An aboriginal leader has called for an end to unverified indigenous self-identification in order to stop “identity fraud” carried out in order to receive preferential treatment from the education and health systems.
Nathan Moran, CEO of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, on Monday told Sky News host Andrew Bolt that false self-identification was a “massive problem” and that an official certification process was needed.
“There’s over 40 per cent of people who have identified as aboriginal who were not born as aboriginal,” he said.
“I can certainly attest, going back to the 90s, birth rates have not matched the identification or population of aboriginal people.”
“It’s out of control the amount of people who are self-identifying, assuming roles and jobs and… going on to provide policy advice, or to speak as authorities for aboriginal people when they’re not known to be aboriginal.”
Mr Moran said aboriginal identity needed to be verified and certified by legitimate aboriginal organisations, which in turn must be “certified Aboriginal authorities under land rights or native title” due to the problem of non-indigenous entities falsely claiming to be aboriginal businesses.
“I can certify that a person who was removed from land rights in New South Wales for being a fraud still operates a corporation registered under the Australian law,” he said.
“It’s something we’d hope the government could address by simply closing the door on self-identification.”
Mr Moran comments come just days after he told A Current Affair that a self-identifying indigenous person who has regularly performed “welcome to country” ceremonies in Sydney over the past decade was “not aboriginal or doesn’t meet the test to qualify”.
Chair of the Darkinjung Aboriginal Land Council Tina West told The Saturday Telegraph that she believed that there was “significant fraud occurring”.
“People are just ticking a box to get benefits at school and in health. They are not meeting the definition of an aboriginal person,” she said.
“In fact, they are born-again blacks.”
According to the 2021 Census, the aboriginal population increased by 33% to 812,728 during the decade prior, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics said that 56% of the increase was due to “non-demographic” factors, which include changes in “identification.
In NSW alone services and programs targeted at indigenous people cost the taxpayer $1.2 billion a year, while the federal government has allocated $5.7 billion for indigenous communities and people in the past 10 months.
In June the South Australia Independent Commission Against Corruption warned that businesses are taking advantage of government policies designed to benefit aboriginals by pretending to be indigenous, labelling the practice “black-cladding”.
