Some things just aren't for sale

Our Federal Government is upping the ante in its push to bring Aboriginal people the dubious benefits of the free market.
It's increasing its efforts to privatise their land.
A senior bureaucrat in the Northern Territory Government gave them the key to making it work.
Starting with the land on which there are townships - known with some irony as 'communities' - he proposed it be leased in its entirety to a Government-run entity for 99 years.
This entity would in turn arrange for sub-leases to outsiders for business and to Aboriginal people from within the town.
The argument goes that offering up a long-term lease as a security would make it easier for outside business to want to invest their capital and it would enable Aboriginal people to start up businesses or use the lease as security for getting the finance to buy their own homes.
For those of you who don't live in Australia, home ownership is the Great Australian Dream, the national sacred cow and the sine qua non of suburban existence.
And what relevance does it have to Aboriginal people, I hear you ask?
Precious little.
Except that Government wants it to be relevant to them so they can be just like all other Australians - whatever that might look like.
So they're peddling this dubious bill of goods wherever and whenever they can
The Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister held a meeting yesterday at Nguiu, on Bathurst Island, to dicker with traditional owners of the town land over how they might join in this scheme.
The clincher is the offer of serious bucks from the Commonwealth - $5 million down now and lots more to come.
It was a closed meeting of Tiwi Land Council members and Mr Brough claimed they had been identified as Traditional Owners of the land in question with anthropological certainty .
And these, the bombastic little twerp told reporters, were the only people he was going to talk to.
Once again he was talking through his arse.
The Tiwi Land Council, the Traditional Owners' representative body, never did the anthropological groundwork done by the two mainland Land Councils, as required under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act to underpin land claims and negotiations for land use proposals.
So Mr Brough's statement gives us some grounds for inferring that he doesn't understand either the Act - the basis of the Aboriginal freehold title the Islands are held under - or the complex nature of traditional ownership.
Traditional ownership is rarely expressed as the kind of single entity ownership - person or body corporate - that we understand in our culture.
It's usually hedged around by checks and balances, like certain people from another clan (in some areas the clan into which the landowning clan marries) taking the role of 'managers', in the sense that they have the cultural right to vet and then approve or veto anything to do the land in question.
So the managers need to in on the consult too.
As do, according to the Act, any people living in the area who might be affected by big changes to the landholding regime.
The egregiously aggressive Minister brushed this aside, but did hold an open meeting later in the day so Aboriginal residents could listen to what was being offered and have their say.
The trouble is, it's difficult to see precisely what direction this whole thing is going.

But it's important to understand a couple of things here.

Bathurst Island is one of two main islands - the other is Melville and both are named after colonial aristos - that are the home of a culturally and linguistically homogenous group, the Tiwi.

It's a short (20-30 minutes) plane ride from Darwin and its international airport, has hundreds of kilometres of unspoilt beach and some of the best fishing to be found in a region that is known as an angler's paradise.

Hoteliers, resort developers and tourism operators have been eyeing it off for the past couple of decades at least.

Get the picture?

Now it seems clear to me that two things are going on: the land is being privatised for the benefit of business; and the process involves the removal of cultural constraints to the acts of privatisation.

If an outside entity takes control of traditional land for 99 years, it weakens Aboriginal control.
If it assumes the power to offer, vary or transfer subleases on that land without any reference to the Traditional Owners, it further weakens Aboriginal control.
If a business owner and staff are exempted from the usual requirements to apply for a permit to be on Aboriginal land - simply because the power over the land has been taken over by an entity - than that weakens Aboriginal control too.
An important part of land ownership in Aboriginal cultures is the landowner's ability to make decisions about it, to enforce those decisions according to Aboriginal Law and to pass on to his or her children the stories about the land that reinforce the clan's identity and its right to claim ownership of the land and the stories and ceremonies associated with that land.
A 99 year lease will irrevocably damage a traditional landowning family's hold on a piece of land because it will erode the intergenerational transfer of knowledge based on that land.
This is not museum stuff we're talking about: it's the here and now and it's right there in people's lives.
Just because we can't always see it or describe it in terms that make sense to us, it doesn't mean it isn't there.
And it doesn't mean that $5 million sweeteners and other such ephemera will make people walk away from it happily.
This might come as a shock to the people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, but some things just aren't for sale.
And if we insist on trying to buy them, which means single-handedly determining the nature and pace of change to suit our needs alone and not the needs of Aboriginal people, then we do untold damage.
And it's damage piled on top of the damage that's already there: disease, premature death, dysfunction.
All in the name of the free market.