More than a ‘voice’: Indigenous transmission in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan

Abstract

The Uluru Statement (2017) has recently focused attention on Indigenous state relations as an Indigenous ‘voice’ to government. For decades, Indigenous peoples in Australia have sought a meaningful voice in settler state environmental planning and management regimes, with limited success. Little attention has been paid to what constitutes an effective Indigenous voice. I conceptualise Australian Indigenous environmental planning and management as a dual deliberative system where Indigenous groups must transmit their messages into settler institutions and processes. I analyse the democratic quality of this transmission between two Indigenous deliberative forums, Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations and the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations and the commonwealth Murray-Darling Basin Authority in developing the controversial Murray-Darling Basin Plan (2012). These deliberative forums improve the transmission quality of Indigenous environmental discourses. They are more than a voice; they are a democratic innovation which goes beyond the limits of state ‘inclusion’ of Indigenous environmental values.

Keywords:

• Indigenous voice
• deliberative system
• transmission
• environmental planning

Notes

1 https://theconversation.com/australia-has-an-ugly-legacy-of-denying-water-rights-to-aboriginal-people-not-much-has-changed-141743.

2 This conjunction of Indigenous democracy together with Indigenous environmental epistemology raises interesting democratic questions which are beyond the scope of this paper.

3 Reported in Guardian Australia, 21 March 2018. Indigenous group ‘offered $10m in water’ to help pass Murray-Darling Plan.

4 http://culturalflows.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19&Itemid=128.

5 Cultural flows Murray–Darling Basin Authority August 2020 Cultural Flows Information Sheet – KeyFacts.

6 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/BudgetReview202021/MurrayDarlingBasin.

7 Mike Foley, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 March 2021.

8 Mike Foley, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 March 2021.