History
In 1996, the High Court’s decision in Wik Peoples v Queensland was handed down. The case dealt with the question of whether pastoral leases granted between 1910 and 1974 in Far North Queensland had the effect of extinguishing native title. A 4:3 majority of the judges decided that the grant of a pastoral lease did not confer exclusive possession, and that native title could therefore continue to exist – this has been called “coexistence”. Where an inconsistency between the native title and non-native title rights occurs, the non-native title rights prevail.
The NTA had not adequately dealt with the possibilities of native title existing over pastoral leases or of native title rights co-existing with other rights. Since the NTA had come into effect, governments had been taking action on pastoral leases that did not comply with the NTA. Wik raised the possibility that those acts could be invalid and showed that the ‘freehold test’ (the principle used to determine where proposed activities could be done without regard to native title) in relation to future acts was inappropriate. The Federal Government developed the Ten Point Plan, which became the basis for the amendments, to deal with these inadequacies of the NTA.
Read more about this topic: Native Title Amendment Act 1998
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)