Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Accounting for history….
Everybody’s journey through history is different – coloured by social
practicalities, cultural assumptions and career objectives. My journey
began in 1984 when I started a BA degree as a mature age student at
Griffith University; and the end is nowhere in sight. In 1989, faced
with a brief timeframe to submit a PhD proposal and seeking a project to
keep myself entertained for the 4-year duration, I decided to apply my
fascination for the intellectual adventures of French philosopher Michel
Foucault to an issue which was previously analysed in very basic power
terms – namely, how governments in Queensland had controlled Aboriginal
lives. This required some inventive conceptual footwork – as far as I
knew Foucault had never mentioned Australia, nor had he written
substantively on race relations. What he did do – what interested me
most – was think outside the square. He brought to his topics a wide
range of texts and voices, exposing leads in unexpected power relations
and undetected power domains, to generate more comprehensive analyses
and bring new understandings to our comfortable ‘knowledges’.
I
had read the ground-breaking work of historians such as Henry Reynolds,
Charles Rowley, Ray Evans and Geoffrey Bolton who used terms such as
conflict, dispossession and exclusion to chart the racial interface at
the frontiers of occupation, the early days of white settlement and the
removals policy whereby thousands of Aboriginal Queenslanders were
confined on isolated reserves. But I wanted to write a history of what
followed, and I wanted to look at the machinery of government itself to
ask: How did a 70-year regime of totalitarian control produce such
disastrous outcomes on every social indicator – education, health,
employment, housing, social cohesion, personal prosperity?
In
piecing together the evidence to allow space for the widest range of
Aboriginal experiences and bureaucratic voices, I compiled an account
which charted the fluctuating prejudices and priorities, ambitions and
failures which characterise the uncoordinated realities of governments
at work. I kept in mind Foucault’s wonderful concept of
governmentality – the field of reformative intentions and bungled
operations of governments. He detected an ‘eternal optimism’ in the
constant devising and implementing of supposedly more effective
strategies, but he said governmentality’s optimism is blighted by a
‘congenital failure’ inherent in the inevitable conflicts and
complexities arising from the sheer quantity and extent of official
interventions. Just think Queensland Health and Jayant Patel, and
you’ll get the picture.
In
thinking about today’s topic – Accounting for history – I
realised that in my journey the notion of accounting for history has had
three dominant characteristics – the telling of history, the charting of
the finances, and the demand for accountability.
The telling of history began in 1989 with my doctoral research into
archive holdings and church correspondence, and, after much persistence,
18 months’ daily research of government files which were, at that time,
minimally archived and even more minimally comprehended. Had this
latter point been different, of course, they would have never allowed
such free access to any researcher. In striving just to complete the
doctoral thesis my aim was to make sense of the material for myself, and
hopefully for my examiners. Beyond that, my thinking was only that the
research project, with its 2000 reference footnotes, might provide an
administrative account for people whose families had been snared in the
system which was never explained to them and which, even now, disdains
accountability. Over subsequent years I gave my account of this
incredible system in speeches and writings, laying the material out in
all its suffocating, horrifying detail. The system was patently unjust,
government practices were characteristically not only incompetent but
positively injurious, yet I had no real thought of stepping beyond my
role as a story teller.
I
think it was the government’s conduct during the under award wage case
on Palm Island in 1996 that led me to focus more closely on a history of
the financial controls. In this Human Rights Commission Inquiry it
seemed the government was determined to repudiate its own admissions of
liability to pay award wages, thereby perpetuating the lies of the past
to advantage itself at the expense of the legal rights of those it was
mandated to ‘protect’; a frightening reminder of the vulnerability of
truth in history. Ultimately the government was ‘motivated’ to pay $40
million in compensation, even though that’s less than one quarter of the
amount illegally withheld. As the dust settled after the Palm Island
stoush, it occurred to me that an analysis of the 70-year system of
financial confiscation might provide an illuminating resource, not only
as context for the extensive poverty which endures in communities today,
but also to underline the key role of Aboriginal labour in Queensland’s
economic development.
For around six years to 2002 I trawled through the data trying to tease
out all the material relating to financial controls. It was soon
apparent that the stated objectives of protecting Aboriginal earnings
was warped by the moral bankruptcy of many of those with access to the
money and the known incompetencies of the system. At almost every
point where there was a potential for Aboriginal workers to be cheated
of their earnings the records show the government knew of this
likelihood, was warned of this likelihood, but failed to fix the system
to prevent it.
Under the compulsory contract system the government ran a labour agency
for thousands of men, women and children. It contracted them out at a
discount even where demand dictated they commanded the highest rates –
in many remote areas white stockmen were simply unavailable to work the
properties; in other areas, year after year protectors reported
Aboriginal stock workers were more highly valued – yet for much of the
20th century their labour was traded for between 30% and 60% the white
rate. Between 30% and 70% of the wage could be paid to the worker as
‘pocket money’ during the contract term, but the government always knew
workers were being cheated: protectors variously described this
procedure as futile, a farce, and a direct profit to employers, the
government admitted it was probably not paid in many instances, and
auditors in the mid-1960s, just prior to termination of the controlled
labour system, said the government had no way of knowing if pocket money
was ever properly paid. Taking one year alone, say 1957, that’s a loss
of around $18 million in today’s value. And this system ran for 70
years.
Between 1914 and 1972 police protectors took direct control of the
remainder of Aboriginal wages, but the government was constantly warned
of fraud on private accounts, in 1932 the government still did not
supervise police dealings on Aboriginal savings and an inquiry found
pilfering was so common there was more likelihood of fraud on Aboriginal
accounts than any other government accounts. Yet the government
rejected a recommendation that people be able to check dealings on their
money. Only in 1935 did the government introduce thumb prints to verify
transactions but auditors frequently complained they were often useless
for verification, and indeed only one in three was even checked at head
office. In 1950 it emerged that thumbprints were not checked for
workers contracted through the Brisbane office of from the northern
missions; in 1964 there was still no check of thumb prints for all the
child endowment accounts then holding almost $450,000. And signatures
were never checked because the department had no database, even in
1965. Given this deplorable lack of basic accounting safeguards, it
will come as no surprise that many people, on finally receiving a
bankbook after 1971, discovered the figure provided was a pathetic
reflection of their decades of work and financial denial.
Countless audit reports, internal investigations, and indeed remarks by
superintendents, top bureaucrats and at times department directors, lay
bare the pattern of exploiting trust funds for government gain. Whether
it was trust funds blatantly raided to cover items which were strictly a
charge against consolidated revenue; whether it was the sidelining of up
to 80% of private savings in an investment portfolio to generate an
interest bonus; whether it was using child endowment for capital works
while malnutrition on the settlements was the key factor in deaths of
85% of infants under four years; whether it was cutting subsidies to the
missions to recoup the endowment bonus; whether it was planning, even
before they were paid from 1959, how to ‘divert to revenue’ the
federal pensions for the aged, the widowed and the invalid; whether it
was bringing the Welfare Fund to the brink of bankruptcy by loading
against it wages which were, as the director complained on several
occasions, rightly a charge against revenue – in each of these cases it
seems the government used and abused the monies it held in trust. And I
have not even touched on the massive losses to the Welfare Fund through
systemic negligence and failure to implement basic accounting practices,
despite countless warnings to do so.
The more I worked through this material the more I realised that if I
was reading these documents now, then the men who were reading these
documents at the time knew full well workers were being cheated of their
earnings and savings at every level: traded for well below their market
value, not paid their pocket money quota, easily swindled of their
savings, denied the mandated extra bonus of endowment and pensions,
deprived of the potential of a competently managed Welfare Fund set up
for their general benefit. The men at the time knew full well
Aboriginal families were thereby struggling and dying in poverty, yet
they never fixed the system. It is beyond belief that the politicians
of today, acquainted as they are with this research, have the effrontery
to describe themselves as ‘generous’ in offering a maximum $4000 as full
payment for a lifetime’s suffering and damage. Despite their weasel
words, this is indeed full payment because it is only given to those who
sign away their legal rights to any further action to recover the money
which would be due, without question, to any other group whose money was
lost or stolen by an agency acting as trustee.
It
was my peculiar position as keeper of a vast research resource which
could not, under the terms of my access, be shared with other
investigators, that set me on an activist path. I wanted to inform both
potential claimants, and the general public, of the gross inequities of
the Beattie ‘offer’. As the Stolen Wages Working Group we fruitlessly
lobbied the government to at least negotiate the terms; we lobbied the
media and key legal figures to speak out; and we got together lawyers
willing to act pro bono for those who wanted to pursue in the courts
their full financial entitlement. But, as the premier warned these
erstwhile wards, it had the money to oppose and delay cases and had
already spent $1.5 million to defend itself against court action by
those it was formerly mandated to ‘protect’. In 1898 Alexander Downer’s
grandfather had pondered this same inequitable power differential.
Speaking of the ease with which governments could avoid accountability
he asked: Why, because you have ‘the longer purse and a greater power of
fighting your opponent should you be exempt from action if you do wrong
as a state, when the humblest citizen is not exempt from any
responsibility for any injury done by him to his fellows’.
And so my thoughts turned to jurisprudence. Surely, given the appalling
and copiously chronicled mismanagement the Queensland government could
not just walk away from these massive debts? Surely in the 21st century
there must be a way to hold the current office holders accountable for
what we know and what they know are the debts of history? Surely we
should not be restricted to the government’s legal rhetoric – that
litigation would depend on an individual proving evidence of fraud on
their account, evidence which had to be supplied by the government which
had lost so many records that one-third of those who applied for the
reparation payment were rejected? Rather than the onus of proof lying
with the plaintiff, I was determined that the onus of proof should lie
with the government – to defend its record as trustee of Aboriginal
monies to the same standard required of any other banker or financial
trustee. I needed to learn enough about trust law, and national and
international decisions, to make my arguments through the Queensland
evidence.
There was a case, I remembered, in the United States where Indian
claimants had sued the federal government for losing millions of dollars
of their money when it controlled their trust accounts. This is the
Individual Indian Monies – or IIM – case, otherwise named the Cobell
case after lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell. You’ll find the full and
ongoing saga on
www.indiantrust.com. In the 1990s Dr Cobell was treasurer for the
Blackfeet tribe of Montana and established the first Native American
bank. In this role she soon learned of the endemic mismanagement of
trust revenue generated on individually owned land through oil wells,
mineral extraction, forestry etc; financial mismanagement which is
ongoing. In 1996 she launched legal action demanding a full accounting
of her trust money, and this has now developed into the largest class
action in the history of the US, comprising 500,000 claimants of whom
200,000 are deceased account holders. The US court declared the
government is a legal trustee of the IIM accounts and therefore, under
standard trust law, must account for all money and property held in
trust since 1887. The government estimates this might be over AUD$56
billion; it has spent over AUD$100 million fighting the case. It has
lost all the way. Mindful of the ever-increasing legal debt – compound
interest applies on this lost money – Congress has demanded the Bush
administration settle the case through negotiation with the claimants.
Bush is still stalling.
There are two important differences between the IIM case and the stolen
wages. First, there is a reversal of the onus of proof: it is the
government which must defend its management. This is just what I would
want to happen here. But second, our courts have never declared a state
government is trustee for Aboriginal money and property controlled in
trust during the 20th century – no such case has ever been mounted.
Indeed, according to legal analysts, Australian courts are ‘reluctant’
to enforce a legal liability on governments in the exercise of their
discretionary powers, taking a narrower view than in Canada and the US
of enforceable trust duties.
Eighteen months ago I set out to better understand this reluctance. I
thought that if I could construct a different accounting, combining the
legal possibilities with the financial realities, at the very least I
would see what we were up against, and at most I might raise options
which the legal experts could further develop. Trustees on Trial
chronicles this journey, and I’d like to acknowledge here the generosity
of Griffith University in providing me a six-month research fellowship
during the project.
As
luck would have it, the launch of the book in September tied neatly with
an event I had been trying to organise for several years – namely the
visit to Australia by Elouise Cobell. My hope for her visit was to
raise awareness for the campaign to recover the stolen wages from
governments around Australia, and in early October we spoke at legal
seminars and community meetings in Queensland, New South Wales and
Victoria. Amazing but true – and entirely as I expected – when an
international guest speaks of Indian trust monies lost and squandered by
government the focus is solely on the issue of breach of trust, whereas
in Australia I had previously been unable to persuade the media that the
battle for stolen wages was not (yet another) demand by
Aboriginal people for government money. By intertwining the two
accounts, as we did in our talks and media interviews, Dr Cobell and I
were able to assert the fundamental parallels – government tells people
they are incapable of managing their own money; government takes control
of that money but provides no documentary record to the workers;
government loses and misuses trust money; government claims it has no
legal accountability to repay. These core parallels, and the court
findings confirming the absolute right of IIM claimants to a full
accounting for all their money and property, convinced several members
of the legal profession a case along these lines could be run
successfully in Australia.
There is one last area I would like to touch on regarding accounting for
history. Through the determination of senator Andrew Bartlett, we now
have a senate committee of inquiry into stolen wages nationally.
Earlier this year I did a brief analysis of financial controls in other
states and the northern territory which will be published in December by
ANTaR National. I relied on the work of other historians who had
investigated, within wider historical contexts, particular segments of
financial management. It is clear nearly every jurisdiction legislated
to control Aboriginal wages and savings to some extent; most operated
trust funds; records show transfers of private monies to consolidated
revenue; records show formal misgivings regarding the handling of
Aboriginal money; records show child endowment and pensions were
suspected to be exploited by missions and pastoral stations,
particularly in Western Australia and the NT.
To
date the committee has held a public hearing in Brisbane and Sydney,
with Perth slotted later this month; we are agitating for some sort of
public hearing in Melbourne and Darwin also. The committee will report
early in December. At the Brisbane hearing it was clear the senators
were convinced there should be no argument that people are entitled to
their own money, they were dismissive of government rhetoric that
somehow this is impracticable, and incredulous of government conduct
surrounding both the 2002 offer and the blighted processes which
followed. The looks passing among the packed gallery of community
people, including a group from Cherbourg, showed just how important it
is to validate the experiences of those who have for so long been denied
their own voices, and whose very real historical experiences have been
so grossly misrepresented by those purporting to have their interests at
heart. Even this brief glimpse of our elected officers demanding some
accounting for history was welcome fuel for those of us who still have a
long road to travel.
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