“WAFarmers are reaping what they sow,” Ben Wyatt declared recently, reflecting on the looming Maddox case and claims by WAFarmers that the current laws are being selectively targeted by the department (Heritage stoush ‘makes mockery of WA laws’ intent, The Australian, 20 January 2026).

There is a curious habit among former ministers once they leave office: they rediscover principle. Mr Wyatt’s recent commentary on Aboriginal cultural heritage laws is a textbook example.

Draped in the language of good intentions and historical inevitability, he now claims the heritage stoush makes “a mockery” of the law’s intent. What he does not say — and what matters far more — is that his argument quietly concedes something damning: the framework he once defended failed, and the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 (WA), which commenced in 2023,* still leaves the department with the power to selectively prosecute farmers using opaque mapping processes, while conveniently ignoring provisions that make it an offence — punishable by significant fines — to photograph heritage sites and publish those images without ministerial consent.

This was never a debate about respect for Aboriginal heritage. That lazy straw man was wheeled out whenever scrutiny became uncomfortable. The real issue is power, process, and the steady conversion of heritage protection into a rent-seeking industry — enforced arbitrarily, not through cooperation or common sense, but through lawyers and activist bureaucrats.

As was repeatedly pointed out during the bitter debate, the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972–73 assumed a finite and manageable number of known sites and relied heavily on discretionary ministerial power. Western Australia in 2026 bears no resemblance to that world.

By the time Mr Wyatt was Treasurer and then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, the Act was already buckling. Every major development attracted claims it was disturbing a sacred site. Court decisions exposed its ambiguity. Administrative practice had drifted far beyond the statute. And instead of admitting the framework was no longer fit for purpose, the 2021 rewrite made things worse by attempting to fix legal uncertainty through universal obligation.

Every block over one acre. Every farmer, miner, council, developer and suburban landholder. Routine activities — grading a track, replacing a fence, clearing a firebreak — were suddenly dragged into a compliance regime more suited to a Pilbara iron ore project.

That was not reform. It was legislative overreach masquerading as progress.

Mr Wyatt now implies that WAFarmers and the Pastoralists and Graziers Association of Western Australia (PGA) were on board with his reforms through what was termed a “co-design” process. There was no such thing. What was presented was a staged consultation where the devil was in the detail, with the regulations held back until the very last minute. The Cook Government’s retreat was not a failure of political courage driven by farmers or the noise around the Voice debate; it was a new Premier cleaning up the mess that Mr Wyatt and his hapless predecessor Buti had left behind.

The government retreated because the backlash was immense, diverse, and justified. The legislation would have failed with or without the Voice debate in the background.

Farmers played a key role in raising the alarm. Local governments soon warned they could not function. Developers cautioned it would inflate housing costs. Property owners discovered they were caught in a legal net they never saw coming. Industry groups flagged legal uncertainty and open-ended liability. Miners, behind closed doors, warned of capital markets walking away from Western Australia. Even Aboriginal groups privately acknowledged the framework was unworkable.

This was not a narrow uprising by primary producers. It was a statewide rejection of a scheme that would have paralysed land use across Western Australia and cost the government dearly.

What makes Mr Wyatt’s selective memory particularly galling is what he leaves out.

At the height of the debate, WAFarmers and the PGA made a constructive, good-faith offer to government: open up around 18 million hectares of freehold farmland to local Indigenous elders, by consent, to map and preserve culturally significant sites genuinely at risk of being lost. Four thousand broadacre farms. Cooperative access. Knowledge recorded collaboratively — not coerced — and funded by government.

In return, develop a final, transparent map of sites and remove the requirement for landholders to spend thousands of dollars on heritage surveys every time they disturbed already-worked ground.

It was practical. It was respectful. And it recognised a simple truth: heritage sites are best protected when they are clearly defined and openly mapped.

That offer was ignored.

Instead, the State pursued a one-size-fits-all law that treated a farmer’s paddock in Perenjori the same as a greenfields mine in the Pilbara.

This is how rent-seeking systems work. Legal uncertainty opens the door for the heritage industry to move in and demand ransom payments to allow projects to proceed. Heritage protection quietly morphs into commercial gatekeeping.

Mr Wyatt points to cases like Maddox as evidence of disrespect for heritage. That is another sleight of hand. Maddox exposes the danger of legislative overreach, not a lack of consultation. Attempting to fix one legal problem by imposing universal obligations across millions of hectares of private land was never defensible.

The upcoming decision is simply the next chapter in a saga where the department appears determined to drive outcomes through the courts that it could not secure through Parliament. If the State wins, the implications will not stop at culverts over creeks. The next question will be whether pumping water from a bore could impact a secret sacred spirit, or whether a wind farm disturbs a newly recalled wind spirit.

That is not heritage protection. That is regulatory absurdity.

The one saving grace in this saga is that Premier Roger Cook stepped in and pulled Western Australia back from the brink before flawed legislation was imposed wholesale on freehold land. That was not weakness; it was restraint.

No one opposed protecting genuine Aboriginal heritage. What was opposed — loudly and correctly — was legal ambiguity, departmental overreach, and the use of litigation as policy.

The real question now is not whether Ben Wyatt can repaint his time in government. One might think his well-paid corporate roles with Rio and Woodside would warrant a quieter public profile. He has had his time in public office — and what did it produce, other than the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021, a deeply flawed law ultimately rejected by his own side of politics?

* Repealed by the Aboriginal Heritage Legislation Amendment and Repeal Act 2023 s. 3(1) (No. 23 of 2023) on 15 November 2023.
Related stories: Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 (WA)