It’s a percentage game. Twiggy Forrest’s family holds some 37% of the shares in Fortescue, the big miner, reckoned to be worth $67 billion.
The native title owners of the interest in what became Fortescue’s Solomon iron ore hub, the Yindjibarndi, estimated that Fortescue had made $80 billion in profit from Solomon.
The Yindjibarndi, led by Michael Woodley, sued Fortescue for the damage inflicted on their sacred sites. Fortescue had pushed ahead with developing Solomon in the mid-teens of this century, as iron ore prices were low and the company’s other mines were producing low-quality ore.
Rio Tinto and BHP negotiated with native title holders, but Fortescue seems to have been in a corner. The way out was to develop the high-quality Solomon mines and face the consequences of railroading the native title holders later.
Seek forgiveness rather than permission.
On May 12 Justice Stephen Burley pronounced the price tag on forgiveness for, among other things, destroying 124 sacred sites and songlines: $150 million.
That’s a little under 0.2% of the estimated profit from Solomon.
Note that Fortescue’s policy is to pay out substantially on profits to shareholders, so the Forrest family, at 37% of the pie, have been able to keep the wolf from the door.
In fact, the Financial Review was able to quantify the dividend payment to the Forrests at $16.9 billion – over 13.5 years since the mine’s inception.
The Fin went on to explain at length that the moral to be drawn was that Twiggy had done very well out of flouting native title protocols. The Solomon hub came online in time to save the company after the September 2012 crash in iron prices to $US89 a tonne.
Nor was the advantage limited to the balance sheet. Twiggy lost none of his social licence with the Great and the Good as a result of brushing off indigenous claims.
The great ethical investor, Norge Bank, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, continues its large holding in Fortescue, and voted at the last AGM for Twiggy to remain on the board.
Oh come on, it’s the rich wot gets the pleasure and the poor wot gets the pain.
The West at least provides consistency. Its colonial development being 40 years behind the eastern colonies, by the time it was given its own Constitution and Parliament in 1889, the British government had noticed that the position of the local indigenous was parlous.
Hence, it introduced into the Constitution a requirement that the Colony devote 1% of public revenue annually to Aboriginal welfare. This was the much-hated s.70, entrenched against abolition.
Good luck if you think the Blackfellas ever saw a penny of the 1%. The entrenching provisions booby-trapped the first two attempts to sink s.70.
Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain ushered the second request for repeal through the Commons in 1897 as all eyes were focussed on the Board of Enquiry into the Jameson Raid in which stooges for Cecil Rhodes had attempted an armed coup against the Transvaal Republic.
Good politics. No one blinked. Business as usual in the Empire. But even then a technicality spotted in 1905 undermined the repeal: a third and successful permission from the British Crown had to be sought.
The only people who remembered were WA’s indigenous population, and marshalled by an eccentric old white man, Don McLeod, they attempted through the 1990s to litigate the validity of s.70’s repeal.
The first trip to the High (Judamia) saw the strike out inflicted by the WA Supremes overturned, but the coup de grace came in 2001 with Yougarla: the High unanimously terminated the claim.
The Yindjibarndi didn’t get up to 1%, but at least they got something, even if their less than 0.2% of profits seems unlikely to scare off future peremptory mining activity confronted with native title claims.
The West is looking up.