governments. The Aboriginal benefits account would be an ideal source. And given the singular failure of past policies, we say that our model is worth a test drive. The outcome will place Aboriginal people in the driving seat where we rightly belong. But right now at the Northern Land Council, we're going further by laying the foundations to establish a community development unit, which is local control and responsibility at its core. Our progress has been slower than at the Central Land Council, which has been very successful in the business of community development for more than a decade. The CLC model, which we seek to replicate as a set of principles and processes that build self-reliance, strengthen communities and promote good governance through the participation of traditional owners, local people in designing and implementing their own development projects. The community development model helps to direct Aboriginal people's own royalty income streams to projects that both maintain their Aboriginal identity, their language, their culture, and the connection to country and strengthen their capacity to participate in mainstream Australia through improving health, education and employment. It's proven to be innovative and extremely successful, and we at the Northern Land Council are now beginning a journey down that same path. It won't be easy, even within our own organisation there's been questions about whether the sorts of projects which community development seeks to promote should really be the obligation of governments. In other words, are we letting governments off the hook by encouraging royalty recipients to spend their own money on amenities and programs to benefit their own communities. But whether that's the case or not, we know that it's not worth waiting around for governments to deliver, especially in a climate of reduced funding in the Indigenous Affairs portfolio and policy by remote control. Remember, hundreds of millions of dollars were cut from Indigenous budgets in 2014 and 15 by the Abbott Government. And with that came a new administration, the Indigenous Advancement Strategy, or the IAS, which channeled more than 150 programs previously delivered by a range of departments into five funding streams. The ensuing shambles was compounded by machinery of government changes, whereby the management of Indigenous Affairs was folded into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The move of Indigenous Affairs into PM and CS caused great upheaval, as Laura Tingill noted last year in her quarterly essay Political Abnesia, How We Forgot to Govern. Tingill writes about a lack of experience in the bureaucracy exacerbated by the war on Indigenous self-determination launched by Prime Minister John Howard in 1996. Howard would destroy all vestiges of the Coombs legacy through his attacks on Indigenous organisations, Indigenous rights and reviving old policies of assimilation and paternalism. He went to war on the history of conflict and settlement of this nation by fostering the history wars and his promotion of the likes of Keith Windshuttle. And for the record things didn't improve for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory under Prime Ministers Rudd and Gillard. But the concurrent move of Indigenous Affairs into PM and CS and the introduction of the IAS laid the ground for a perfect storm. Chaos and confusion has reigned. A damning Senate committee inquiry into the introduction of the IAS found fundamental failures and questioned the evidence base for its design. The inquiries report released in March this year identified a lack of consultation and rushed processes with poor transparency. The IAS has all the hallmarks of the Howard Government's infamous intervention. Top-down, ill-considered policies worked out on the run without consultation and implemented with callous disregard for their impact on Indigenous people. The same could be said about the current government's remote job scheme, the so-called Community Development Program or CDP. Only this week it's been revealed that skyrocketing rates of financial penalties are having harsh and discriminatory impacts on job seekers in remote Indigenous communities. Families and children are fairly penalised in some community stores food sales have dropped since the introduction of this program. The acronym CDP has been cunningly crafted to sound eerily like CDEP, the Community Development Employment Project scheme created on the advice of Nugget Coombs back in the mid-1970s. Coombs' vision for CDEP was beautifully simple as Dr Will Sanders described in his Nugget Coombs Memorial lecture in 2012. That is rather than pay unemployed benefits to lots of Aboriginal people in remote areas, it would be more constructive for them to be employed part-time by local Indigenous organisations to undertake socially useful tasks. And from the simple idea Sanders said was born one of the most significant and in time one of the largest Indigenous specific programs Australia has seen. CDEP underwent various transformations after its introduction by the Fraser government in 1977, but its death was eventually hastened by the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007. CDEP's obituary was written by the Labor Party in 2013 when they replaced it with the disastrous RJCP or the Remote Jobs and Communities Program. But before that dramatic change came about it should be understood that out of Nugget CDEP grew the ranger programs here in the top end and I'm proud to have had a role in that development. The first form we're gathering to talk about post-land rights management and development of the Indigenous State here took place at a place called Numerily on the Blythe River in 1999. About 80 people attended this meeting hosted by the then powerful Bauer Nugget Aboriginal Corporation that itself has a ranger program for our stations called the Joke Rangers. BAC's Joke Rangers and the successful Dimmeru Aboriginal Corporation in north-east Arnhem land were beacons and would I believe make Nugget proud. Why? Because CDEP provided the vehicle for building remote capacity and governance. The ranger groups that grew out of that are now supported by the Australian Government. At last count there are more than 2,600 Indigenous Rangers employed around the country to look after that country as their ancestors have always done. The Northern Land Council is one of the originating institutions for this country and it employs more than 100 Rangers and we simply cannot meet the demand for new groups to be established. But if it wasn't for CDEP and the flexibility it provided the local organisations and people the most successful employment opportunity for Indigenous people in remote Australia would never have got off the ground. And Australia would not be able to meet its international obligations for management of important ecosystems nor engage Indigenous people to do this. This was public policy created in the bush for the bush. I believe that Nugget opened the door for Indigenous people to lead the agenda informed by best practice research. This has happened through the establishment of the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance or NAOSMA that has been engaged in research and policy development from the ground up since that meeting at Nimerally. NAOSMA is a small institution that I used to head and it was chaired at PDU. Organisations like NAOSMA are critical if we are to realise the potential of Northern Australia and its capacity to engage and enhance the lives of the region's most impoverished people. We simply cannot go forth without the knowledge and consideration of the social and the cultural aspirations of the region's largest land owning group. Today government policies continue to fail spectacularly and that a failure profoundly affects the everyday lives of our constituents. The state of housing in Aboriginal communities is scandalous. Homelessness in the Northern Territory is estimated to be 17 times higher than anywhere else in Australia affecting one in four Aboriginal people. I can't recall seeing so many people living rough in my hometown of Catherine where I was growing up in the 80s and the 90s. The Northern Territory government itself has identified a need for more than 2,000 new houses to meet current demands in Aboriginal communities. On other fronts co-eagues closing the gap targets continue to be elusive. The target for closing the gap in life expectancy is not on track. We still finish up 10 years younger than non-Indigenous people. School attendance rates remain static. The federal government continues to throw tens of millions of dollars a year in its remote school attendance strategy to little effect. In remote Australia the attendance rate of Indigenous children is only 67.4 percent. That is 19.1 percentage points lower than the attendance of Indigenous people in urban schools. No wonder we're paying the price of state sanctioned dysfunction as Aboriginal imprisonment rates in the Northern Territory set global standards set global records, sorry. And still the federal government refuses to have co-executed a new target to close the gap in Aboriginal imprisonment. And now we have the Royal Commission into Child Protection Systems after the four corners laid bare the horrors of the Northern Territory's youth justice system. This Royal Commission will have achieved nothing if it does not come up with real and achievable measures to reduce the numbers of young Aboriginal people being locked up. And I have serious reservations about that, given the possibly short reporting time the Commonwealth and Territory governments have imposed on this Royal Commission. The Commission has set aside only 25 days for formal hearings. That would make it the speediest Royal Commission on recent record and I implore the two governments to agree to a more realistic reporting time. At a recent Land Council meeting I've heard the sorrow and the anger of our members outraged the treatment of their youth in detention. But there are high hopes for this Royal Commission and it would be a betrayal of those hopes if its work was seen to be once over lightly or as a feel good community talkfest. At this stage of this lecture it might be time to lighten up a little and remind you that there have been a couple of uplifting moments this 40th anniversary of the Northern Territory's Aboriginal Land Rights Act. The first was in mid June at a small community called Yarrowland in the Victoria River District. The Narrowman people settled at Yarrowland in 1973 18 months after they had walked off Victoria River Down Station then owned by the Hooker Corporation the Sydney based real estate company. And like the owners of VRD station before him Hooker's had been disgraceful. Like the Gringy the Narrowman people were fed up with their pay and conditions on VRD and in April 1972 they joined the Gringy who had walked off Waveville Station in 1966. After they negotiated their return to a new community at Yarrowland they were among the first to lodge a claim with the Interim Aboriginal Land Commissioner in September 1975 more than a year before the Land Rights Act became a reality. The Interim Land Commissioner recommended their Yarrowland claim to the Commonwealth but it took more than 40 years before they received the title to their lands. Today the most substantial building in Yarrowland is a new police station but the state of the housing stock is a disgrace. Having got title to their land after decades of wrangling with politicians and bureaucrats the Aboriginal people at Yarrowland are now having to wrestle with the offer of a 99 year township lease by the Commonwealth in order to get much needed new housing. Township leases were a creature of the Howard governments amendments to the Land Rights Act in May 2006. As mentioned by the last speaker of this lecture Marion Scrimger the amendments were meant to facilitate a high level of economic development on Aboriginal land. The Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner was on to it straight away. He reported that the 99 year leasing provision had the practical effect of alienating Indigenous communal land. Ninety nine years he noted was at least four generations and with the potential to create back to back leases there was a high probability that the leases would continue in perpetuity. Then in May 2007 the Howard government established an office of Executive Director of Township Leasing a month before the declaration of the emergency intervention into the Northern Territory. The Executive Director of Township Leasing or EDTL has managed to secure head leases over communities in two small offshore land council regions the Tiwi and the Anandeliakwa. But the Anandeliakwa Land Council which covers a group archipelago in the Gulf of Carton Terrier are now having second thoughts. Chairman Tony Warramabra laments that this surrender to a lease held by the EDTL has taken away community self-control and responsibility and that's been our concern and our argument at the Northern Land Council. The Commonwealth has been sniffing around communities in our region trying hard to sell its township leasing regime but so far without success. At Gumbalanya in the East Arnhem Land the Commonwealth got as far as signing an agreement and principle until the traditional owners fed up with the humbug told them all to go away but not before the Northern Land Council hired a linguist who talked them through the pages and pages of the English language document which constituted the agreement and principle. That exercise quickly convinced us that the traditional owners had no real idea of what was being sold to them. The linguist later reported to us that he found it difficult to reconcile the traditional owners at Gumbalanya could have signed the agreement and principle with the required principle of free, pride and form consent. Now the Commonwealth is knocking on the door of Yarrowland which has just got its land back after a wait of 40 years. How Yarrowland with a population around 300 that fits the Commonwealth's model for township leasing given that it's envisaged curing leases over larger communities is beyond me. It's a measure I suppose of the Commonwealth in relation to establish a footprint within the Northern Land Council region. And the whole business of township leasing has been a long running cause of tension between the Commonwealth and the Northern Land Council. Our argument to the Commonwealth has been if you're so desperate to get a lease why not do it under section 19 of the Land Rights Act the usual vehicle for leasing Aboriginal land whereby the traditional owners themselves through a land trust hold the lease. Late last year the Indigenous Affairs Minister Senator Nigel Scully acknowledged our concerns. He amended the Land Rights Act so the traditional owners themselves can indeed hold the head lease over a township. That way the traditional owners can decide who gets a sub lease rather than some white shirt Commonwealth officers based in Canberra. I use the term white shirt deliberately because it's brought grief upon us in the past or particularly me in the context of township leasing. It's used humorously by Aboriginal people who refer to public servants who are forever flying in and flying out of Aboriginal communities. We use the term white shirts for a poster to educate communities about the publications and the implications of township leasing and it brought upon us the wrath of both the Indigenous Affairs Minister and the Director of Township Leasing. Senator Scully was very formal. He took brave exception to our promulgation of the poster and he reminded us of our obligations under the Public Governance Performance and Accountability Act. He wrote and warned us at the Northern Land Council of the need to discharge our duties in good faith and for a proper purpose. Further he suggested that given the fiscal environment we should reflect on the use of government funding for what he said was an inappropriate campaign. All that growling over in the US poster such as life these days for an independent statutory authority of the Commonwealth. But back to other uplifting moment of the anniversary year followed a week after the hand-backed ceremony at Yarrowland in June. The traditional owners of Cox Peninsula and nearby islands finally had their Kenby land claim realised when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull handed over the title deeds on June the 21st of this year. It had taken 37 years after the Northern Land Council lodged the Kenby claim with the Aboriginal Land Commissioner. Kenby was the doozy of all land claims in the Northern Territory. Let me remind you that early on the CLP government led by the then Chief Minister Paul Everingham deliberately poisoned the world of public opinion against the claim. And even though that government had known full well that the Northern Land Council was intending to lodge the Kenby claim one of its first acts in December 1978 was to prominent go town planning regulations aimed at choking the claim before it hit the desk of the Aboriginal Land Commissioner. The regulations grossly expanded the boundaries of the City of Darwin to incorporate Cox Peninsula. And because lands within towns could never be claimed under the Northern Territory Land Rights Act the then CLP government of Paul Everingham thought it had cleverly thwarted the Kenby claim. The government's tactics were eventually undone by the High Court which directed the Land Commissioner to consider whether the regulations had been made for the ulterior and improper purposes of defeating the claim and eventually the Land Commissioner found just that. Even so in the subsequent hearing the government refused the Land Commissioner's order to produce all relevant documents about its planning decision. Again, the High Court ruled against the government. The Kenby claim was finally recommended in December 2000 and by then five Land Commissioners had dealt with it. And it still took more than 15 years of complex negotiations after that before the claim was finally settled in April this year. The way the settlement was negotiated, Darwin can still expand on Cox Peninsula but now Aboriginal people themselves are in charge of any future expansion. But the real tragedy of both the Kenby and Yarrowland claims has been that they took far too long to be realised. Far too many Aboriginal people died waiting for their land to be handed back. I now detect a growing and palpable frustration among Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory that the human rights and aspirations are ignored by governments while at the same time they are expected to accommodate this push for Northern Development. At the past two Northern Territory General elections Aboriginal voters have rejected first the Labor Party in 2013 and then the Country Liberal Party again in August of this year. It remains to be seen how furtick on this new Territory Labor Government will be. But the Aboriginal vote can no longer be taken for granted. Neither party has yet demonstrated a fitness to govern for all. Nugget Coombs 40 years ago hinted at dark consequences of failed Indigenous policy. We must learn from the lessons that Nugget's legacy reminds us about, including the role of CDEP. The ranger programs that grew out of CDEP manage some of the most important biodiversity rich ecosystems left on this planet on behalf of all humanity. And we must support the knowledge and language that Indigenous people have gained in living and managing these landscapes for 50,000 years. The ranger programs uphold the relationship between country, people, their laws and their customs. And we must enliven the role of Nugget Coombs North Australian Research Unit and polish the Indigenous lens that he opened for us. Most importantly, policy must be developed by Aboriginal people who have the most to lose in any current policy paradigm. I want to finish this lecture with a quote from Nugget Coombs at the University of Western Australia in 1976. He said, what may however be for us to determine that is non-Indigenous people is whether Aboriginal achievement is one in the context of friendship and respect or whether it must be fought for as in so many lands in bitterness and violence. Let us fervently pray that the wisdom and can prevail in the achievement of better public policy than we've seen in recent decades. Thank you.