FNA MONTHLY BRIEF - April

Note from the Founder

Racism directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is usually discussed as a social problem. It is. But social conditions are shaped by governance structures, and the governance structures currently in place in Australia actively enable the harm.

This month, First Nations Affairs made a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs' Inquiry into racism, hate and violence directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Our submission made three recommendations: enshrine the UNDRIP in domestic law; develop a National Action Plan for its implementation across jurisdictions; and create a dedicated disclosure framework for First Nations impacts, dependencies, risks, and opportunities.

Each of those recommendations is a governance recommendation. The distinction is that governance operates upstream. If institutions are not required to recognise and uphold cultural authority, they won't. If legislation omits First Nations peoples entirely, as the Climate Change Act 2022 does, the omission becomes a governance failure with material consequences.

The submission is publicly available, and I encourage you to read it in full. This brief draws out the governance arguments that sit at its core.

~ Bec Blurton

Governance Reflections

The absence of a domestic legal mechanism to implement UNDRIP does not create a gap waiting to be filled. It is an active condition. First Nations rights are codified in international law and endorsed by Australia, yet they carry no enforceable weight in the legislative, regulatory, and corporate decision-making contexts that most directly affect First Nations peoples.

The practical consequence at the entity level is the substitution of cultural authority with proxies. Organisations appoint a First Nations staff member, engage an advisor, or establish a designated role, and proceed as though legitimacy has been secured. It has not. Proxy authority shifts risk without shifting accountability. It places unreasonable responsibility on individuals who do not hold recognised decision-making authority, while allowing the institution to proceed with a false assurance of compliance. Legitimacy is not a role description but is demonstrated through consistent, systemic behaviour and accountability to those with authority.

At the institutional level, First Nations rights are routinely treated as stakeholder interests to be balanced against commercial or policy objectives. Rights are not preferences. They establish constraints on action, and institutions that treat them as negotiable are not managing risk but generating it. When consultation processes are designed to confirm decisions rather than shape them, the harm that results from predetermined outcomes is structurally enabled rather than accidental.

Rio Tinto's destruction of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters in 2020 is the most cited example of this failure mode. The company held Reconciliation Australia's highest endorsement at the time. The problem was not absent reporting but reporting that failed to treat First Nations governance and rights as material categories. Voluntary frameworks allowed a corporation to appear compliant while perpetrating harm. The gap between the appearance of accountability and its substance is precisely what a governance-grounded approach is designed to close.

FNA Resource of the Month

Submission to the Inquiry into Racism, Hate and Violence Directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People

First Nations Affairs' submission to the JSCATSIA inquiry frames racism as a governance failure and makes three specific structural recommendations. It examines how the absence of UNDRIP in domestic law enables institutional actors to adjudicate authority that does not belong to them, how legislative blindspots in areas such as climate policy create downstream harm at the community level, and how current corporate disclosure frameworks allow First Nations rights to be treated as peripheral reputational matters rather than sovereignty-based entitlements.
The submission draws on FNA's direct experience drafting the First Nations Minimum Social Safeguards for Australia's Sustainable Finance Taxonomy and contributing to the conceptual foundations of the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures.
It is written for policy leaders, boards, and governance professionals who need a clear account of how structural conditions generate harm and what is required to change them.

Climate, Finance, & Policy

Australia's Climate Change Act 2022 does not mention Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. All climate action, from renewable energy approvals to carbon market mechanisms, has direct implications for First Nations lands, waters, rights, and governance. Legislating a net zero framework without reference to the peoples whose Country will bear its physical footprint is a governance failure at the point of origin.

The downstream effects are visible in implementation. The Net Zero Plan produces six sector plans, each designed by different departments, with First Nations rights and interests addressed through parallel strategies or consultation processes that sit outside the core framework. Regional planning is proceeding in areas where environmental departments acknowledge they do not hold the relationships or knowledge required to map cultural heritage, so that mapping is deferred. Deferral is not a neutral position. It violates the right to free, prior, and informed consent.

There is a precedent problem that Australian policy is not taking seriously. Carbon farming schemes have been used to dispossess Indigenous peoples in Kenya and the Amazon. The mechanisms differ but the structural dynamic does not: climate action deployed to override Indigenous land rights is a documented pattern. Australia's sustainable finance architecture is being built at pace, and whether First Nations governance is embedded in it from the outset or retrofitted after the damage is done is a design choice being made now.

The argument for a dedicated First Nations disclosure framework is not a social responsibility argument but a market integrity one. Disclosures determine what is visible to investors and regulators and therefore what is treated as material. When First Nations issues sit in community engagement or social licence sections of reporting, they are categorised as reputational rather than governance matters, and that miscategorisation produces the conditions in which decisions like Juukan Gorge become possible.

First Nations Affairs