Waiting for Mary: Process and practice issues in negotiating Native Title Indigenous decision-making and dispute management management frameworks

This paper follows a previous Issues Paper in which I suggest, that at the outset of any Native Title agreement-making processes, there is a need for facilitating decision-making and dispute management frameworks in congruence with the matrix of differentiated and relational Indigenous rights and interests, at least some of which are negotiable amongst Indigenous people themselves. Here, I raise some of the practical issues in negotiating such a framework including the need for contingency plans should an agreement not be able to be reached through the accepted primary process in the framework. The paper is woven around a scenario which is based on years of practice and research in a number of locations across Australia and with a range of Native Title stakeholders. It concludes with some observations about Bernard Mayer’s suggestion that the third-party neutral role of the mediator or facilitator should be expanded.