Traditional owners from the Banjima tribe in the Pilbara region of Western Australia have struck a landmark deal with the iron ore giant BHP Billiton from which they will receive hundreds of millions of dollars over the 100-year life of the mines.
The deal, which was signed at a ceremony in Kings Park overlooking Perth CBD on Wednesday, covers areas held under non-exclusive native title rights by Banjima people but will provide the same solid economic base as land rights deals in the Northern Territory, the chief executive of the Yamatji-Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation, Simon Hawkins, said.
The Banjima Native Title Aboriginal Corporation will receive a steady stream of income based on the royalties earned by two active iron ore mines and six mining tenements held by BHP within its native title area, which sits between the mining towns of Newman and Tom Price, about 1,400km north of Perth. That money will be used to build up remote communities on that country, provide services and allow Banjima people to invest in their law and cultural practices for at least the next century.
It is a certainty of income not often offered under native title, which is a relatively weak form of property right but the only recognition of traditional Aboriginal ownership outside of the Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory.
“It’s the closest you can get outside of the NT,” Hawkins said. “The Banjima people want to have self-determination. How else do you do that without having financial independence and independence of community decision-making?”
Slim Parker, a Banjima elder, led his people through the four-year negotiations. At the signing ceremony on Wednesday, which began with a Noongar cultural performance in recognition of the fact that it was occurring on Noongar land, Parker said the agreement would allow future generations to remain on country.
“Of course it’s worth a lot of money … but that’s not the only thing that this agreement provides,” Parker said. “This agreement provides for the Banjima people to be able to take control of their destiny, their future, and to be able to sustain themselves through their teaching of their language, law and culture.”
The first step, Parker said, would be to build up the existing remote communities, which support a fluctuating population of between 500 and 1,000 people, so that people can either live on country full time or just use the areas for certain cultural activities.
The Banjima people won a 15-year battle to have native title recognised over a 10,200ha area stretching between the Karijini and Chichester national parks, about 239km south of Port Hedland, in 2013, and a determination ceremony was held on country a year later. The BHP agreement covers an 8,263ha area within the native title footprint.
Jimmy Wilson, the president of iron ore at BHP Billiton, said the agreement was significant “in terms of magnitude and duration” and would provide “multiple millions of dollars”, depending on production levels at the various mines and mining tenements, some of which are inactive, and royalty rates.
“It is a life-of-mine agreement,” Wilson said. “The Banjima people have now got a security of income from this agreement for an extended period of time.
“With that security of income obviously they can think much, much longer term and think about how they determine their destiny going forward through generations.”
It is a very different tack than that taken by the WA mining magnate Andrew Forrest, who has derided financially based agreements with traditional owners as “mining welfare” and based the agreement between his iron ore company, Fortescue, and the Yindjibarndi people, also in the Pilbara, around providing jobs.
The clauses of the BHP-Banjima agreement, which runs to several thousand pages, also mention employment and contract opportunities, but the detail is not spelled out. Guardian Australia was told that those shorter-term arrangements, which wax and wane with the boom and bust cycles of the mining industry, were considered less propitious and were secondary to the overarching agreement.
