Michael Duffy: And so what would you like to see done with land rights?
Warren Mundine: What I'd like to see is that we do start opening land rights up and that we do have direct benefits to Aboriginal communities. A good example of this is out of a NSW land rights legislation where we got about three billion dollars worth of land tied up in inalienable free hold title, where the dispersements of the profits of those lands are not given to Aboriginal people, it's actually kept inside the land councils. So Aboriginal people don't directly benefit from that. So if an organisation, the land council, makes a 40 million dollar profit (for argument's sake) each year, it means sweet bugger-all to the Aboriginal people because that money cannot be dispersed to the Aboriginal people. So what happens is we have Aboriginal people who are asset rich in regard to land and in regard to organisations who may be capable of making 40 million dollars, but they're cash poor, they have no ability to move forward.
Michael Duffy: So what happens to that 40 million dollars?
Warren Mundine: It just remains within the land council and the money just builds and builds from there, and what happens is you have big, large organisations and the only benefits are to the staff within those organisations because the CEO gets a lot more money and the staff members get a lot more money, but the people they're supposed to be serving don't get anything.
Michael Duffy: Do you use it to buy more land sometimes?
Warren Mundine: They use it for buying more land, they use it for a number of different things, but in actual fact Aboriginal people don't get benefit from it. It's like having shares in BHP Billiton, for instance, and not getting dividends.
