The Federal Court's decision on 5 December 2025 to overturn the dismissal of the Gaangalu Nation's massive 25,000 km² Native Title claim west of Rockhampton is being celebrated in some circles as a triumph for Indigenous justice. In reality, it is yet another depressing illustration of why the entire Native Title system, thirty-three years after Mabo, has morphed into a costly, divisive, and largely counterproductive industry that does almost nothing to improve the actual lives of Aboriginal people.
Let's be blunt: the area in question is mostly state forest, national park, and grazing country between Rockhampton and Emerald, and Springsure. It includes Blackdown Tableland and the Dawson Range, rugged, often waterless bush that has been extensively logged, mined, grazed, and roaded for 160 years. No one is pretending there are thriving pre-contact villages still living traditionally on this land. The original 2024 trial judge, Darryl Rangiah, looked at the evidence and concluded, quite reasonably, that whatever rights and interests may have existed at sovereignty had not been continuously maintained under traditionally based laws and customs right through to the present day. He therefore issued the rare "negative determination" that not only dismissed the claim but barred any refiling, effectively saying: enough is enough.
The Full Federal Court has now said Judge Rangiah asked the wrong questions. Apparently, he failed to recognise that switching from strict patrilineal descent to "cognatic" (bilateral) inheritance, and from clan estates to broader "language-group" identification, were merely "adaptations" of tradition rather than fundamental breaks with it. With the help of new anthropological reports and biographies of elderly Gaangalu people, the appeal bench has sent the whole thing back for (yet another) trial.
This is peak Native Title theatre.
It entrenches division instead of healing it
Every large overlapping or competing claim turns Aboriginal people against one another and against their non-Indigenous neighbours. Local councils (Banana Shire, Central Highlands) and the Queensland Government spent years and millions of taxpayer dollars successfully defending the first case, only to be told they must now do it all again. Farmers, miners, and conservationists who have to keep lawyers on retainer indefinitely. The only clear winners are barristers, anthropologists, and the Native Title Representative Bodies.
It almost never delivers tangible benefits to grassroots Aboriginal people
Even when claims succeed, the "title" granted is usually non-exclusive and comes with so many qualifications that it is useless for housing, business, or economic development. Compensation payments, when they finally arrive, are typically swallowed up by legal fees and internal distribution fights. Meanwhile, the remote communities that need schools, dialysis machines, jobs, and decent houses get nothing, because the billions spent on Native Title processes are not available for those mundane but life-saving things.
The standard of "connection" has become absurdly elastic.
The appeal court has now formally endorsed the idea that a complete overhaul of inheritance rules and territorial organisation can be waved away as mere "adaptation." If virtually any change is compatible with "tradition", then the statutory requirement of continuity becomes meaningless. We are rapidly approaching the point where the only thing needed to win Native Title is an anthropologist willing to argue that today's claimants are spiritual heirs of whoever was here in 1788, evidence of actual observance be damned.
The land itself is usually the least useful possible real estate.
Successful claims are disproportionately over national parks, vacant Crown land, and pastoral leases that are already never going to be built on. The reason is simple: governments will fight to the death over anything with mineral or agricultural value, but they are happy to grant symbolic title over wilderness areas because it costs them nothing. The result is that Native Title becomes a kind of consolation prize: "You can't have Alice Springs town centre or the Pilbara iron ore fields, but here's a nice big national park where you can run cultural tours, if you can find the tourists."
The opportunity cost is obscene.
The Native Title industry has consumed tens of billions of dollars since 1993. Imagine if even a fraction of that money had gone directly into Indigenous-controlled health services, trade-training centres, community-owned solar farms, or equity stakes in operating mines. Instead, the ruling elites fund endless courtroom contests over whether a shift to cognatic descent counts as "traditional".
None of this is to deny the historical dispossession of Aboriginal people (it happens to everyone, including Anglos, right now), or to suggest that legitimate traditional owners should get nothing. But Native Title as currently practised has become a bureaucratic monster that sets Aboriginal aspirations back by tying up time, money, and emotional energy in symbolic battles royal over largely worthless land, while the real killers, poor health, addiction, domestic violence, and educational failure, go under-funded. It is all a symbolic parade of wokeness, with the Aboriginal people who need the funds most, missing out.
The Gaangalu claim will now drag on for several more years and several more millions of dollars. When it is finally resolved, the odds are overwhelming that Central Queensland's Aboriginal communities will be no better housed, no healthier, and no wealthier than they are today.
That is not justice. It is a national embarrassment.