‘INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS’ - REALLY?
Member for Western Victoria Region, Bev McArthur used an adjournment debate in Parliament to ask the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs about the State Government’s lack of utilisation of traditional Indigenous burning methods.
On 24 January 2020, Bev McArthur convened a public meeting on fire prevention in Terang attended by over 200 people, where Peek Whurrong elder Robert Lowe Senior told the crowd 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.
Traditional burning methods are used extensively in Western Australia, where over 100 full and part-time Indigenous rangers have been conducting controlled burns across 420 000 kilometres of the Kimberley. The Kimberley Land Council contends that the spread and intensity of fire in that region has been reduced by half.
On 28 November 2019, Mrs McArthur asked the Minister or Police and Emergency Services why the state government had failed to sufficiently utilise traditional Indigenous burning practices to mitigate fire risk.
On the 10th of January, the Minister wrote to Mrs McArthur explaining 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 or the Departments involved in forest and fire management.”
Quotes attributable to Bev McArthur MP:
“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 licences 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.”
“The Minister must justify 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.”
19 February 2020