Conclusion

767. The Australian Experience. The Australian experience with Aboriginal courts or equivalent bodies is limited. Aboriginal courts have been of uneven quality and have had mixed success. Overall the experience is inconclusive, even discouraging. Recent developments in the area of dispute resolution and community justice (not related to Aborigines) have been more towards mediation and conciliation, or increased involvement in sentencing and rehabilitation, rather than setting up new and separate court systems. The Queensland Aboriginal courts, while tolerated and even generally accepted within some communities, do not accord with this trend. But there is no strong tendency to enlarge their area of operations beyond the communities where they already exist. There are also more basic questions, which continue to recur in a variety of schemes, about the conflicts between introduced and local authority structures that Aboriginal courts or other official structures can create or intensify. These underlying questions will be discussed in Chapter 31.