Labor commits to new Indigenous heritage protections but response to Juukan Gorge report angers traditional owners

The federal government will legislate new protections for Indigenous heritage sites, accepting all but one of the recommendations of a report on mining company Rio Tinto’s catastrophic destruction of a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal sacred site at Juukan Gorge.

But the organisation representing the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) traditional owners at the heart of the disaster at Juukan Gorge say they are “angry and disappointed” by the response because they had not been consulted on the content.