The ACT's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elected body, which acts as a local voice to parliament and government, should be abolished, the leader of the First Nation Party says.
Paul Girrawah House, a Ngambri-Ngunnawal custodian, said the body was an irrelevance when it came to the needs and aspirations of Aboriginal people in the ACT.
"The ACT elected body is an anachronism of past misunderstandings and deliberate confusion, it has indeed become irrelevant and should be scrapped," Mr House, who is running in the central Canberra seat of Kurrajong, said.
"It fails because many of the Aboriginal people of the ACT do not see the elected body as genuinely representing their interests or as a voice for their needs and aspirations."
Mr House pointed to low voter turnout and the government's announcement of a review of the body as an admission of failure by the territory government.
"What has the elected body done in terms of closing the gap of Indigenous disadvantage for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples living in the ACT?" Mr House said.
"The statistics on disadvantage continue to speak for themselves. For example, the incarceration and child separation rates in the ACT are amongst the worst in Australia. The existence of the elected body has not made any difference at all."
Ngarra Group, led by Dhunghutti and Biripi man Craig Ritchie, has been appointed to lead the first part of the review of the elected body, which was first established in 2008.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said the review would consider how a contemporary elected body should function and whether the existing system delivered on the needs, priorities and aspirations of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community.
Elections for the body were held in July, with Maurice Walker, Billy T. Tompkins, Deanne Booth, Helen Wright, Kaylene Mcleod, Vicky Bradley and Bradley Bell elected.
But turnout fell from 267 formal votes in 2021 to 198 formal votes this year, despite the government's hopes it would increase in light of the attention on the body during the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023.
Mr House said the body should have been focused on Closing the Gap targets as it could not deal with matters relating to traditional owners, connections to and responsibilities for Country.
"The ACT government has a moral and ethical obligation to treat with all of the Aboriginal groups with traditional connections to the ACT on all matters that affect their land and water rights and interests, in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples," he said.
"The ACT government needs to deal with these two matters quite separately because under Aboriginal law, Aboriginal people cannot speak for other people's Country."
Mr House last year reached a settlement alongside Leah House with the ACT government in the Supreme Court in which the territory acknowledged the "hurt and distress" the sole recognition of Ngunnawal people as the territories traditional owners had caused Ngambri custodians. The government also committed to a comprehensive review.
Mr House and other Ngambri custodians filed a claim in 2022 against the government's "one-tribe policy", formalised in 2002 as an Indigenous Protocol, which states Ngunnawal people are the only traditional custodians.
Mr House ran for the Canberra Liberals in the seat of Murrumbidgee at the 2016 Assembly election, having previously been a member of ACT Labor for about five years between 2005 and 2010. He collected 3.5 per cent of the vote and did not win a seat.
Mr House told The Canberra Times in 2016 he had quit Labor because there "obviously wasn't room for an Indigenous person there".
