This paper examines the progression of the Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) case, and the legal construction of public participation in the making of political decsions. In the process of examining the politics of competing interests in land, the paper reflects on the challenge of the tension between Indigenous interests in land and developmentalism in relation to the Australian jurisprudence of procedural fairness and natural justice. The argument running through the article concerns the question of how the liberal restraint on power, where that power creates rather than infringes upon rights, may also play its role in the maintenance of relations of settler-colonial dispossession
