Aboriginal Cultural Heritage in Civil Works: What Contractors Are Responsible For

The bucket comes up and something in the spoil is wrong. A dark band of soil with shell through it. A stone that has been worked. A scatter of flakes lying in a cut that should be clean subgrade. The operator knows before anyone else does, because the operator sees every bucket.

What happens in the next ten minutes matters more than anything written in the tender. And the uncomfortable part, for a contractor who has been told the principal holds the approvals, is that the obligation at that moment is not the principal’s. Heritage legislation across Australia places duties on the person carrying out the activity — which, on the ground, with the machine running, is you.

This guide sets out which Act applies in each jurisdiction and who administers it, what shape the obligation takes, and what a competent unexpected-finds procedure looks like. It deliberately states no penalties, no monetary figures, no thresholds and no timeframes, and §20 explains why. It is not a substitute for advice, and it is emphatically not a substitute for talking to the Traditional Owners of the Country you are working on.

Recorded or not, it is protected

If you take one thing from this page, take this one.

Every state and territory maintains a register or database of recorded Aboriginal sites, places and objects. Contractors and principals search them, get a nil result, and conclude the site is clear. That conclusion is wrong, and it is the single most common and most expensive misunderstanding in this area.

The registers record what has been surveyed and reported. They are not a map of what exists. Vast areas of Australia have never been systematically surveyed, and the absence of a record says nothing about the presence of heritage. The protective provisions in these Acts generally attach to the thing itself, not to its listing — which means an object or place can be legally protected, and harming it can be an offence, on land where the register showed nothing at all.

There is a second reason a nil result should not reassure you. Some information is culturally restricted and is not held on a public register by design. A search returning nothing may mean nothing has been recorded, or it may mean what is there is not the kind of thing that goes on a public list.

So the practical posture is: assume the ground may hold something, and have a procedure ready for the day it does. That posture costs almost nothing to adopt and it is the difference between a managed event and a serious one.

Who holds which obligation

Heritage obligations sit in two layers, and the layers do not move just because a contract says they do.

	Usually the principal	Always you as well
What it is	Assessments, approvals, permits, consents and any management plan for the project	A general duty not to harm heritage while carrying out the activity, and the practical duty to stop and notify on discovery
When it happens	Before your contract exists — during planning and approvals	Every day the machines are running
Who can be liable	The proponent, and often its officers	The company carrying out the work, and in some circumstances individuals
Can the contract shift it	Cost and programme risk, yes	The statutory duty itself, no

That last row is the one to understand properly. A contract can allocate who wears the cost of a delay, who pays for a monitor, and who carries the risk of a redesign. What it cannot do is transfer a statutory duty off the person actually doing the excavating. If the legislation says a person who carries out an activity must take reasonable measures to avoid harm, then you are that person, and an indemnity from the principal does not change your position with the regulator. It only changes who pays afterwards.

The corollary is more useful than it sounds: because both parties can be exposed, both parties normally want the same thing — a procedure that works. Heritage is one of the few risk areas where the principal’s interest and the contractor’s interest are genuinely aligned, and you can raise it in a pre-award conversation without it reading as a contractor looking for an excuse.

The jurisdictional map

Cultural heritage law is state and territory law. The Acts differ in structure, in the instruments they create, in who the decision-maker is and in who the recognised Aboriginal party is. There is no national position, and a procedure written for one state may be wrong in the next.

This table is a routing device. It tells you which Act to look at and who to ask. It does not tell you what applies to your job.

Jurisdiction	Principal Act	Who administers it
Victoria	Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 (Vic)	First Peoples – State Relations; Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council; Registered Aboriginal Parties
Queensland	Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (Qld); Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (Qld)	The Queensland department responsible for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander partnerships, through its cultural heritage unit
New South Wales	National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 (NSW), Part 6	Heritage NSW, within the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water
Western Australia	Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA), as amended	Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage; Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Committee; the Minister
South Australia	Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988 (SA)	Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation, and the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation
Tasmania	Aboriginal Heritage Act 1975 (Tas)	Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania
Northern Territory	Northern Territory Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act 1989 (NT); Heritage Act 2011 (NT)	Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority; the NT heritage branch
ACT	Heritage Act 2004 (ACT)	ACT Heritage Council, with Representative Aboriginal Organisations
Commonwealth	Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (Cth); Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth)	Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and the responsible Minister

Two standing cautions on that table. First, departmental names change with machinery-of-government reshuffles more often than the Acts do; if a name here does not match what you find, search the Act rather than the department. Second, this is an area under active reform in several jurisdictions, and the sections that follow flag where.

Victoria

The Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 (Vic) and its regulations are widely regarded as the most developed regime in the country, and the instrument a civil contractor will meet is the Cultural Heritage Management Plan — the CHMP. Where one is required, it is prepared by a heritage advisor and it governs how the works proceed.

Victoria formally recognises Registered Aboriginal Parties as the decision-makers for cultural heritage in their areas, and the RAP for the area is the body that evaluates a plan. The Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council appoints RAPs; First Peoples – State Relations administers the system and publishes the guidance.

What a contractor needs to establish in Victoria is narrow and answerable: does a CHMP exist for this project, am I bound by its conditions, and what does it require of me during construction. Ask for the document itself, not a summary of it.

Queensland

Queensland runs two parallel Acts — the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (Qld) and the Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (Qld) — and the concept at the centre of both is the cultural heritage duty of care. It applies to a person carrying out an activity, and it is not conditional on anything being recorded on a database.

The state publishes duty of care guidelines to help work out what reasonable and practicable measures look like for a given category of activity, and the Acts provide for cultural heritage management plans and cultural heritage management agreements negotiated with the Aboriginal party for the area. Which of those routes fits a project is a question for the parties and the department, not for a guide.

Queensland is the jurisdiction where a contractor is most likely to hold a personal, freestanding obligation regardless of what the principal has done. Read the guidelines.

New South Wales

New South Wales protects Aboriginal objects and declared Aboriginal Places through Part 6 of the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 (NSW) — heritage provisions sitting inside conservation legislation, which is an accident of history rather than a design. Harm to an Aboriginal object is an offence, and the approval instrument is the Aboriginal Heritage Impact Permit, administered by Heritage NSW.

Recorded information sits in the Aboriginal Heritage Information Management System. Search it, and then re-read §01, because in NSW as everywhere the search result is not the answer.

NSW has been working towards standalone Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation for years and the government has committed to delivering it. At the time of writing it has not been enacted. If you are reading this later, check whether that has changed.

Western Australia

Western Australia is the jurisdiction to be most careful about, because the law changed twice in quick succession. The Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 (WA) commenced in mid-2023 and was repealed later the same year. The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA) was reinstated with amendments and, as at the time of writing, is the operative law, administered by the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage with a statutory Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Committee advising the Minister on consent to use land where an Aboriginal site is involved.

Two consequences for a contractor. Guidance, templates and precedent documents written during the short life of the 2021 Act may still be circulating and may no longer reflect the law — treat any WA heritage material with a date on it accordingly. And because this remains politically live, the position should be confirmed with the department rather than assumed from anything here.

South Australia and Tasmania

South Australia. The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988 (SA) protects Aboriginal sites, objects and remains, and is administered through Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation with the Minister as decision-maker. The Act was amended relatively recently, including changes to offences, enforcement powers and reporting obligations, so material predating those amendments should not be relied on.

Tasmania. The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1975 (Tas) is the operative law and is administered by Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania. Tasmania has been developing replacement legislation for some years, and a draft Bill has been through public consultation. It had not been passed at the time of writing. Tasmania is therefore the other jurisdiction where a contractor should confirm the current position before relying on any secondary source, including this one.

Northern Territory and the ACT

Northern Territory. The Northern Territory Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act 1989 (NT) protects sacred sites and is administered by the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, an independent statutory body. The instrument to know about is the Authority Certificate, which follows consultation with custodians and sets conditions for work in the vicinity of sacred sites. Archaeological places and objects are dealt with separately under the Heritage Act 2011 (NT). The sacred sites legislation was amended in 2025.

ACT. Aboriginal places and objects are protected under the Heritage Act 2004 (ACT), administered by the ACT Heritage Council, which consults Representative Aboriginal Organisations declared under the Act. The ACT is small enough that the Council is genuinely approachable on a specific question.

The Commonwealth layer

Two Commonwealth regimes sit over the state ones, and neither is a day-to-day concern for most civil jobs — but both are worth knowing exist.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (Cth) is a backstop. It allows an application to be made to the Commonwealth Minister for a declaration protecting an area or object from injury or desecration where state or territory law has not delivered protection. It operates over the top of the state process rather than instead of it, and applications under it have not been rare in recent years. For a contractor the practical significance is that a project which has cleared its state approvals is not necessarily immune from a further Commonwealth process.

The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) matters where a project needs Commonwealth environmental approval and heritage is among the controlling considerations — National Heritage places, and Indigenous heritage values assessed as part of a referral. This regime is mid-transition: reform legislation passed in late 2025 is commencing in stages through 2026, including the establishment of a national environment protection agency and new national environmental standards. If your project has a Commonwealth referral in it, the approvals landscape is not what it was two years ago, and the principal’s environmental adviser should be the source of truth, not a general guide. The interaction with your own environmental obligations on site is covered in construction environmental management plans for tenders.

Separately, work has been under way for some years on new Commonwealth First Nations cultural heritage legislation, developed in partnership with First Nations organisations following the destruction of the rock shelters at Juukan Gorge. That work is not complete. It is a reasonable expectation that this area will keep moving.

What brings an assessment or a plan into play

Every regime has some mechanism for deciding when a project needs a heritage assessment, a plan, a permit or a consent. The tests are different in every jurisdiction, they turn on defined terms, and several of them are set out in regulations rather than in the Act itself. This guide does not state any of them, because a trigger quoted wrongly is worse than no trigger at all.

What can be said honestly is the general shape these tests take. Across jurisdictions they tend to combine three ideas:

• The nature and depth of the ground disturbance. High-impact activity that disturbs previously intact ground is treated differently from surface work or work within an existing formation.
• Mapped cultural sensitivity. Landforms with a known association with occupation and use are more likely to be flagged — waterways and their margins, dunes and sand bodies, ridgelines, coastal fringes, rock outcrops, and the ground around them.
• Prior significant disturbance. Ground that has already been substantially disturbed is generally treated as holding less potential than ground that has not, though “already disturbed” is a defined concept in some places and not a common-sense one.

Notice how much civil work sits squarely in that shape. A pipeline through a river flat, a subdivision on a sandy rise, a transmission line access track along a ridge, a new road alignment through a paddock that has only ever been grazed — these are not edge cases, they are the ordinary work. Contractors in subdivision civil works and renewable energy and transmission meet heritage requirements as a matter of routine, and greenfield earthworks projects are precisely the activity these regimes were written for.

Whether any of it applies to your job is a question for the regulator in §03 and the relevant Aboriginal party. Ask them.

At tender: what to read, what to price

Heritage is a pricing input, not a compliance afterthought, and the work happens during the tender period or it does not happen at all.

1. Read the heritage documentation, not the heritage clause. If the principal holds an assessment, a plan, a permit or a consent, ask for the document. The clause tells you a plan exists; only the plan tells you what it will cost you to comply with it.
2. Establish whether you are bound by it. Being handed a plan and being made contractually responsible for implementing its construction-phase requirements are different things, and the second is what you are pricing.
3. Price what the plan actually requires. Inductions for every person entering the site, monitors where the plan calls for them, salvage or collection activities, exclusion zone establishment and maintenance, and the supervision time to keep all of it working.
4. Read the exclusion zones against your own methodology. A no-go area in the middle of your haul route is a methodology problem, and it is far cheaper to find it now.
5. Treat “heritage assessment pending” as a programme risk, in writing. Where the principal has not completed the heritage process, your programme is contingent on someone else’s timeline. Say so in your tender assumptions rather than absorbing it silently.
6. Ask the question in the clarification window. Whether a plan exists, who the recognised Aboriginal party is, and who bears the cost of monitoring are all fair questions, and asking them reads as competence.

Where the heritage position is genuinely unresolved and the contract pushes the risk onto you, that is a legitimate input to the go/no-go decision. It is the same discipline that applies to unknown ground conditions on a contaminated land job: an unpriceable risk transferred to the contractor is a reason to decline, or to qualify.

On site: the practical regime

Four things carry the weight during construction.

• Cultural heritage induction. Before anyone touches the ground. It covers what may be present, what it looks like, the stop-work trigger, and who to call. Where the plan provides for it to be delivered by the Aboriginal party, that is the version people remember — a briefing from the people whose heritage it is lands differently from a slide in a site induction pack.
• A stop-work and notification procedure that people can actually execute. One trigger, one number to call, one instruction. If your procedure requires an operator to make a judgement about significance, it is the wrong procedure.
• Monitors where the plan requires them. Aboriginal site monitors observe ground disturbance in identified areas. Plan the works so monitors are used properly rather than kept waiting, and build their attendance into the programme rather than calling it in the day before.
• Exclusion zones that survive contact with reality. Physically fenced, marked on every drawing including the ones the subcontractors use, and re-briefed at crew changeover. Heritage exclusion zones fail the same way every time — a new crew, a new subcontractor, or a night shift that never got the induction.

That last point deserves emphasis because it is where contractors actually come unstuck. It is rarely a deliberate decision to dig in a protected area. It is a subcontractor’s excavator working from a superseded drawing. Your subcontract terms and your induction gate are the controls that prevent it, and both belong in your tendered methodology.

Unexpected finds

Every heritage management plan should contain an unexpected finds procedure, and where one does not exist the project needs one anyway. Its purpose is to remove all judgement from the person at the machine.

The shape it almost always takes:

1. Stop work in the vicinity. Not the whole site necessarily — the area around the find, as the procedure defines it.
2. Do not disturb anything further. No cleaning it up, no moving it to one side, no digging around it to see how far it goes.
3. Secure the area. Barricade or flag it so nobody drives through it while the calls are being made.
4. Do not remove, collect or keep anything. Ever. Removing material is very often itself the offence, and a pocketed stone tool is the version of this that ends careers.
5. Do not photograph unless the procedure says you may. Some plans require a photographic record; some cultural material should not be photographed at all. Follow the document rather than the instinct to record it on a phone.
6. Notify the people the plan names. The principal or superintendent, the heritage advisor, and the Aboriginal party — in the order and by the method the plan specifies. Keep a written record of who was told and when.
7. Do not restart in that area until you are authorised to. In writing, from the person the plan says can authorise it. Not from a foreman who is confident it was nothing.

Two additions from experience. Make the trigger deliberately over-inclusive — “anything that looks unusual” is a better instruction than any attempt to describe what to look for, because false alarms cost an hour and a missed find costs vastly more. And make sure everyone on site knows they will be supported for stopping, including if it turns out to be a rock. A crew that fears being blamed for a stoppage will keep digging, and that is the failure mode this whole procedure exists to prevent.

Ancestral remains

Suspected human remains are a different and more serious situation, and they need to be handled separately in your procedure rather than folded into the general finds process.

The essential points, stated carefully:

• Stop immediately and do not disturb anything. This is not a judgement call and there is no threshold of certainty to reach first.
• Notify police. Suspected human remains are reported to police in every Australian jurisdiction, because until qualified people have assessed them nobody on site can know what they are. That reporting pathway is separate from, and additional to, the heritage notifications in the plan.
• Also notify the parties the plan names — the principal, the heritage advisor, the heritage regulator and the Aboriginal party — in accordance with the procedure.
• Nobody on site determines what has been found. Whether remains are ancestral remains, and what happens next, is determined through a process involving the police, the coronial system, specialists and the Aboriginal community concerned. It is not determined by a superintendent, an operator or a project manager.
• Treat the location and the information with discretion. No photographs, no site gossip, no social media, and no discussion outside the notification chain.

Ancestral remains are the remains of somebody’s family. The reason the procedure is rigid is not administrative — it is so that the people who should decide what happens are the ones who do.

Programme and cost consequences

Treated honestly, a heritage discovery has three cost consequences, and they escalate.

Consequence	What it looks like	Where to look in the contract
Ongoing monitoring	Monitor day rates, heritage advisor attendance, additional inductions, slower production rates in monitored areas	Whether it is a priced item, a provisional sum, or your risk
Standby during investigation	Plant and crews idle while a find is assessed and a decision is made	Delay and disruption provisions, and whether the event is a compensable cause
Redesign or realignment	The works change to avoid what was found — a shifted alignment, a redesigned structure, a relocated compound	Variation provisions, and the design responsibility split

The question everyone asks is whether a heritage discovery is a latent condition. The honest answer is: read the contract, because it very often is not. Many standard and amended forms deal with heritage, artefacts and objects of value under a separate clause from physical conditions, with its own notice requirements and its own relief. Some make the contractor’s entitlement conditional on having complied with the management plan. Assuming heritage falls into the latent conditions clause is a good way to serve the wrong notice under the wrong provision.

What is consistent is that entitlement depends on notice. Whatever the clause, it will have a notification requirement, and the discipline set out in extensions of time and delay claims applies with full force: notify under the correct clause, on time, with records. A heritage stoppage is one of the more clearly evidenced delay events available to a contractor — the stop-work record, the notification log and the authorisation to resume are exactly the contemporaneous documentation that these claims usually lack.

Writing the tender response

Evaluators are not looking for a statement of respect. They are looking for evidence that if something is found on their project, your people will do the right thing without being told.

What scores:

• The procedure itself, or a faithful summary of it — the stop-work trigger, the notification chain, the authorisation-to-resume step.
• Evidence you have used it. A project where a find occurred, what you did, and what the outcome was. If you have never had one, say how the procedure is embedded — induction records, toolbox coverage, the fact that it sits in your management system rather than in a bid.
• The named roles. Who stops work, who makes the calls, who authorises resumption, and who inducts subcontractors.
• Integration with your other plans, so it reads as part of how you run a job rather than a standalone document. It belongs alongside your CEMP, and the consultation side of it connects to your community and stakeholder engagement plan.

What does not score: a paragraph affirming that your company respects Aboriginal cultural heritage, with no procedure behind it. Every bidder writes that paragraph. The general principle in addressing selection criteria applies here as much as anywhere — the claim is worth nothing without the method and the evidence.

One distinction to get right. Cultural heritage obligations and Indigenous procurement participation are two completely different things, and conflating them in a tender response is a recognisable error. Heritage is about protecting places and objects, and it is governed by legislation. Indigenous participation targets are about Indigenous business spend and employment, and they are governed by procurement policy and your contract — those are covered separately in social and Indigenous procurement policies. Answering a heritage question with your Indigenous participation performance tells an evaluator you have not understood what was asked.

Working with Traditional Owners

Underneath the Acts and the plans, this subject is not a compliance category. It is other people’s heritage, held by communities with a continuing connection to the Country your machines are working on, and the legislation exists because that heritage has been damaged and lost within living memory.

Some things worth knowing before the first conversation:

• Consultation is with the party the legislation recognises for that area — a Registered Aboriginal Party, an Aboriginal party, a Representative Aboriginal Organisation, or the custodians identified through the relevant process. Who that is, is a question of fact you can establish through the regulator in §03. Talking to the wrong group is worse than not talking yet.
• It takes the time it takes. Corporations have meeting cycles, people have other commitments, and decisions may need to be made collectively. Build that into the programme at tender rather than treating it as an obstruction later.
• Knowledge is shared on terms. Some information is restricted by gender, seniority or community decision, and being told about a place does not make the information yours to repeat, map or file.
• The people you meet are experts. Site monitors, cultural officers and heritage staff often have decades of field experience. Crews who treat them as part of the project team rather than as an inspection get better outcomes, and so does the heritage.
• Done properly or not at all. A consultation run to tick a box produces a document nobody stands behind, which is precisely the situation that goes badly when something is found.

Most contractors who have worked under a well-run plan say the same thing afterwards: the process was better than they expected, and they learned something about the ground they were working on that they would not otherwise have known.

Checklist

• Do you know which Act and which regulator apply in every jurisdiction you work in?
• Does everyone in your business understand that a nil database result does not mean the site is clear?
• For this project, does a heritage assessment, plan, permit or consent exist — and have you read the document rather than the clause?
• Are you contractually bound to implement its construction-phase requirements?
• Have you priced inductions, monitors, exclusion zones and the supervision time to maintain them?
• Is “heritage assessment pending” recorded as a programme assumption in your tender?
• Do you have a written unexpected finds procedure, and could the operator on the machine execute it without ringing anyone for advice first?
• Does your procedure deal with suspected human remains separately, including police notification?
• Do your exclusion zones appear on the drawings your subcontractors are actually using?
• Does your induction gate cover every person on site, including night shift and late-arriving subcontractors?
• Do you know which clause of your contract deals with heritage discoveries, and what notice it requires?
• Do you know who the recognised Aboriginal party is for the area, and have you allowed realistic time for consultation?
• Does your tender response contain a procedure and evidence, not a statement of values?
• Are you clear that heritage obligations and Indigenous procurement participation are different things?

The short version

• Heritage is protected whether or not it is recorded. A clear register search is not a clear site, and this is the mistake that catches contractors.
• The principal usually holds the approvals and the plan. You hold a duty not to harm heritage while doing the work, and the duty to stop and notify. Both parties can be liable.
• A contract can allocate the cost. It cannot allocate away a statutory duty.
• The law is state-specific and several jurisdictions are mid-reform — Western Australia changed twice in quick succession, Tasmania has a Bill in progress, and NSW has committed to standalone legislation.
• Assessment and plan triggers exist everywhere and differ everywhere. Check them with the regulator; do not take them from a guide.
• At tender: read the heritage documents, find out if you are bound by them, price the monitoring and inductions, and flag a pending assessment as a programme risk.
• On site it comes down to induction, a stop-work trigger anyone can execute, monitors used properly, and exclusion zones that survive crew changeover.
• Unexpected finds: stop, secure, disturb nothing, remove nothing, notify the people the plan names, and do not restart until authorised.
• Suspected human remains are a separate situation with immediate police notification, and nobody on site decides what has been found.
• Heritage obligations are not Indigenous procurement participation. Do not answer one with the other.
• Consultation is with the party the legislation recognises, it takes real time, and it is done properly or not at all.

Sources and further reading

This guide is general information. It is expressly not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for consultation with Traditional Owners. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage is protected by separate legislation in every Australian state and territory, with different instruments, different decision-makers and different recognised Aboriginal parties, overlaid by Commonwealth legislation. Harming protected heritage is an offence, penalties are severe, and in some circumstances liability extends to individuals and includes criminal liability. This area has changed materially in recent years and continues to change: Western Australia’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 was repealed and the amended Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 reinstated; Tasmania has draft replacement legislation in progress; New South Wales has committed to standalone legislation; South Australia’s and the Northern Territory’s Acts have recently been amended; and Commonwealth environmental law is mid-transition. This guide deliberately states no penalties, no monetary figures, no thresholds, no timeframes and no assessment triggers, because a figure or a trigger that is wrong or out of date in this area causes real and irreversible harm — to heritage, and to the contractor who relied on it. Confirm the current position for your jurisdiction and your project directly with the responsible regulator and with the relevant Aboriginal party, and obtain legal advice. Where a heritage obligation may attach to your work, that advice is not optional.

• State and territory Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation and administering bodies: the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 (Vic), administered through First Peoples – State Relations with the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council and Registered Aboriginal Parties; the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (Qld) and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (Qld), administered by the Queensland department responsible for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander partnerships, which publishes duty of care guidelines; Part 6 of the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 (NSW), administered by Heritage NSW within the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water; the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA) as amended, administered by the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage; the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988 (SA), administered through Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation; the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1975 (Tas), administered by Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania; the Northern Territory Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act 1989 (NT), administered by the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, together with the Heritage Act 2011 (NT); and the Heritage Act 2004 (ACT), administered by the ACT Heritage Council with Representative Aboriginal Organisations. Each publishes its own guidance on when an assessment, plan, permit or consent is required, and each answers enquiries about specific projects. Those published sources — not this guide — are authoritative.
• Commonwealth legislation: the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (Cth), under which the responsible Minister may make declarations protecting areas and objects, administered by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water; and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth), as amended by reform legislation passed in late 2025 and commencing in stages through 2026, including the establishment of a national environment protection agency and new national environmental standards. Work on new Commonwealth First Nations cultural heritage legislation, developed in partnership with First Nations organisations following the Juukan Gorge inquiry, remains in progress.
• Western Australia’s legislative change: the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 (WA) commenced on 1 July 2023 and was repealed with effect from 15 November 2023 by the Aboriginal Heritage Legislation Amendment and Repeal Act 2023 (WA), which reinstated the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA) with amendments including review rights for native title parties and a statutory Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Committee. Contractors should treat any WA heritage guidance issued between mid-2023 and late 2023 with particular caution.
• Reform status in other jurisdictions, current at the time of writing and subject to change: Tasmania released a draft Aboriginal Heritage Bill for public consultation in 2026 to replace the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1975 (Tas), which had not been enacted; New South Wales has committed to delivering standalone Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation to replace the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 provisions; South Australia’s Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988 was amended with effect from 1 January 2025; and the Northern Territory Aboriginal Sacred Sites Act 1989 was amended in 2025.
• Related TenderBuilt guides covering the adjacent obligations this page connects to: construction environmental management plans, community and stakeholder engagement plans, social and Indigenous procurement policies (a different obligation from heritage), latent conditions, extensions of time and delay claims, and the go/no-go decision.