[Greens-Media] Minister knew Aboriginal heritage committee reversed its Roe 8 decision

[Dortch, Eloise]

Minister knew heritage committee reversed its Roe 8 decision
Media release Tuesday 1 December 2015
 
Questions by Greens Member for South Metropolitan Lynn MacLaren MLC have confirmed that the Aboriginal Affairs Minister knew a committee that advised him on whether Aboriginal sites in the path of Roe 8 should be disturbed had initially advised against their disturbance, yet he gave final approval for them to be disturbed anyway.

"The Minister is now implicated in the entire sorry story of how the Aboriginal Cultural Materials Committee initially recommended that Aboriginal sites in the path of Roe 8 should not be disturbed because of their great spiritual significance and then later reversed its position, supposedly on the basis of new information provided by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs," Ms MacLaren said.

"That new information turned out to be nothing more than an internal site assessment report by Departmental staffers who walked across a registered site considered by archaeologists to have subsurface cultural material and dug a single 20-centimetre test hole, which unsurprisingly, led to no artefacts being found.

"The resulting report was used to justify removing registered archaeological site from the register. 

"If Minister Collier read more carefully the documents put before him in relation to this decision he would be aware of this. 

"In a Ministerial he received from his Department, dated 10 June 2015, the Minister was told that the ACMC did not initially approve of the sites being disturbed, when Main Roads' application was first put to it in February 2013.

"Nothing changed in Main Roads' application between February 2013 and June 2015, when the Department required the ACMC to reconsider its decision.

"This unorthodox process should have alerted the Minister to look closer at what information was being supplied by his Department to both himself and to the ACMC, and had he done so, he would naturally have questioned as to how such a superficial examination could be used to justify a registered site previously considered significant being removed from the register on such weak grounds.

"The site in question, DAA 4107, has been highly disturbed on the surface over the years but once contained more than 2,000 artefacts, including many hand tools made of chert, quartz and glass, which indicates continuous occupation of the area by Aboriginal people over a period of at least five thousand years - that is, longer than Egypt's Pyramids and western civilisation have been inexistence."

 
Office of Hon Lynn MacLaren MLC, Member for South Metropolitan Region
Legislative Council, Parliament of Western Australia
Unit 7, 142 South Terrace, Fremantle, Western Australia 6160
Tel 08 9430 7233
Mob 0403 721 951
southmetro2 at mp.wa.gov.au   www.LynnMacLaren.org.au