I'm very pleased to be speaking on the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia's inquiry report into the Juukan Gorge disaster. I note that this is one of those examples where the committee, with its key recommendations, showed the sort of bipartisanship that's really good to see come out of our committee structure.

I want to start by repeating a quote of the committee chair, the member for Leichhardt. When he spoke to ABC he said it was:

… inconceivable that Australia has not developed proper protections for such sites, and action must be a matter of national priority.

Because, he said, we can't just pay lip service to this and see a repeat of the loss and devastation of Juukan Gorge across other parts of Australia on that scale.

A 46,000-year-old site of global, cultural and archaeological significance was destroyed when Rio Tinto exploded Juukan Gorge. What the committee found, via the inquiry that the explosion triggered, was that it wasn't a one-off. The report describes it as one of:

… countless instances where cultural heritage has been the victim of the drive for development and commercial gain.

It also found failures at every level of government, and recommended urgent change to stop the destruction of Aboriginal heritage sites across the nation.

The member for Leichhardt describes the disaster as a wake-up call that there are serious deficiencies in the protection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage. As Senator Pat Dodson says, the committee spent a lot of time on the ground with traditional owners and Aboriginal communities, and was moved by the lack of power that they had in the situation they found themselves in. In his view, this report highlights the systemic nature of the injustice that has been perpetrated on Aboriginal people by inadequate cultural heritage law.

This report and its recommendations for urgent change are particularly relevant to my electorate and the work that's currently being done on assessing the impact of raising the Warragamba Dam wall. There are lessons in this report for us. The quality of the assessment of the impact on Aboriginal heritage has come in for criticism. It's estimated that around 1,200 culturally significant sites could be affected by the proposal. The Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area Strategic Plan recognises 14,000 and possibly 22,000 years of Aboriginal occupation in the area.

Reading about the way traditional owners felt about what happened at Juukan Gorge really resonated with me when I heard Kazan Brown—a Gundungurra traditional owner whose great-grandmother was the last Aboriginal person to leave the Burragorang Valley before it was flooded to build the original dam—talking about trying to have a voice in the current process. That's what's come through in this report—an inability to have a voice. Kazan says that in early 2018 a panel of 22 registered Aboriginal parties was established for the project, but she was not part of the panel. She was involved in only four consultation meetings and felt as though she'd been locked out of the project:

We couldn't get on the survey team. It was like people who had a real connection to the place were not included. It was really, really horrible. It's like we have no control … we go into these meetings, and there's no consultation. They just tell us what they're going to do … They don't talk with us. They talk at us.

So these same things that this committee has found, which it says are repeated countless times, we're seeing happening here as well. Kazan describes the place that could be inundated if the dam-wall-raising goes ahead:

The place is full of culture. My grandfather used to call it our Vatican. The river is our creation story … all along the river there are spots.

Reading this report, you can see it's wrong to think about it as simply loss of a natural feature of the landscape. Aunty Sharyn Halls, a Gundungurra elder, said the same when she described, for the New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into the wall-raising, what's at risk. She said:

We have an Aboriginal connection to country with our songlines and everything [in] that will be destroyed.

She talked about the creation stories that are connected. Of the 15 waterholes in the creation story, 11 were destroyed by the filling of Warragamba Dam in the 1950s. If the dam wall is raised, she says, two of the four remaining waterholes that the creation story describes will be inundated.

This is a pattern that we've seen, and it is really incumbent upon the government to act, not just pay lip-service to this. We're seeing multiple pieces of evidence that, to me, sound like the sort of thing that the committee has found with Juukan Gorge. Things that point to the New South Wales government's efforts to ensure adequate investigation and assessment of the impacts are seriously lacking. One example would be that there is no assessment about the significance of certain sites. Michael Jackson, an archaeologist and cultural heritage adviser, said:

… significance assessment was done by one person who only spent one day in the field and who had no discussions with the archaeologists involved in the field survey—not one discussion about any of the sites … There were no discussions with the Aboriginal community.

The current laws we have, as the committee has found, allow for those sorts of processes to happen. That view was echoed by multiple parties who reported to the New South Wales inquiry. What they also highlighted, from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, ICOMOS, was that the cultural heritage survey undertaken as part of the impact assessment for the dam wall project comprised 25 days across a 354-square-kilometre section around the shores of Lake Burragorang. ICOMOS said:

This time-frame appears to be inadequate, either to identify the cultural heritage places which may be affected or to engage appropriately with the relevant Gundungurra Traditional Owners.

An application has been made by the Gundungurra Aboriginal Heritage Association and other descendants to have their ancestral lands protected under section 90 of the National Parks and Wildlife Act as a place of special significance to Aboriginal cultural heritage, and that's still to be determined. But I think what the committee's report shows is that we can't necessarily have confidence in these processes and that they are going to get the result that best preserves and protects Aboriginal cultural heritage. The committee particularly notes the need for all tiers of government to be involved in this. They have direct recommendations for the Western Australian government, and I would really urge New South Wales to look at these recommendations. In the briefing notes of one of the New South Wales departments, the heritage department, they blasted their own government and said that the consultation with traditional owners was inadequate and modelling was needed to determine the likely impacts on cultural heritage from inundation.

This is what we're seeing again, and none of us wants to see another Juukan Gorge where we realise too late and people say, 'Oops, we shouldn't have done that.' I would like to point out that the Insurance Council of Australia has taken action on these matters, and the evidence around the failure to respect traditional owners and Aboriginal heritage has led to the council dropping its support for the dam wall raising. All those stories echo exactly what we saw in a different set of circumstances at Juukan Gorge: Aboriginal people and traditional owners not being listened to. The systems in place are failing to adequately protect significant cultural heritage, and there is no point in saying that you care about this stuff and then not doing something about it. There have been reports and recommendations to the Morrison government and previous Liberal governments to review the relevant laws, and the current government and its predecessors have failed to act on them. The loss of such significant Aboriginal heritage as we saw in Juukan Gorge in Western Australia is a real tragedy. I urge the government to act on the recommendations in this report so that there are protections in place that ensure we don't see the same thing happen across the rest of the country, including in the Blue Mountains World Heritage area.