Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to second, to endorse, all the comments made by the Chair of the  Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Senator Marise Payne, in presenting the report on what has come to be known as the stolen wages inquiry. This matter was first highlighted by Senator Bartlett, and all credit goes to the work that he and his staff have done to highlight this. The reference first came to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee. When the Senate committee structure changed, it became part of the work of the legislation committee, and Senator Payne then took over the chairing of this.

I say at the outset that I cannot help but get a feeling that we are just scratching the surface in presenting this report. Sometimes the work we do in Senate committees is quite conclusive. It is very simple, as all the facts and figures are there before you, and as a Senate committee we have the ability to rearrange the arguments, put them a bit more succinctly and provide more direction. But I certainly felt on this committee that we had really only just started to get a handle on this situation.

I was extremely surprised and disappointed by the role that governments have played in the history of this country, particularly by the way in which Indigenous people have been treated. The penny had dropped for me when I started to put together this nation’s history in relation to stolen children. What I think is now going to be the second chapter of that history will involve the wages or due payments that either all or some of those people did not get in that saga. Of course, people who were not in fact stolen but were simply working on cattle stations have missed out on due payments. So I do actually think that this is a chapter of another saga in the history of this country’s treatment of Indigenous people.

When this inquiry was with the references committee, we considered a choice: either we could spend 18 months to two years looking at this, making a really in-depth, extensive intrinsic analysis of this situation, or we could get around the country as quickly as we could within a six-month period and table this report before Christmas. When I chaired the committee, it decided to have a very fast, quick look at this and get submissions from people. I understand that some people did not even know that this inquiry had started, and I think some people who wanted to put in a submission did not get a chance to do that. The aim of this was to just get a handle on how extensive this situation is.

As I remarked a few minutes ago, I was incredibly surprised by what we were facing. We know that since Federation, as Senator Payne said, the states were responsible for the protection or control of Indigenous people and that the Commonwealth government was responsible for that with the Northern Territory. What we found in the course of our inquiry is that we do not know if Indigenous people who worked on cattle stations, who worked in homes as governesses or who worked in other establishments in the capital cities were actually paid the right rate of pay. We certainly know, from the extensive research work that has been conducted, that Indigenous people were due to be paid some form of endowment in the form of what these days we would call a Centrelink benefit and that that never got into their hands. That was either held in trust by the government of the day or was passed on to cattle station staff, who then gave only a portion of that to Indigenous people. They might have given a portion of that back to the state and territory governments.

I want to say a couple of things about the work in this area. Some people around this country have spent an enormous amount of their time researching this, and no doubt they have been frustrated in their efforts to get this issue on a national stage or platform. I am talking about the fantastic work of Dr Ros Kidd and the book that she has now produced, the work of Dr Thalia Anthony and of the Stephen Grays of the world. Quite a lot of academics have spent many years researching this, and I think that, while we need to pay tribute to the work that they have done, we need to in fact take their work a step further.

There have been calls for us to have a royal commission. I am not convinced we need one. As Senator Payne said, we know that these people are due this money. It is really a matter of tracking back through the archives and trying to find out who these people are, where they were, what their entitlements are and giving them the money. A royal commission can take one or two years to conduct and time is not on our side. Indigenous people who are probably owed this money are elderly. The argument about whether their entitlement should pass to their children is an issue. I believe it should. Because it is an entitlement that is due to the family trust it should be passed on to them. But time is not with us here. We need to start moving this saga very quickly to the next stage so that people who are due compensation receive recognition and get paid before time passes them by. I do not think there are many Indigenous people who even believe they might be part of a group that had wages stolen from them or had moneys withheld from them.

Since I became alerted to this dilemma through the inquiry I have been making inquiries around the Northern Territory. I met a couple of the old men who worked out at Vestys meatworks station at Kalkarinji. They said to me, ‘We got £5 a month.’ Ted Eagan, the administrator, who was the protector of Indigenous people back in 1953, said to me, ‘My job was to go and make sure the cattle stations gave these people £5 a month, and they did.’ Of course, Indigenous people say to me: ‘We had no idea what to do with this money. There was no store. We didn’t even know what money was.’ That is not the point. Were they due more than £5? Were they due an entitlement from the Commonwealth government that the Vestys meatworks cattle owners may well have kept or left in a trust with the Commonwealth government? We do not know that. We suspect that is the case but we do not know.

In some of the work that has been done, Dr Ros Kidd estimated that in 1919 there were 2,500 licensed Aboriginal workers in the Territory and 1,500 dependants. Dr Thalia Anthony provided information on the number of Northern Territory people registered under the welfare ordinance and found there would be about 15,700 people registered in the Territory. There are many Indigenous people who are not even aware of this. There are many Indigenous people for whom we will now have trouble finding and matching records.

Access to records is a problem for these people. As with the stolen generation people, there was a need for somebody to make a decision that these people would be entitled to archival records at no cost and to free, open and unhindered access to records at no detriment. We are not yet at that stage in this country when trying to ascertain people’s payments and monetary entitlements. There are still very tight restrictions in Queensland and in Western Australia in particular. You might request access to the records and somebody in government says yes or no. That has to change if people are to get any fair payment under this scheme.

In conclusion, we are at the first chapter of the next stage in the history of what has happened to Indigenous people in this country. We have to take this forward. If we do not have a national forum I urge HREOC to gather together Indigenous people and to talk about this and make them aware that this is an issue. I thank Senator Bartlett and particularly the committee staff—Ann, Jackie and all the other research assistants who helped us. It is not easy when you get an exercise of this magnitude and you pull it all together in six months. Tribute is due to them. (Time expired)