New Aboriginal cultural heritage laws in WA hope to take state from ‘wild west’ to a better way

The new laws have removed section 18 of the old Aboriginal Heritage Act, which allowed Rio Tinto to blow up the 46,000-year-old Juukan Gorge site. Photograph: PKKP Aboriginal Corporation

“The sky isn’t falling down,” says Warren Pearce, chief executive of the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies in Western Australia. “But it’s a big change, and big changes take a while to flow through.”

The big change is the introduction on 1 July of the state’s Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation, which has been overhauled in the wake of Rio Tinto’s destruction of Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara in May 2020.