In this chapter we have discussed the possibilities within the existing Australian planning and legislative framework for rationalising and integrating the operations of PBCs, ALTs, and Aboriginal landowning corporations so as to improve the outcomes possible from land acquired by Aboriginal groups on Cape York and elsewhere under a variety of tenures. A key to the models proposed has been to take a regional approach and, to the extent possible, to pool resources and to service landholding bodies on this basis. However all such attempts are severely constrained by limitations on funding within the public sector, and by legislative and legal constraints which apply to PBCs, ALTs and the operations of Aboriginal corporations.

These constraints may only be readily overcome with policy and legislative reform of the commonwealth native title and state land rights legislations (and their associated regulations) to harmonise the amalgamation of tenures and landholding entities, to provide adequate levels of base funding for landholding and management entities and to amend them to enable greater flexibility in the types of corporate landholding structures available for native title holders and traditional owners under statutory land rights regimes.

In both the ALA land claim and the NTA title claim process the structure of the title-holding corporation is often the last aspect to be considered. In our view the preferred approach is to work with claimants from the outset on designing and establishing their PBCs and ALTs. This would shift the initial focus from the frustratingly lengthy and legalistic processes leading to a determination, to consideration of the long-term outcomes people wish to achieve from their native title. It would assist in achieving desired outcomes because, as the claimants pursue their claim, important dynamic aspects of their political processes and social structuring are likely to be revealed, and these may hold valuable clues as to how their title-holding corporations might operate in reality.

Anthropologists can further assist by promoting landholding corporation design and operation as a component of effective community government. A basic design assumption should be that the customary system of Aboriginal land tenure cannot be divorced from the social relations of its ‘owners’, nor from their systems of internal group authority and governance. At the same time, it is important that PBCs and ALTs are structured to ensure congruency and compatibility with the planning frameworks of state and local government bodies. This may best be done through the sort of regional land and sea management agencies suggested in the case study models. Other specific governance aims would be to minimise unreasonable and unnecessary friction and obstruction with respect to community settlement planning and development processes, through ILUAs between native title holders and DOGIT-owning councils.

In the introduction we drew attention to the distinction between native title as a recent construct of the Australian legal system and Aboriginal land tenure as the emic system of indigenous landownership. A key principle is to inform the PBC design process, and that of ALTs and other landholding corporations, with an understanding of the social structure and decision-making dynamics of the autochthonous Aboriginal land tenure system. This presents a classic opportunity in applied anthropology for the practitioner, based upon his or her research on the emic system, to mediate the transition from the Aboriginal system of land tenure to the holding of title under a corporate, statutory entity, whose objectives include the replication of ‘traditional’ membership and decision-making processes, into a structure capable of articulating with a variety of non-indigenous planning and land management entities. Major design challenges include: maintaining the integrity of traditional decision-making processes whilst responding to the legal and administrative requirements of the various statutory regimes for Aboriginal land rights; structuring the membership to reflect traditional social organisational arrangements; and having a capacity to subsume any politicisation and power politics within the native title group.