* Joel Gibson Indigenous Affairs Reporter
* March 28, 2009
“THE Chief Justice of the High Court, Robert French, has dismissed the legal argument used by the former prime minister John Howard against the reaching of a treaty with indigenous Australia.
Justice French disagreed with the view that a treaty was impossible because Aboriginal Australia was not a sovereign nation – or as Mr Howard put it in 2000, that a nation “does not make a treaty with itself”.
The Mabo decisions and the Native Title Act recognised indigenous rights without undermining Australia’s sovereignty and could provide the basis for an agreement, Justice French said in a speech at the University of Melbourne Law School.
“Such an agreement could recognise and acknowledge traditional law and custom of indigenous communities across Australia, their historical relationship with their country, their prior occupancy of the continent and that there are those who have maintained and asserted their traditional rights to the present time,” he said.
“This is a cultural reality which can be accepted without comprising, symbolically or otherwise, Australia’s identity as a nation.”
Although Aboriginal notions of sovereignty would belong in a different “universe of discourse”, he said, “it would be sovereignty under traditional law and custom”.
Experts said the statement was a significant step in a debate that continues.”
