Rio Tinto has allegedly underpaid traditional owners of West Australia’s Pilbarra region as much as $400 million over the course of its twenty-four year long agreement with the Gumala Aboriginal Corporation (GAC). The mining giant wrote to members of the GAC in July highlighting this oversight and included an enclosed cheque of only $40 million.
Senator Pat Dobson has called for a full-scale audit of current land-use agreements Australia-wide, and says the federal government needs to do more to resource traditional land owners with safeguards that would help detect underpayments.
Addressing the power imbalance within land-use agreements is currently the subject of the parliamentary inquiry into the destruction of the Jukkan Gorge by Rio Tinto in May 2020.