Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
The biggest broker of them all: the State of Queensland
and Aboriginal labour
Introduction
Rural and remote
Queensland could not have developed without Aboriginal labour. Periodic
surveys by the department of Native Affairs revealed these workers were
frequently acknowledged as more skilled and reliable that their white
colleagues.1
Every dimension of this labour was controlled by the State for most of
the twentieth century, including management of earnings totalling
millions of dollars. Yet Aboriginal working and domestic lives were
characterised by appalling conditions and abject poverty.
Drawing upon the vast
repository of previously restricted primary evidence which I have
accessed since the early 1990s, this paper will chart and analyse major
aspects of the State’s role as employment broker and banker from 1897
until the early 1970s, and as employer until the mid-1980s. This will
allow consideration of the constitution of poverty enduring across
generations, and the context of recent multi-million dollar offers by
the Beattie Labor government to compensate workers subjected to that
regime of controls.
The assumption of
powers
The 1897
Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act
gave the State the right to control movement, marriages, domicile and
labour of any person of Aboriginal descent, and delegated enforcement to
a network of police officers named as protectors and answerable to the
Aboriginal department.2
Signed ‘agreements’ were mandatory for all employment, and for the next
70 years to refuse contracted work was to risk exile to a mission or
settlement.
Initially wages were
left to the discretion of the protector and employer, a hands-off
approach quickly corrected under amending legislation in 1901 which set
minimum rates3
at a time when no such provision existed for white labour. It was not
uncommon for workers to be abandoned to avoid payment of wages at the
end of the contract period, a ploy countered in 1902 by establishing the
Aboriginal Protection of Property Account (APP) to absorb monies of
deceased or missing workers for distribution to relatives or ‘for the
benefit of blacks generally.’4
Regulations in 1904
provided that wages could be paid direct to protectors except for a
pocket money allowance accessed during the work period. This
modification was intended to pre-empt employers who claimed all wages
had been absorbed during the work period in food, clothing or tobacco,
or that workers had been paid but cheated of their wages before reaching
their home camps. In 1905 a Trust account was set up in the Home
Department to receive female wages directly.5
In the same year the protectress in Brisbane was found guilty of
swindling the accounts of domestic workers and was forced to resign.6
During the first
world war Chief Protector John Bleakley exploited the labour shortage,
increasing the minimum wage and formalising the compulsory payment of
all male wages directly to protectors. In 1916 he lobbied for the
imposition of a 10 per cent levy on the compulsorily banked portion of
wages (generally around 50 per cent), characterising the tax as a
measure to increase the ‘social responsibility’ of Aborigines for their
dependents. Although the tax was not implemented, internal calculations
reveal it was intended to yield around ₤2,500 ($152,900) a year, or 60
percent more than current expenditure on relief.7
Aboriginal workers
were covered under the Workers’ Compensation Act Amendment Act of
1916, although Annual Reports regularly acknowledge the
‘co-operation’ of the Insurance Commissioner and his department in
arriving at a ‘fair settlement’, which suggests that injuries or deaths
of Aboriginal workers were not assessed at the same rate as for white
workers. Anecdotal evidence suggests large sums were at times not
transferred to beneficiaries.
Regulations in 1919
established the tax on workers’ earnings – 5 per cent for single workers
and 2.5 per cent for married workers – which was diverted to the new
Aboriginal Provident Fund (APF), ostensibly to provide relief for
workers unemployed during drought or illness. In order to maximise
employment levels and minimise dependency on the State, the government
successfully lobbied to exclude the 4000 Aboriginal workers from the
McCawley Station Hands Award of 1918, contrary to Australian Workers’
Union (AWU) calls for equal wages. Through a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’
with the pastoral industry, the 1919 Regulations pegged Aboriginal
pastoral wages at 66 per cent the white rate.8
Minimum conditions
now specified food, accommodation and working hours, but lack of
workplace inspections rendered the requirements worthless. Aboriginal
workers were responsible for maintaining their families on their
fractional wages; failure to do so commonly trigged removal to a
reserve. Children under twelve were still contracted to work, although
this now required the Chief Protector’s endorsement. Bleakley later
boasted that government controls of rural employment operated
‘practically without a hitch’ until the mid-1940s,9
when new regulations were issued.
Under the 1939
Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act the Chief Protector
became legal guardian of every Aboriginal child under 21, and his
endorsement was required for child labourers under 16 years. New
Regulations under this Act were not gazetted until 1945, leaving a
six-year hiatus during which successive auditors warned there was no
legal authority for a multitude of administrative transactions on
Aboriginal monies.10
The 1945 Regulations
continued the APF levy unchanged, although this was now absorbed into a
new Trust fund (the Aboriginal Welfare Fund, see below). Work hours
were now pegged to the Station Hands’ Award although employees’ wives
had to work 12 hours a week for rations. As with general conditions,
inspections were rare and people who complained about wages or
conditions risked deportation to reserves.11
Provision was made for one week’s holiday per year. Despite protectors
advising that the pocket money system was a farce and a direct profit to
employers, the system was retained unchanged. Indeed auditors in
the mid-1960s accused the department of never having any system in place
to make sure pocket money was properly paid to workers, and head office
admitted some workers had never received any pocket money even when
fully thumbprinted books were tendered at the closure of the contract
period.12
The 1945 Regulations
for the first time set a minimum of 32 hours work weekly for ‘every
Aboriginal’ confined on a mission or settlement, in return for meagre
rations. These communities were built and maintained by the labour of
the inmates who had to obey all orders and could be isolated by the
Director (formerly Chief Protector) within or to another reserve. All
workers with dependents based on a settlement were taxed 10 per cent of
their earnings, or 5 per cent without dependents, formalising a levy
that had been illegally imposed for around thirty years,13
and was frequently, if erroneously, applied more than once within
particular families.
Perusal of wage rates
indicates the department failed to comply with its policy of 66 per cent
parity for pastoral workers, with rates for 4500 workers slumping to
only 31 per cent in 1949. In the late 1950s, with wages at 63 per
cent, the United Graziers Association (UGA) lobbied against further
rises saying pastoralists had to support ‘half the tribe’ of
stockworkers who were unreliable and under skilled.14
In confidential discussions with UGA delegates, the Chief Protector of
Aboriginals conceded that child labour remained common and children
frequently suffered broken limbs.15
Indeed northern pastoralists lobbied strongly that children not be sent
to missions for educating as this ‘ruined’ them for work.
However, following a
1956 survey of pastoral stations, the departmental inspector dismissed
allegations of incompetence, observing that ‘white men of markedly less
ability and industry [are] receiving higher wages and better living
conditions than Aboriginals who are better workmen.’16
Noting that the industry was entirely dependent on Aboriginal workers,
particularly in remote areas where white stockmen were rare, he deplored
the entrenched mentality of paying as little as possible for Aboriginal
workers and the frequent abuse of the ‘slow worker’ category (endorsed
by the AWU) to undercut set rates. In 1961, after intense lobbying, the
UGA conceded a slight rise for gross wages but won a reduced hourly
rate, leading the Trades and Labour Council (TLC) to declare Aboriginal
workers ‘shockingly exploited’. The Director feigned impotence,
claiming rates were ‘determined by the Industrial Court’ rather than the
department.17
In 1964 the UGA
claimed ‘practically all Aboriginals’ were ‘slow workers’ because of
their ‘lack of mental capacity’, but blocked a TLC submission that an
industrial magistrate adjudicate such assessment.18
In a climate of international pressure the Queensland government
admitted opposition to equal wages was not prudent. Yet regulations in
April 1966 continued the parity system, despite a recent Commonwealth
Arbitration Commission decision that equal pay be in place by December
1968. In the interim, as prime minister Robert Menzies confidentially
advised the Queensland premier, all former wards and inmates of reserves
could be deemed ‘trainees’ and paid at a lower rate.19
Although the 1965
Aboriginal Affairs Act defined every Aboriginal a ‘free citizen’
unless deemed in need of ‘assistance’ – a category which embraced all
reserve residents – Aboriginal property and accounts could still be
taken possession of, retained or sold at the director’s discretion.
Police protectors’ duties were now transferred to clerks of court,
commonly the same officer. Full award rates were now mandatory except
where Aboriginal workers were specifically excluded – effectively almost
the whole workforce. Only now could workers access passbooks showing
transactions on their accounts, although financial control was retained
by the State.
It was not until 1972
that workers could request permission to control their own accounts,
unless a magistrate upheld an objection from the Director as to their
capacity to do so. Only now were all Aboriginal workers finally
accorded equal wages and freedom of movement. ‘For the first time’,
reported the department’s Coen manager, ‘men did not have to go to a
station if they did not want to…if they feel they have not been fairly
treated, or have not been paid’. Workers were no longer ‘owned’ by
particular stations which frequently put them off in slack times in
breach of long term contracts, ‘to leave their men simply sit in the
reserve until they needed them’. Elderly family members and wives who
had been compelled to work for free on the stations could now also
refuse exploitation: ‘Pensioners are coming in to sit down, this is
hitting the stations, and most of the women will not now go out as they
never got pay only food.’ Pastoralists were angry: ‘there was a lot of
local tension to put it very mildly.’
20
The State as
labour contractor
The State maintained
a contract labour system for 70 years on the grounds that it could
better protect the industrial and financial interests of Aboriginal
workers. This section will look at the range of interventions and
confiscations executed by the State under this rubric.
As early as 1904 a
system of thumb print authentification had to be introduced because of
high levels of fraud on workers’ earnings by both employers and
protectors. From 1912 the State intercepted maternity allowances due to
part-Aboriginal mothers and from around 1915 seized bank interest due on
the private accounts, using it for rations, blankets and ‘Christmas
cheer’, for which Aboriginal settlement residents, whose money it was,
were reportedly extremely grateful. Indeed for the next fifty years
very few residents saw any cash, their earnings acquitted in vouchers on
settlement stores which ran at profit margins as high as 40 per cent.
So extensive was the
continuing level of police fraud on private accounts that
‘disinterested’ third party witnesses were required from 1921 to verify
thumb prints. An Inquiry the following year21
revealed errors by protectors in nearly half the levy calculations, yet
the department dismissed recommendations that workers be allowed to
appeal against dubious handling of their accounts. The inspectors also
condemned the total lack of departmental oversight of police conduct and
of the living and working conditions of 8000 people under control in
rural areas.
In 1927, when workers
on Wrotham Park station on Cape York refused to re-sign until
outstanding wages of almost ₤200 ($9600) were paid, the police protector
terrorised them and locked them in the poisons shed until they
capitulated.22
Police routinely dispensed vouchers on local stores rather than give
cash to workers; in the mid-1920s the Longreach protector was found to
be colluding with the local storekeeper to charge ‘exorbitant amounts’
for goods sold to workers. In his possession were several ‘witnessed’
receipts lacking signature or thumb print of the account holder.23
In 1932, another
internal Inquiry24
condemned common and long standing fraud and pilfering by police, and
the Chief Protector again admitted there were no real controls over
protectors’ transactions. The inspectors warned that ‘the opportunity
for fraud existed to a greater degree than with any other Governmental
accounts’, and it was decided to centralise private funds at Head
Office, a measure intended ‘to minimise fraud by members of the Police
Force who are Protectors.’25
However the department refused outright the recommendation that workers
be allowed to see some record of dealings on their savings.
This denial is not
surprising. Records show that the government itself was confiscating
private funds. During the depression, with Treasury approval, a 5 per
cent quarterly levy was imposed on all balances over ₤20 ($984.50), and
a 2.5 per cent tax, euphemistically described as an administration
charge, neatly appropriated bank interest due on all rural accounts.
The department admitted this seizure ‘had not yet been resorted to in
the case of the white public.’26
A 1941 Investigation27
was so critical of the department’s financial incompetence that the
Chief Protector was forced to resign. Over subsequent decades
successive auditors continued to condemn negligent supervision of police
dealings on Aboriginal monies, the lack of secure checks of thumb
printing, and the incompetent accounting procedures at head office.
Workers had to run
the gauntlet of protectors to access their earnings, and many police
bitterly resented their unpaid accounting work.28
Permission was required for all withdrawals and was often refused, even
for people with large account balances. Few workers complained direct
to head office, fearing retribution from the protector or exile to a
reserve. A justified fear of collusion between protector and employer
deterred reporting of workplace assaults which were not uncommon,
particularly sexual assaults on female family members and domestics;29
the main deterrent was the risk of personal deportation or removal of
children. Awareness of rights was sporadic: the Coen protector reported
that knowledgeable ex-mission workers were the best defence against
abusive employers who still thought that ‘anything is good enough for a
nigger.’30
Underlining the dilemma, this same awareness prompted many employers to
demand removal of workers described as ‘too cheeky.’
Rare inspections of
pastoral camps left workers commonly living in deplorable conditions;
the Boulia protector described his monitoring position as ‘nominal’ and
‘a farce all along’. Ordered to check reports of starvation in 1933 at
Glenormiston station near the Northern Territory border, he reported
that the property manager refused to feed workers in the off-season or
to distribute rations; workers and their families were camped without
any shelter on an open flat, exposed to the rain and wind in winter.31
In 1959 workers at Strathburn station near Coen were housed in an open
lean-to, were not provided with tables, beds or cooking utensils, lacked
access to clean water, and received no pocket money. The only return
for their labour was a little tobacco and matches. When they absconded
the police were directed to hunt them down and return them.32
Yet all regular workers would have had reasonable savings in their
names. It is revealing that a key reason for UGA opposition to equal
wages, and a requisite under the Workers’ Accommodation Act into
the 1960s, was that white workers should not have to live or eat with
‘coloured workers’.
Conditions on the
department’s rural reserves were similarly reprehensible: dank, dusty
earthen-floored shanties of tin and cast-off timber, water retrieved
from creeks or waterholes a distance away and stored in open tins,
children denied schooling on the grounds of ‘health risk’. Decade after
decade the department filed away such information, condemning people to
conditions which should have brought charges of criminal neglect and
often led to the removal and institutionalisation of children. Without
access to their savings, and refused the right to rent or buy property,
workers were condemned to suffer under the ‘protection’ laws.
It was not uncommon
for the department to deduct from accounts of rural workers the costs of
huts, fencing or amenities on country reserves. Thousands of dollars
were taken from workers’ accounts for capital improvements on reserves
such as Charters Towers, Cooktown and Normanton.33
‘Consent’ was purportedly obtained although people were pursued for
years to pay their share; yet workers rarely visited the reserves which
overwhelmingly were home to the unemployed and the elderly. Money was
taken from locals to buy a house in Cloncurry in the late 1940s but the
place was riddled with termites and was demolished two years later.34
The land, no doubt, remained a department asset.
These same
‘protection’ laws, and the parsimony and discriminatory attitudes of the
government, underwrote the appalling conditions on missions and
settlements. In the 1930s medical reports from Palm Island stated that
most of the ill and elderly were slowly starving to death, and that
babies who were not breast fed were dying of malnutrition.35
In the 1940s at Yarrabah mission, the ‘ablebodied’ were too weak to work
because of malnutrition, the drinking water tested unfit for human
consumption and sanitation was said to be so dangerous as to ‘lead to
prosecution in any other circumstances’;36
yet the government refused a plea for increased funding to improve
conditions. Mona Mona mission was so contaminated that 90 per cent of
dormitory children suffered massive worm infestation causing anaemia and
debility.37
Indeed missions received only half the funding of the settlements, an
equivalent in the 1950s of $8.50 per person per week, or less than 50
cents per day for food rations.
In the mid-1950s at
Cherbourg many families still lived in leaking unlined shacks, some
holding up to 19 people, without taps for washing or food preparation.38
In the 1960s a medical survey of government settlements revealed
malnutrition was the key factor in deaths of 50 per cent of children
under three, and 47 per cent of deaths of children under sixteen were
from gastroenteritis or pneumonia or both.39
Although a 40 hour working week was mandatory for every ablebodied
person only key workers were paid, at around 25 per cent the basic
wage. Into the 1970s overcrowding and poverty were so severe that many
families survived on bread and syrup. Yet protesters risked eviction
from families and community because the 1965 Aboriginal Affairs Act
reversed tenancy controls: it was now necessary to have a permit to
reside on a community, and these permits could be revoked or denied by
the department.
Only in 1968 did the
government switch from rations to a wage economy on missions and
settlements. At a time when the basic wage stood at $37 ($270.50 today)
a week, Director Patrick Killoran decreed community workers be paid $16
($117), although only a fraction of that was cash and the remainder
purportedly provided by an ‘incentive’ margin and ‘benefits’ such as
housing and amenities.40
Workforces on the communities were immediately cut by half to keep
within budget allocations. Skilled tradesmen were paid around one-third
of the award rate and the TLC condemned the pittance as ‘virtually
robbery’.41
The department’s officer at Yarrabah despaired that even good financial
managers could not make ends meet: families found they could not
survive, food sales plummeted, school absenteeism increased as food was
not available for lunches.42
Over nearly 20 years managers reported essential services were at risk
as gradual increases in community wages were exacted through workforce
attrition.
In 1972, when the
community rate was less than 58 per cent the basic wage, 200 Palm
Islanders petitioned Parliament protesting they could not survive.43
Few families could afford fridges, cupboards or beds in the grossly
overcrowded houses averaging eight person per substandard dwelling.
Nervous of union pressure, the government gazetted new Regulations
confirming adherence to full wage requirements where industrial awards
applied, the unstated assumption being that reserves remained exempt
from industrial purview. In 1974 skilled tradesmen on communities were
underpaid by almost two-thirds, and the gutting of workforces as wages
slowly rose exacerbated chronic unemployment,44
malnutrition and shocking illness attrition in children and the
elderly. As overcrowding intensified due to lack of ability to meet
rent charges the department won changes to the State’s Audit Act
so it could intercept Social Security payments to reclaim rental
arrears.
Throughout the 1970s
and early 1980s the State continued its refusal to pay employees award
rates, despite legal advice obtained at the highest level in 1979 which
confirmed that award rates were due and payable on communities since
passage of the federal 1975 Racial Discrimination Act. Director
Patrick Killoran threatened to sack any person who applied for award
wages, warning he could withhold funding to councils forcing them to
levy householders to cover essential services.45
By late 1980 wages were 72 per cent the award rate and mass sackings had
lifted unemployment across the communities to 92.5 per cent. Houses
fell into decay and there was no substitute accommodation, yet derelict
unrepaired housing was blamed on the occupants: average occupancy at
Yarrabah was 11 persons, at Weipa 12, and at Hope Vale over 18. Award
wages were only paid from the mid 1980s as Aboriginal councils gained
control over community budgets. Wage poverty and critical unemployment
compounded the massive infrastructure backlog46
inherited by councils, the legacy of a century of State management.
The State as
banker
Governments in
Queensland have profited immeasurably through the management of
Aboriginal labour and the exploitation of private savings and the
associated Trust funds.
The 1922 Report47
found that both the Aboriginal Provident Fund (APF), established as an
unemployment relief fund two years earlier, and the Aboriginal
Protection of Property Account (APP) comprising deceased estates, were
misappropriated to cover development and equipment on settlements,
grants to missions, and costs of compulsory removals. Only a small
portion of APF levies were properly paid towards relief; Report findings
that individual ‘contributions’ to the APF should only rightly be
disbursed in the same protectorate were never applied.
From 1926 the State
used the two Trust funds to generate income by investing ‘surplus’
holdings. In addition, during and after the 1929-32 depression years,
the State transferred ₤72,032 ($3.5 million) from the two Trust funds,
‘for departmental purposes’. The APF was so depleted that funds had to
be transferred from the settlement Trust accounts (comprising earnings
of settlement workers) to keep it solvent.48
The APP was similarly compromised. Despite a dramatic increase in the
number of private accounts declared ‘inoperative’ and absorbed into it,
by 1941 the Fund held only ₤3875 ($186,460) in cash and loans to meet a
contingent liability of over ₤74,000 ($3.56 million), representing
thousands of unclaimed balances.49
The 1941
Investigation50
condemned as illegal the seizure of bank interest from savings accounts,
and the 5 per cent levy on accounts over ₤20 which they calculated had
deprived workers of around ₤5882 ($283,000), part of an estimated
₤18,960 ($933,200) diverted from private savings in the decade 1925 to
1935. Even into the early 1940s almost ₤20,000 ($1 million) annually
was streamed from Aboriginal earnings through the Standing account
despite consistent criticism by auditors that this was ‘wrong in
principle’ and ‘without the authority of Parliament.’51
These improper
dealings only ceased with the setting up of a new Trust fund, the
Aboriginal Welfare Fund (AWF), which operated from 1943 ‘for the benefit
of Aborigines generally’, an ambit wide enough to legitimise the earlier
procedures of using private monies for State expenditure. This fund
absorbed the APF and settlement levies, and any profits raised from
community enterprises: workers thus retain a vested interest in its
operations and holdings. As with the other Trust monies controlled by
the State, use of the AWF has been controversial and professional
accusations of negligent dealings common.52
Items wrongly charged against it to benefit consolidated revenue
included wages, costs of relief and blankets and costs of compulsory
removals. State dealings on this Fund were frozen in 1993 and the State
is anxious to distribute the current balance of around $8.6 million to
the Aboriginal community. However the community would be extremely ill
advised to acquit this residue until a full accounting identifies how
much should rightly be available.
Over the years the
State has exploited private savings and Trust funds as a profitable
source of income. When ₤258,596 (almost $15 million) of savings was
centralised in Brisbane in 1933, ₤212,000 ($12.2 million) was promptly
transferred to investment, yielding interest of ₤5316 ($320,500) in that
year alone,53
money which should have devolved to account holders. By 1953 ₤389,000
(over $8 million) or 76 per cent of savings was frozen in investments,
as was a further ₤8000 ($167,000) of APP funds. In 1956 the department
amended its regulations so it could offer ‘surplus’ private
savings for regional hospital expansion projects, and also to validate
the transfer to the APP of any estates ‘unclaimed’ after a five year
period. Meanwhile those whose money it was, lived, and died, in
poverty.
In 1960, with over
₤705,130 ($12.3 million) of private monies invested, the department
initiated investment of the cash balance on the short term money market
to reap additional interest. In 1969 the director vigorously opposed
pressure to relinquish control of over 10,450 private savings accounts,
arguing that the State would not only lose investment revenue but would
be exposed to an estimated $4 million (over $28 million) in additional
costs for relief and maintenance currently extracted through levies.54
From the early 1970s cash balances in State hands dropped dramatically
as people accessed their savings.
The State’s continued
– and illegal – underpayment of its employees on Aboriginal reserves
after passage of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act provided an
additional financial bonanza. Employment figures are on file for 1976
(2500 workers), 1980 (1463 workers), 1985 (901 workers) and 1986 (765
workers). Comparison of the community wage with the award wage in each
of those years shows an annual shortfall to workers (in today’s value)
of $30.7 million in 1976, $16.8 million in 1980, $5.3 million in 1985
and $5.7 million in 1986. Extrapolating for the intervening years
reveals the State profited by almost $187 million between 1975/86, in
full knowledge that this underpayment was illegal, and in full
knowledge of consequential dire poverty. Rightful payment of this money
to community workers would have dramatically altered living
circumstances and prospects, then and now.
In 1996 an inquiry in
the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found the State guilty
of ‘deliberately, knowingly and intentionally’ underpaying Aboriginal
employees.55
Indeed cases had been brought on this matter in the Industrial Courts
since 1979, each one settled by the State to avoid the adverse finding
predicted by legal counsel. Facing mounting cases, the Beattie Labor
government took the cheaper option in 1999 of providing the suggested
compensation payment of $7000 to any person who had worked in the
1975/86 period. Currently the State has paid out around $30 million, a
bargain price compared with the estimated $187 million wages profit
during that period. The $7000 payment is conditional on an undertaking
to indemnify the State against any future claims on underpaid wages.
Most claimants, of course, are so desperately poor they cannot refuse
it, and have no idea of their own financial histories nor of detailed
evidence of the State’s illegal conduct. A few, however, have spurned
the ‘compensation’ and have initiated court action for full restitution.
In 1999 the Beattie
government settled a case on what is now known as the Stolen Wages,
namely, missing and misused private savings and Trust funds. In May
2002, with increased public exposure to accumulating evidence and an
estimated 4000 people expressing interest in taking legal action against
it, the Beattie government offered a $55.6 million package to resolve
grievances.56
But this amounts to only $2000 for people aged between 45 and 50, or
$4000 for those older, whose working lives may have spanned thirty years
of systemic impoverishment. The government has clothed this pittance in
the guise of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘generosity’, but its callous agenda
is clear from the demand to be indemnified against any future action on
any aspect of a century of ‘protection’ regimes. Again there is a
refusal to supply all potential claimants with their financial records
so they can make an informed choice. Government-appointed ‘independent’
lawyers will explain only the terms of the government offer. But unless
those lawyers also appraise clients of the full financial, historical
and legal context, claimants are likely to sign the indemnity in
ignorance of their best interests. Under such conditions, leading
lawyers have suggested the indemnity might be untenable in law.57
The fight for justice continues.
Conclusion
For almost a century
Queensland governments controlled almost every aspect of Aboriginal
lives by designating thousands of people wards of State in the name of
‘protecting’ their interests. In order to comprehend the entrenched
poverty which has characterised this regime, this paper has undertaken
an analysis of recently released official files to investigate the key
fields of employment and banking.
By legislative decree
and regulatory regime the State devolved to itself a fiduciary duty
which it has patently failed to execute. This failure has not only been
demonstrated through omission such as failure to provide standard
requirements for life and wellbeing on communities and in the workplace,
and failure to implement proper accounting procedures to protect
workers’ earnings and savings, but also by commission. The State
knowingly failed to ensure workers’ entitlements in the pastoral
industry, and knowingly refused to pay legally due award wages to its
community employees. The State also continued a range of financial
confiscations despite constant warnings from auditors, public service
inspectors, and frequently from its own bureaucrats, that Trust monies
were being wrongly diverted to items which were the financial
responsibility of the State.
Trust law in
Australia holds a trustee responsible to make good any losses caused by
active breaches of trust – such as intentional, negligent or dishonest
acts, and by passive breaches of trust such as a failure to act to
protect the interests of beneficiaries.58
The State of Queensland stands in such breach. In an ongoing class
action over similar entrenched financial mismanagement of Indian trust
monies, a United States judge recently declared that such breaches
should be viewed far more severely because of the involuntary nature of
the trust relationship and because the plaintiffs were among ‘the
poorest people in this nation.’59
In Australia this
desperate and continuing poverty is the outcome of industrial
exploitation and financial confiscation across generations of workers
under agencies which assumed the authority to ‘protect’ their
interests. It is a national scandal.
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