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,
frequently acknowledged as more skilled and reliable that white
workers. 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.
Workers recently won
compensation from the Beattie Labor government totalling around $30
million for one illegal procedure and an offer last year of $55.6
million to settle claims for missing or stolen monies. This paper will
examine the State’s role as employment broker and banker.
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. 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 rates1
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.’
Regulations in 1904
provided that wages could be paid direct to protectors except for a
pocket money allowance payable 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.2
In the same year the protectress in Brisbane was found guilty of
swindling the accounts of domestic workers and was forced to resign.
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. He failed to get support for a
10 per cent levy on the compulsorily banked portion of wages (generally
around 50 per cent), publicly touted as a measure to increase the
‘social responsibility’ of Aborigines for their dependents. Internal
calculations reveal the tax was intended to yield around ₤2,500
($152,900) a year, or 60 percent more than current expenditure on
relief.3
Although workers were
covered under the Workers’ Compensation Act Amendment Act of
1916, 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. These Regulations also
pegged pastoral wages at 66 per cent the white rate4
courtesy of a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with the pastoral industry, after
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.
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,5
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.6
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.7
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.8
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,9
and was frequently, if erroneously, applied more than once within
particular families.
Calculations show 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. Confidential discussions revealed that
child labour remained common and children frequently suffered broken
limbs.10
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. 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.11
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.12
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.13
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 man. 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.’
14
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. Under this rubric the State executed a range of interventions
and confiscations.
As early as 1904 a
system of thumb print authentification had to be introduced because of
high levels of fraud 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 year15
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 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.16
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.
In 1932, another
internal Inquiry17
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.’18
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.’19
A 1941 Investigation20
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. 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; 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.’21
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 at
Glenormiston in 1933 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. In 1959 workers at Strathburn 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. Yet all regular workers would have had reasonable
savings in their names. Perversely, a key reason for UGA opposition to
equal wages, and indeed 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. ‘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. 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. 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’; 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. 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.
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. 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 protest was risky 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. 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’.22
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. 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. 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,23
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.24
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. Councils inherited an infrastructure
backlog estimated at $2.5 billion,25
yet they are commonly blamed for their ‘inability’ to redress the
appalling circumstances they inherited after 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 Report 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.26
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.27
The 1941
Investigation 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.’28
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.29
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,30
money which should have devolved to account holders. By 1953 ₤389,000
($181,866) 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.31
From the early 1970s cash balances in State hands dropped dramatically
as people accessed their savings.
The underpayment of
community workers – illegal after passage of the 1975 Racial
Discrimination Act – was an additional financial bonanza to the
State. 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.32
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 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 1000 people expressing interest in taking legal action against
it, the Beattie government offered a $55.6 million package to resolve
grievances.33
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.34
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. This paper has investigated 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.35
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.’36
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.
1
Ten shillings a month for boat workers and
half that for mainland workers ($45.50 and $22.75 today’s
value).
2 Weekly rates for females varied between
1s3d ($5.80) for children under 12, and 2s3d ($10.50), with ‘the
odd threepence’ ($1.15) paid as pocket money.
3 DNA, Annual Report, 1915, p5
4 For a 48-hour week, rates for Aboriginal
adult male station hands were ₤2 per week ($94), or ₤3.5.0
($153) for tradesmen; females cooking for up to 30 persons
₤2.5.0 ($106) or 60% of that rate if those persons were
Aboriginal; adult domestic workers 14s ($33).
5 J W Bleakley, The Aborigines of
Australia, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1961, p 172.
6 QSA TR254 1B/12, Audit Report, 1940.
7 Weekly rates for adult stockmen in 1945
were ₤1.10.0 ($64.25), or only 36 per cent the Union rate of
₤4.4.0; domestic servants received ₤1.5.0 ($53.50).
8 QSA TR254 1B/69, Audit Report
1964/65.
9 QSA TR254 1B/12, Audit Report 1940.
10 QSA TR 1227:258. 23.1.57.
11 QSA TR254 1A/29, 9.11.64.
14 QSA TR254 9L/57 1.5.74.
15 QSA A/69452, Report on the Office of
The Chief Protector of Aboriginals.
16 Queensland Parliamentary Debates,
1927, p 308.
17 QSA A/58856, 9.11.32, Report on the
Inspector of the Office of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals.
18 ibid, 15.3.33, Under Secretary to
Premier and Treasurer.
19 QSA A/58915 Report on the
Aboriginal Settlements Palm Island, Cherbourg, Woorabinda
inspected April 1932.
20 QSA A/4291, 29.7.41, lnvestigation
into the Sub-department of Native Affairs.
22 DAIA 01-007-006, 15.3.66.
23 Workforces were cut from 2500 in 1975
to 1463 in 1980 to 765 in 1986.
24 DAIA 01-007-006, 30.7.79.
25 Legislative Review Committee,
Towards Self-Government, August 1991, p34.
26 QSA A/58856, 9.11.32, Report on the
Inspector of the Office of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals.
27 QSA TR254 1B/23, Audit Report 1941.
30 Initially this interest went into the
department’s Standing Account. After 1943 it went into the
Treasury controlled AWF: $11,552 was listed under ‘Surplus
savings bank interest & dividends’ in 1990.
31 QSA TR254 1A/345 Batch 2(ii), April-May
1970.
34 See comments by Terry O’Gorman,
National Indigenous Times, 5.3.03.
35 D Chalmers, Trusts, The Law Book
Company, 1988.
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