BY ALF LACEY
If you read or hear about Australian history, it's easy to think this country was built by a lot of "famous" people — prime ministers, statesmen, economists, and even singers or poets.
But it wasn't the politicians or governments, nor many of the people who have claimed the spotlight of history in the past 200 years, who built this country; it was workers.
People who, at the end of the day, see their work as a meaningful contribution to the health, wealth and well-being of a country we should all be proud of.
The Aboriginal people who contributed to building this country are asking for nothing more than this.
Images of Australian identity are nearly always wrapped up in the generic outback stockman — that hard working, good humoured, tough, resilient, reliable-yet-casual icon, who was, in reality, mostly Aboriginal.
But today, thousands of Aboriginal people in communities across Australia are living in poverty as a direct result of the harsh reality of how those stockmen and thousands of other workers were treated by governments throughout most of the last century.
Since the first "protection" act was written in 1897, almost every aspect of Aboriginal lives, including their wages and savings, was under the control of government legislation, bureaucracy and policing. These Aboriginal workers never saw their earnings, receiving "rations" for their labour instead.
Between 1897 and 1971, the Queensland government enacted laws so it could declare any Aboriginal a ward of the state and confine them to a mission or settlement reserve.
From the 1940s and beyond, the Queensland government took child endowment and other social security payments into an existing system of Aboriginal "trust" accounts which were in turn routinely "loaned" or just taken into general revenue.
By 1968, the government controlled 5000 workers and their private savings — worth $11 million — from which individuals and families were routinely denied permission to make withdrawals, under a system which was well-established and has been well-documented.
By establishing and maintaining this system of controls, the government was legally accountable for every Aboriginal in its care; it had a legal duty always to act in their best interests.
The "stolen wages" issue was, and is, the aftermath of this system which exploited Aboriginal earnings for government profit and condemned our families and communities to utter destitution.
It was a system riddled with fraud, negligence and misappropriation; a system which operated without the knowledge of those whose finances and lives were hostage to it.
When I was a young man on the Queensland reserve of Palm Island in the early 1980s the phrase "stolen wages" was used in my community by those who knew they had worked, knew they had been paid and wanted to know where it had gone.
Ten years later, when I made my first move into politics as a councillor for the Palm Island Council in 1994, they were still talking about it, still asking where the money had gone. And today it is still an issue.
This issue has affected my life, as it has the many who have been before me. Its legacy will affect my own children.
Our archives show the theft and misappropriation of wages, which were paid to the government in good faith by pastoralists and employers, was knowing and deliberate.
My people don't forget these things.
Family and community poverty, anger and despair can be traced to the illegal withholding of these wages; entitlements every other Australian worker reasonably expects to control for themselves.
There is another dimension of the stolen wages which is about under-award rates and goes back to when the missions and reserves were "handed back" to Aboriginal people in the early 1980s.
At that time Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander government employees on missions and reserves were paid under the award wage, something my own people on Palm Island took a lead role in fighting, forcing the Queensland government to abide by its own industrial laws.
In January 1986, the Transport Workers Union admitted its failure as a trade union during the previous 15 years, because it had not applied its full might to the plight of these workers who were illegally underpaid by the Queensland government.
The government did not budge on this issue until it was threatened with court action by half-a-dozen unions.
Yet even today, for many of our workers, these issues have not yet been resolved.
The stolen wages and savings of Aboriginal people is an industrial issue. The workers who helped to build this nation have been refused due process accorded to all other workers.
We need unions to reignite the resolve of the mid-1980s and help us on this issue. It's not rhetoric, it's real.
After 70 years of forced labour, intercepted wages and lost or stolen savings, the total missing amounts to more than $500 million. The current government offer to workers of a maximum of $55.6 million — or up to $4000 each — is an insult.
It was not taxpayers' money, it was my people's own hard-earned money — and it was stolen.
By the early 1990s, a substantial number of people were waiting in good faith for the government to negotiate an outcome — a process which was held up by Aboriginal people's lack of knowledge of their own circumstances, because they did not have the ability or resources to go to the archives themselves to find out what had happened to them.
By the year 2000, the team charged with negotiating an outcome on the matter was talking about offers of between $150 million and $250 million being fair. But in May last year, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie walked into a meeting with a document called Without Prejudice, put it on the table, and said that was his final offer — and to take it or leave it.
But workers are now denied access to their financial records, and most of them are therefore denied the ability to make an informed decision.
The premier claims this offer for reparations is made "in the spirit of reconciliation" and yet he demands each claimant must first indemnify the government against "any common law or other legal actions" open to them to redress past injustices.
The Beattie government's offer remains unchanged, despite a long and hard-fought campaign by community groups last year for a better deal.
That campaign successfully drew the attention and support of the Queensland Council of Unions and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. The stolen wages have been discussed at a number of national forums including the national ACTU Indigenous conference, the National Union of Students conference, the Charles Perkins Memorial Lecture and the Treaty Conference.
But a three-year process for paying out the offer is now in place.
My people — my elders and their families — are not actually seeking large amounts — what they want is an honest settlement which acknowledges the value of their work and the pain of their deprivation.
To most of our people, this offer wasn't and isn't, about money. At the core of it always was, and always will be, recognition and acknowledgement — that same respect that all of our workers and unions in this country have fought long and hard for.
All the assumptions that Aboriginal people didn't work and lived on handouts have been built on the misinformation surrounding this issue and now, today, on the lack of respect and recognition which has accompanied this current offer.
We worked, in our thousands.
But they took our money and our security for that and then they blamed us for our poverty.
In every state there is a similar history.
This is a national workers' issue. The wealth of the states and the pastoral industry can be measured by the poverty of those who were forced to labour for the financial security that Australians other than themselves now enjoy.
It is time to set the record straight.
[This abridged from a speech given by Alf Lacey to an April 29 public meeting organised by Australia Asia Worker Links. For more information, visit or email Christine Howes at <chowes@hotkey.net.au>.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 18, 2003.
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