Mr GARETH EVANS (Deputy Leader of the Opposition)(9.32 a.m.) —Before proceeding any further with the consideration in detail stage of the Native Title Amendment Bill 1997 , I have a question to the government which must be answered; that is, what is the government's intention so far as further amendments to this legislation are concerned other than the amendment to introduce schedule 4, which has already been foreshadowed?

The Attorney-General (Mr Williams) will no doubt be familiar with the press reports this morning that, within the coalition party room—or a subgroup of it—last night, a major revolt was threatened by National Party members demanding that the bill be further amended in a number of ways, otherwise they would cross the floor. It is further reported that the government, in response to those demands and threats, has in fact proposed that there be a further amendment to the threshold test, which is a crucial element in this legislative package, one which is certainly central to our response to it and central to any consideration of both the justice and workability of the legislation.

As reported, the government proposal is that an already very tough threshold test will be made much tougher still by a requirement that, as a condition of someone being registered as a claimant, the claimant actually have a current physical connection with the land in question. The notion that any such criterion could be required merely to get a claimant into the condition of being able to pursue that claim, to take advantage of rights, to negotiate and everything else in the legislation, is nothing short of outrageous.

The government has already sold its soul on this legislation to those of its own members who have adopted from the outset an absolutely indefensibly rednecked, one-sided approach to this legislation by being utterly unwilling to acknowledge the reality that, for this legislation to be successful, effective and decent, it has to be balanced legislation which gets the balance of interests right as between indigenous Australians, miners and farmers—and of course the Australian public, the taxpayers, who are also stakeholders in this measure. That is the object to which we are trying to address ourselves.

The balance of this legislation has already wildly swung in the other direction. It is indefensibly unbalanced and one-sided in its present construction and, as such, cannot deliver the certainty and predictability, quite apart from the justice, that is necessary if the interests of these various categories of stakeholders are in fact to be met.

The point, obviously, is that, if you demand a current physical connection with the land, quite apart from anything or anyone else you are immediately excluding from the capacity to benefit from, or to participate in, this legislative framework for a start those indigenous people who were locked out of their land with which they had a long association and with which, in many cases, they have a very credible claim of native title as a result of the pastoral awards in the 1960s. Lock the gate, lose your native title is going to be the principle that is adopted, it seems, by the government if this further amendment is in fact accommodated and advanced.

There are many issues to be further debated today in the limited time we have available, but I must ask the government to respond, as a threshold matter, as to the accuracy of these reports and to state its intentions so far as a further amendment of the kind that I have been describing, of the kind that was reported in this morning's press, is concerned. Until we have a clear understanding of where the government is going in this respect, it is impossible to approach this already complex and difficult task with any sense of understanding about how the government is proposing to secure the necessary public interest balances that are involved. I ask the Attorney for an answer straight away.