🎙️ Episode 1 | Historical Settings and the Limits of Consultation
Podcast Series: Reframing Reef Governance: Traditional Owner Leadership in Practice
Episode Description:
In this opening episode, Bec Blurton sits down with Gugu-Badhun man and Deputy Chair of the Healthy Water Traditional Owner Technical Working Group, Ben Gertz, to examine the historical landscape of Traditional Owner engagement in reef conservation – and the structural conditions that made reform necessary.
A desktop review conducted at the outset of the Reef Trust Partnership found close to 600 water quality projects funded across the Great Barrier Reef catchment. Six were led by Traditional Owner groups. Less than one percent of total expenditure had reached them.
Ben reflects on what those numbers reveal about whose governance has historically been considered legitimate, what standard consultation has looked like in practice, and how the Reef Trust Partnership's approach — giving Traditional Owner Technical Working Groups genuine decision-making authority and a blank canvas — represented a meaningful structural departure.
We also discuss the role of trust in any genuine co-design process and why the time it takes to build it is not a delay to the work — it is the work beginning.

📍 A First Nations Affairs × Ben Gertz collaboration

#TraditionalOwners #ReefGovernance #CoDesign #GreatBarrierReef #FirstNationsLeadership #Conservation #ESG #FirstNationsAffairs

www.firstnationsaffairs.com
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www.firstnationsaffairs.com

[email protected]