Liberal MP for Herbert, Peter Lindsay, thinks the answer to the Palm Island riots could lie in reforms to land tenure. He’s not alone. Former Mayor of Palm Island, Robert Blackley, raised this issue in a talk that he gave to the Brisbane Institute on the 13th March, 2001. On a recent Australia Talks Back programme, co-chair of Reconciliation Australia, Fred Chaney, tantalisingly mentioned land tenure as an indigenous issue, but didn’t expand on it. He might have been at cross purposes with the others, but then again, he might not.
Lindsay is quoted by the ABC as saying:

I strongly support making changes to land tenure on Palm Island.
It’s the key to improving the self esteem of islanders and to bringing about local integration.
It will provide an opportunity for economic participation and home ownership, something islanders cannot even dream about under the deed of grant in trust tenure.

I think it is overly simplistic to restrict the problem to one issue, but undoubtedly economic conditions on the island play a part in a general culture of nihilism, as well as tending to organise the community in destructive ways.
Land tenure is recognised as a problem in many parts of the world. For example Hernando de Soto has shown the devastating results of faulty land tenure in his own country of Peru, which, among other things, leads to increased cocaine production.
Land tenure in Palm Island is a form of collective ownership – a soviet style system imposed by the Bjelke-Petersen government. Blackley outlines the particular consequences of collectivism on what should be an island paradise. As one might expect it includes corruption of the endemic, but not prosecutable type.
Perhaps the Palm Island riots will cause a rethink about more than policing which might transform Aboriginal communities in a way that some of the more collectivist solutions of Noel Pearson probably won’t.