ONE of Australia's leading indigenous academics and a participant in Kevin Rudd's 2020 ideas summit is calling for laws to be changed to give Aboriginal people greater rights over natural resources.

Jon Altman, the ANU director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, yesterday said indigenous people were being short-changed under the current system.

He will ask the 2020 summit in Canberra on April 19-20 to support a call for Aboriginal Australians to be given more power over resource rights.

Professor Altman said consideration needed to be given to the idea, amending the law to provide indigenous land owners with legal property rights over resources, as occurs in the US and most Canadian provinces. He said this might be one mechanism to close the gaps in life expectancy.

"People are able to claim land but they are not able to get access to commercially valuable resources," he said. "And if we are talking about closing gaps particularly, in places like the Kimberley, the Pilbara, all those remote areas, we need to start thinking about bestowing some commercially valuable resources and rights on indigenous groups.

"There has to be a change to the law. I think we need to introduce provisions in the Native Title Act which have right of consent provisions to give people a stronger leverage in negotiations because at the moment native title groups have six months to negotiate with resource developers but they have no leverage because if they don't come to an agreement the development goes ahead anyway."

Professor Altman said Australia needed to make the playing field "more level" in negotiations. He said he believed mining companies would be prepared to pay more for the land they used, and it would also benefit the Government with less reliance by indigenous people on welfare.