Stolen Lands 2.0

THE REAL AGENDA BEHIND QUEENSLAND’S ‘PATH TO TREATY’

With the COP27 climate conference in Egypt next week set to focus on the transition to ‘renewables’, some experts are warning there may not be enough land to manage a shift away from fossil fuels.

The warnings are far from misplaced.

Most people simply have no idea how much land is going to be needed to develop the gigantic utility-scale structures necessary to replace coal and gas.

Or that these industrial-scale monstrosities are not going to be put ‘out in the desert’, away from everyone, as many seem to believe.

Developers will need land that is close to transmission lines, close to a substation and close to the “load” that is being used.

They will need, in other words, huge areas of land near to the towns and cities they are supplying energy to.

The incredible loss of high-value farmland, native trees vegetation, forests and precious natural habitats this will involve is going to be catastrophic.

Here in Queensland, the message is clear.

To power the State using renewables, there will have to be a huge trade off in land use.

A HUGE trade off.

And guess who will be asked to make the biggest ‘trade-off’ of all?

You guessed it.  The same group who has always found themselves on the wrong side of ‘trade-offs’ involving land – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

You didn’t seriously think ‘The Path to Treaty’ process was devised because Australian governments were suddenly stricken with guilt and a need to atone, did you?

Spare me.

They couldn’t even give the country’s other ‘black group’, Australian South Sea Islanders, the time of day recently, when asked to honour commitments made to them two decades ago!

So why all the crocodile tears now?

Could it be that ATSIs have something the government and their ‘stakeholder’ partners desperately want from them?

Something that other deeply disadvantaged groups like Australian South Sea Islanders, don’t have?

Such as the rights governing access to, and use of, huge tracts of the state’s land perhaps?

Surely not.

And yet… Governments, state and federal, WILL need to take back control (if only covertly) of vast areas of Aboriginal lands and waterways between now and 2030!

Not just for constructing massive amounts of new energy infrastructure, but to facilitate the thousands of new projects planned for the mining of radioactive rare earths in Queensland, a commodity the ‘new economy’ is heavily reliant on.

So, forgive my cynicism over the governments’ new virtue-signalling campaign aimed at convincing ATSIs that their government loves them and has only their best interests at heart?

And for suspecting that government bureaucrats are already hard at work drafting this new ‘Treaty’, quietly laying the groundwork for one of the biggest land grabs in the state’s history.

Convince me I’m wrong!