The Confessions of an Erstwhile Land Rights Advocate

Late in his term on the High Court, Justice McHugh, one of the majority in the Mabo decision and one of the dissentients in Wik, expressed criticism of the "costly and time-consuming" native title system. He thought it was unable to fairly evaluate the competing legal rights of landholders and native-title holders. In this lecture presented by the National Centre for Indigenous Studies and the Centre for International and Public Law, Father Frank Brennan argues that the issue now is not the legitimacy of land rights but determining the cut-off point for recognising native-title rights when other parties also have rights over the same land. He also argues the importance of matching the remaining native-title rights with the real, rather than imagined, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aspirations.