Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:23): My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. I recently convened a public meeting in Terang, and Peek Whurrong elder Robert Lowe, Sr, told that gathering of over 200 people, which was convened on fire prevention, about how his grandfather would go down to a river with a box of matches and a wet hessian sack and burn the majority of the river bank in just one single day. In Western Australia over 100 full and part-time Indigenous rangers have been conducting controlled burns across 420 000 kilometres of the Kimberley, with experts suggesting it may have halved the spread and intensity of fire in that region.

On the last day of Parliament last year I asked the Minister for Police and Emergency Services why the state government had failed to sufficiently utilise traditional Indigenous burning practices to mitigate fire risk. On 10 January I was told by the minister in writing that the government is concerned about ‘intellectual property rights’ and that:

Knowledge of how to apply cultural fire and the purpose of that application is knowledge owned and held by Traditional Owners, not the Victorian Government …

This is clearly a pathetic excuse as to why the Labor government has not utilised these techniques to prevent the loss of life, livestock and property. The government frequently licenses intellectual property, including the software on the desk of every public servant. If Indigenous burning practices really can be deemed intellectual property and this is not simply a feeble effort to shift blame to our Indigenous community for government inertia on fuel load reduction, then surely the government has attempted to license or otherwise access the knowledge as they do with other intellectual property? I also wonder which Indigenous groups have expressed their concern over the state government using their burning techniques, given that all the media and discussion I have seen has shown the clear enthusiasm from the Indigenous community for all of us to learn from them and their ancestors. So the action I seek is that the minister justifies the state government’s policy of limiting the usage of Indigenous burning techniques to reduce fire risk and save lives on the basis of some dubious intellectual property rights argument.