Howes, Christine --- "Stolen Wages: Pushing the Issue onto the National Agenda" [2005] IndigLawB 34; (2005) 6(12) Indigenous Law Bulletin 6

• Stolen Wages: Pushing The Issue Onto The National Agenda
• Call For Information And Volunteers

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Stolen Wages: Pushing the Issue onto the National Agenda

by Christine Howes

From 1900 until as late as the 1980s, governments around Australia controlled wages, savings and benefits belonging to Aboriginal people who were under their care and protection. In almost every state and territory, money belonging to individual Aboriginal people was improperly withheld by governments. This money included wages, social security payments like child endowment and pensions, soldiers’ pay, workers compensation and inheritances.

Records show some funds from Trust accounts were transferred to public revenue and used for development and infrastructure; some ‘disappeared’ through fraud, negligence and maintenance of banking systems known to be faulty.

In New South Wales (‘NSW’) the Government recently admitted it lied to people seeking money still held in their accounts. In Queensland people only got control of their savings accounts in the 1970s, and only if they asked. Many balances reflected little return for decades of work.

Generations of Aboriginal families have been economically disadvantaged as a direct result of this flawed financial management - yet government rhetoric continues to blame Aboriginal people for their own poverty!

In 2002 Peter Beattie's Queensland Government made a capped reparations offer of $55.6 million to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to whom money is owed. The Indigenous Wages and Savings Reparations process is a ‘take it or leave it’ scheme which closes at the end of 2005. It offers fixed payments of $2,000 or $4,000, according to age, to claimants alive after 9 May 2002.

A lot of older Indigenous people are only taking the offer because they may have to wait years and may not be around.
Stolen Wages Survey Respondent

The Government knows many now-elderly claimants, forced to work for up to 20 years, sometimes more, with limited access to their own accounts, are actually owed much larger amounts. Even if they have records to prove it they cannot claim all their money without taking the Government to court.

Families of deceased workers cannot apply and claimants must also sign an indemnity waiving their right to take any further action to recover their full entitlements; yet few claimants have any idea of what they are legally owed.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers and families who had their personal accounts withheld want their money back and, in Queensland, have been campaigning for three years to try and convince the Government to make a better offer than the current process, now in its last year.

Just because this practice of withholding wages has ended, that is no excuse for the Government to ignore the issues and people involved.
Stolen Wages Survey Respondent

Final results of a Stolen Wages Survey distributed throughout Queensland strongly indicate a high level of dissatisfaction with that Government's handling of this issue. The survey was distributed in response to the Queensland Government's refusal to carry out its own State Labor Party policy which calls for re-negotiation with Indigenous communities.

Members of the Stolen Wages Working Group agree the results discredit the State Government's stance on the issue and therefore the original process through which it was devised.

I attended the Toowoomba meeting a few years ago regarding this matter and the process was appalling. Telling older people that the legal process (if they don't accept the offer) could take up to ten years, that many may not live till then - as a young Aboriginal woman I was highly offended.
Stolen Wages Survey Respondent

Results of the survey were uniformly strong with more than 94 per cent of Indigenous and non-Indigenous respondents agreeing that the offer was not fair, that the families of deceased workers should be entitled to make a claim, and that there should be an independent inquiry to audit what might be owed.

A result showing only 75 per cent of both groups knew about the Government's offer has prompted calls for the offer to be extended. Less than 10 per cent of those who knew about the offer found out from Government; the rest from either the stolen wages campaign or the media - nearly all of which over the past three years has been generated by the campaign.

I do think we deserve the right to know the benefits of our stolen wages or the amount of funds.
Stolen Wages Survey Respondent

In March 2004, NSW Premier Bob Carr apologised for the practices of previous governments, and promised the NSW Government would search surviving records and reimburse people shown to be owed money. An Aboriginal Trust Funds Repayment Scheme was announced in December 2004. There is no 'cap' on total repayments, claimants will be paid what they are owed to today’s value, and they will not have to sign a legal indemnity. Oral evidence will be given due weight where written records are missing or suspect.

The NSW scheme is much fairer than Queensland’s, but there are still many questions of detail, and progress so far is very slow. Repayment in both States depends primarily on surviving evidence in government files, and both governments have admitted their records are grossly incomplete.

Other Governments, including the Commonwealth, have yet to face up to this issue although the Victorian Government has promised some research funding to look into the issue.

In June this year NSW claimants and campaigners attended a Stolen Wages Working Group meeting in Brisbane, determined to promote unity between states and territories and a stronger showing for stolen wages as a national issue.

Queensland Working Group members from as far afield as Cairns, Townsville and Mackay were able to meet with the NSW contingent to discuss a unified strategy aimed at ‘bumping up’ stolen wages on the national agenda.

The meeting agreed that national leadership - Indigenous and non-Indigenous - was not taking issues about reparations seriously enough and that stolen wages in particular did not have the profile that it should.

[We] must get the message out to all Australians about how [we were] forced to live and what was denied.
Stolen Wages Working Group Meeting, June 2005

Outcomes of the meeting included a decision to print 10,000 ‘Stolen Wages Built this State’ stickers for Queensland and proposals for a day of action at Parliament House in Queensland (to be announced), and a call for two national days of action - one to be held on Human Rights Day in December this year and the other to coincide with the launch of a National Report in May 2006.

The National Report is currently being researched by volunteers across the nation under the guidance of historian Dr Ros Kidd and international human rights lawyer Helen Burrows. It will summarise laws and regulations in each State relating to work and finances, indicate relevant holdings in State archives, and – where possible – include evidence from the files themselves. Most importantly it will include testimony from people telling how the financial controls impacted on their lives. The Report aims to give a full picture of government controls of Aboriginal labour and finances in every state, including entitlements such as endowment, workers compensation, pensions and inheritances. It will look at wages, access to personal money and management of savings accounts.

Dr Kidd says the greatest evidence of official negligence and malpractice has been collected for Queensland and to a lesser extent for NSW.

We know all states had similar opportunities to misuse Aboriginal monies and we want to find out if there was similar negligence.
Dr Ros Kidd

The final Report will provide the basis to demand a national inquiry to reveal the full extent of Aboriginal labour input in the development of modern Australia and to clarify the extent to which other states are also guilty of financial mismanagement. Legal organisations in several states have already said that they are willing to provide pro bono advice for people who want to discuss the possibility of legal action to recover monies owing.

In Queensland it is known there are already some legal actions pending but the elderly status of many claimants and the length of time and commitment required to reach an outcome has dissuaded many from taking this course.

All monies should be given to claimants.
Stolen Wages Survey Respondent

In the meantime the only options left in the remaining six months of the Queensland offer are for campaigners to continue attempts to persuade the Beattie Government to act on the community's, trade unions’ and its own Party's concerns.

It seems the Queensland Government is hoping this issue will ‘go away’ at the end of this year; but they should also be aware that many Queenslanders consider what they have or haven't done about this issue to be unconscionable and unacceptable. The fact is that the effects of inter-generational poverty caused by these practices, and perpetuated by this offer, will not go away for Indigenous individuals, their families and communities.

Not satisfied.
Stolen Wages Survey Respondent

The issue of missing, unpaid and underpaid wages belonging to Aboriginal workers over the past century is destined to persist until governments - both state and federal - face up to their moral and legal responsibilities for these matters.

Call for information and volunteers

Volunteer researchers in each State are needed to summarise laws and regulations and give a brief listing of general files held in government archives. Where possible, it is hoped to include evidence from these files – this depends on manpower and state restrictions.

It is planned that information sessions will be held in each state to tell people what is already known about these financial controls and people will be asked if they’d like to make some of their own experiences available for inclusion. There is a special questionnaire which can help with collecting these stories. State offices of ANTaR will help organise these sessions.

If anyone is willing to share file information they might already hold, this would be very valuable. Anyone providing information, written or oral, is welcome to remain anonymous if that is their wish.

The aim is to have all information collected by the end of November 2005 and the Report completed by May 2006. This report depends entirely upon volunteers. If you can help, please contact Christine Howes <[e-mail]> or the ANTaR office in your state <www.antar.org.au>.

Christine Howes is a freelance journalist and media coordinator based in Cairns, far north Queensland, and has coordinated the Stolen Wages Campaign in that State since June 2002. Information for this article was gathered from Dr Ros Kidd (Fact Sheets and National Report, see <www.linksdisk.com/roskidd>), Stolen Wages Survey Results and Stolen Wages Updates 1-7 (all available from ANTaR Queensland at <www.antarqld.org.au>).