The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs has confirmed the governments advisory body on heritage, the ACMC, will be reassessing the 16 mythological or otherwise sacred sites that were determined to be ‘non-sites’ based on flawed legal advice provided to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) by the State Solicitors Office (SSO) in 2011. AHAA wants to highlight that 1262 sites have been considered as ‘non sites’ since the SSO advice was given, and asks the government how many archaeological sites out of these 1262 may also have been falsely determined ‘non-sites’, considering the Port Hedland Case found the ACMC had fallen into jurisdictional error in it’s interpretation of Section 5 in its entirety.

2015-05-05 QWON C468 1307 Aboriginal Heritage Sites