Miningweb: Australia’s mining sector faces a backlash over indigenous rights claims

Key topics:Fortescue ordered to pay A$150m in Yindjibarndi land disputePilbara mining boom clashes with Indigenous land and heritage rightsAustralia’s Indigenous rights reforms seen as weakened after 2020 peak.By David Fickling.Politics moves in pendulum swings from one extreme to the other. In many parts of the world, the backlash against the “woke” politics of the early 2020s appears to be foundering. That’s far from being the case in Australia’s mining industry.Consider the end of a two-decade series of legal battles this week between Australia’s richest man and the Yindjibarndi, a First Nations group in the Pilbara region of the country’s northwest.Fortescue Ltd., the iron-ore miner founded by billionaire Andrew Forrest, has been ordered to pay A$150 million ($108 million) to the Yindjibarndi after Australia’s Federal Court found it had built its Solomon Hub project on their land without their consent. Forrest promised to make the payment as soon as possible. “We have always accepted and encouraged fair and proper compensation should be paid,” he said in a statement. .Read more:.Miningweb: Mining lobby warns of uncertainty as South Africa revises draft sector bill.The moral victory is to be welcomed — but the amount is trifling.Remote though it is, the Pilbara is central to the way the world has developed over the past few decades. China’s steel-intensive development would have been next to impossible without the region’s vast mines, the source of about 40% of all the iron ore traded by sea. At the same time, the 15 billion metric tons of rock shipped since 2000 has devastated the traditional lands of local Aboriginal people, whose ancestors have occupied the region since long before the last ice age.In compensation for the damage done, big iron ore miners in the Pilbara typically pay roughly 0.5% of revenues to Indigenous landowners. Due in part to a drawn-out dispute between Fortescue and different groups of Yindjibarndi, that didn’t happen in this case — even after YNAC was confirmed as titleholder in 2017. .The Yindjibarndi legal claim wasn’t excessive. Pay a 0.5% fee on 33 years of revenues from a 70 million-metric-ton-a-year iron ore project like Solomon, and you’re probably looking at about A$2 billion of payments — similar to the A$1.8 billion they had sought. The A$150 million awarded, meanwhile, is somewhat less in real terms than the A$3.4 million a year Forrest offered in his opening negotiating gambit in 2008. The sum “is unsatisfactory in context of what has been lost,” Yindjibarndi Group CEO Michael Woodley said in statement after the judgement..Read more:.Miningweb: Ivanhoe's Friedland sees growth opportunities as US looks to DRC for critical minerals.In Yindjibarndi beliefs, the damage from mining can be equivalent to a spiritual injury to their ngurra, a term encompassing notions of home and sanctity. Some 124 heritage sites were destroyed to make way for the Solomon mine.The testimony of Margaret Read, a Yindjibarndi woman locked out of her own land during a 2022 visit to the 135-square-kilometer (52-square-mile) site, lays out the harm: “That ngurra that has been blasted and dug up will never be the same, ever again,” she said in an affidavit filed in the case. “We would not do this because it is sacred ground, and has our ancestor spirits there that look after the land, the plants and the animals.”It’s a very different outcome to what you might have expected back in May 2020, when civil rights politics hit its most recent peak of influence. One day before the murder of George Floyd sparked a reckoning with police brutality in America, the demolition of a 46,000-year-old Indigenous archaeological site near Solomon appeared to prompt a comparable reassessment in Australia.That site, known as Juukan Gorge, had been legally dynamited to make way for a Rio Tinto Plc iron ore mine. Such wanton destruction of a piece of priceless cultural heritage shocked the world, and the consequences were sweeping: Rio Tinto’s chief executive officer and other senior officials lost their jobs; Western Australia accelerated reforms of its heritage laws to replace them with something more equitable; and the federal government spent 16 months carrying out an exhaustive inquiry into the failings.It might have appeared to be the dawn of a better era in Australia’s relationship with Indigenous people. In truth, things have since gone backwards. Western Australia announced the repeal of the heritage laws barely a month after they entered into force in 2023, following a backlash from farmers and industry. The new regime seems as stacked against traditional landowners as the old one: Since the revised rules were introduced, just six out of 135 applications to destroy Aboriginal heritage have been denied. Soon after the law’s withdrawal, a national referendum rejected a proposed constitutional reform to set up an Indigenous advisory body to parliament, too. The brief ferment of civil rights that bubbled up in the late 2010s and early 2020s went distinctly quiet..Read more:.Miningweb: US and Australia team up on rare earths to take on China.It’s a travesty, but a familiar one. For all the photos of Indigenous workers driving dump trucks you’ll find on the covers of corporate responsibility reports, such mine disputes often boil down to a bare-knuckle fight over cash between landowners, governments, and mining companies. This story is far from over. Just as the culture war backlash in the US is foundering, so the pendulum in Australia may yet swing again. In the short term, miners and governments benefit financially from a system that suppresses Indigenous land rights. In the long term, the sheer injustice ensures the problem will never really go away. That will continue to be a headache for Fortescue and its descendants, decades into the future..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Miningweb: Australia’s mining sector faces a backlash over indigenous rights claims

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