The multimillion-dollar fight for Indigenous workers’ stolen wages continues

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers, please note that this article may contain images of deceased persons.

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This week sees the continuation of another in a series of historic stolen wages class actions launched against the states, in this case Western Australia. Up to 14,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who worked in WA between 1936 and 1972 on farms, cattle stations and “native schools” are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen wages from the state government.

During this time, WA had a permit system under which the government “rented” Aboriginal people to pastoral stations as free labourers. Until 1972 the state could withhold up to 75% of their wage in government trust accounts. Mediation continues, and the parties are scheduled for a case management hearing on Friday.

This is far from an isolated incident. Across Australia from the 1800s to as late as the 1980s, tens of thousands of Indigenous stockmen, farm hands, kitchen hands, labourers and domestic workers were covered by “protection acts” that controlled what happened to their wages. These were usually paid into a trust that the worker couldn’t access — and in many cases they never saw it again.

Beyond that, the legislation essentially ensured they had no ultimate say in how their life was lived — the state decided where they worked, who they could marry, where they could travel. Historians have noted it was a set-up not too dissimilar from the apartheid system in South Africa.

Crikey takes a look at the patchwork of inadequate reparations programs and class action wage cases that have made up the attempts to right this historical injustice.

Western Australia

In 2012, under the Liberal government of Colin Barnett, Western Australia managed the dubious distinction of offering possibly the most insulting reparations program put forward by any state government.

The scheme was riddled with arbitrary limitation. It ran for just nine months, applicants had to have been born before 1958, and descendants of affected workers were exempt. Applicants often had to fight the government for the documents they were required to provide to make a claim. Successful applicants got $2000.

Documents leaked to the ABC’s Background Briefing program showed the government’s research placed debt for just one workplace, Moore River Native Settlement, at more than $63 million. A government whistleblower told the ABC that state Treasury officials had agreed individual claimants were owed up to $78,000 each and speculated that as the scheme was applicable only to living workers, the government had been deliberately delaying the scheme, waiting for claimants to die. 

Queensland

In 2019 the Queensland government paid $190 million in stolen wages to about 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers to conclude a class action that had been running since mid-2017. This was less than half of what many historians estimated was owed but saved the elderly claimants a long trial.

In 2002 the Peter Beattie government had initiated the first stolen wages reparations scheme in the country. It set aside $55.4 million for the scheme, a figure Beattie conceded was far less than estimates of what was owed. The scheme closed to new applications in September 2017 and was not extended.

New South Wales

In March 2004, then-NSW Premier Bob Carr formally apologised to the Aboriginal people of the state for the historic theft of their wages between 1900 and 1969. The ensuing scheme, which took place between in 2006 and 2010, had the usual issues around evidence requirements and particularly around time limits, but it bettered the equivalents in Queensland and WA in one key way: it was uncapped, and it matched the wages withheld in trust funds. It paid $3521 for every $100 owed or, if an exact amount couldn’t be established, an $11,000 lump sum.

Elsewhere

The Northern Territory, traditionally the largest employer of Indigenous workers in the nation, has never put a program in place. Last year Shine Lawyers, the same firm behind the WA case, lodged a class action against the Commonwealth (which administered the territory until 1978) on behalf of Indigenous workers in the territory between the 1930s and 1970s.

Victoria, too, has no scheme in place, despite studies establishing that Victoria was just as guilty as any of systematic underpayment and compulsory payments to mismanaged trust funds affecting Indigenous workers.

A 2006 committee into the matter concluded that “substantial research” was required in South Australia to “determine the nature and extent of previous investigations, if any, into the official management of Indigenous monies”.