Aboriginal people hold less than 1% of all water licences in Australia, a form of economic and cultural dispossession that needs urgent redress, according to a major study of water rights in the Murray-Darling Basin. Researchers from Griffith University found Aboriginal water entitlements in the New South Wales portion of the basin covered 0.2% of all available surface water, in a region where Aboriginal people comprise about 10% of the population.
These licences, which the researchers said were a “tiny fraction” of the water rights in the region, nevertheless accounted for 75% of all known water licences held by Indigenous organisations across Australia. “Alarmingly, we also found that the amount of water held by Aboriginal organisations has decreased by 17% over the past 10 years,” the Australian Rivers Institute’s researcher Dr Lana Hartwig said.
More than 40 Aboriginal nations, about 15% of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, live in the Murray-Darling Basin. They manage less than 1% of its land base. The researchers were critical of efforts to allocate water to Aboriginal groups, saying native title and revised water legislation had “so far offered no meaningful means of redistributing water use rights, providing instead mere consultation and tokenistic protection of ‘cultural values’.”
Source: Guardian
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