Kimberley Appropriate Economics Interim Report - Australian ...

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boriginal people may be forgiven for respondng less than ecstatically to such assurances. If you are a traditional
owner of a part of this country, a place you have known intimately and lived in all your life, as your ancestors
have done before you, how are you going to feel about giving up your rights to that place, seeing it laid waste,
and then being offered a job on it with the industry that has destroyed it? A cattle station lessee whose family
has lived on the land for a number of years, decades or generations (though never as many generations as the
families of Indigenous people), would be outraged at such an offer. And so, with much greater reason, are
traditional owners.
In any event, offers of employment seldom come to much. Western Agricultural Industries asserted strongly
that they would employ Indigenous people in their cotton fields. Yet the tiny workforce they employed on
their trial crops was drawn, not from Bidyadanga just down the road, but from backpackers’ hostels in Broome.
Argyle Diamonds may have done a better job of recruiting Aboriginal people to its workforce, but Barramundi
Gap, a site sacred to women, is gone forever.
Money alone does not solve social problems. It does not solve poverty. Big business does not solve poverty.
Charity does not solve poverty. Welfare does not solve poverty. What solves poverty is personal enterprise and
initiative, pride and independence, belief in the future, and a society that fosters these things.
Environs Kimberley has helped to drive this forum because we have faith in the future. We have a vision for the
Kimberley that can be realised, if only people take the time and make the sustained effort needed to achieve
it. Our vision is of a region in which nature and culture are valued, protected, and given priority in decisions
about development; in which small-scale, environmentally friendly industries and enterprises are encouraged,
and large-scale developments are viewed with scepticism rather than greeted with the naïve, unreflecting
excitement shown by our politicians.
In saying this, I risk exposing Environs Kimberley to accusations of being anti-development. If we were
anti-development we would not be participating in this forum. As a group advocating change we accept the
challenge to actively promote better ways of doing business. The scepticism that we propose as an appropriate
response to large-scale development proposals is well founded. Broadscale irrigated agriculture has been an
environmental and even an economic disaster for other parts of Australia: why then would we want to see it
here, where it has failed so catastrophically in the past? Mining is even more destructive, albeit over much
smaller areas than agriculture. In the past, mining companies were able to plunder the country and then walk
away, as I have seen myself at Koolan and Cockatoo Islands, but today, largely because of the lobbying of
environmentalists, efforts are made to rehabilitate the land when the mine closes. Some people stand to make
a fortune out of these mega-industries. Others lose their land. And few developers would be making a fortune
if the full costs of their activities were factored in: if mining companies were obliged to fill in the holes they
have dug in the landscape and eradicate the weeds they have introduced; if sugar growers had to pay for the
elimination of the Cane Toad, if farmers in the wheat belt were forced to rehabilitate the ever-expanding salty
land. And what price can anyone put on the extinction of a species?
My work with Environs Kimberley has made me very conscious that, while developers reap the short-term
rewards of exploiting the land, it is so often taxpayers and volunteer groups who meet the costs of cleaning
up after them. We at EK prefer to protect the region from the sort of damage we have seen inflicted on it
elsewhere.
So, what sort of enterprises are we looking for in the Kimberley? Do we have any idea? Well, yes, we have some
great ideas, but it is not EK that will put them into effect. Some of the participants in this conference are already
engaged in environmentally friendly enterprises, and with a commitment motivated by far more than just the
income. We are going to hear about them over the next two days.
There are Aboriginal pastoral stations, but few other Aboriginal communities have any economic base of their
own. They are dependent on government and therefore subject to the whims of the party in power. Amongst
other things, especially art production, Indigenous people are setting up small tourist enterprises and working
out ways of doing tourism that suit them and their communities, whether as independent or joint ventures. I
understand that, in the United States, there is a large and growing demand from people wanting to learn bush
survival and Indigenous tracking skills: something that could easily and appropriately be developed here. But
take heed: all such Indigenous enterprises require traditional lands and the species that live on them to remain
intact.