Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have only two minutes to speak further to the Unfinished business: Indigenous stolen wages report before we break for dinner and then for other business, but I want to use those two minutes to emphasise the urgency of this matter. This is a unanimous Senate committee report. Senators from across the political spectrum and from a range of states found that there had been systematic and comprehensive fraud perpetrated on Indigenous people in many states and territories of Australia over decades. That fraud has not been recompensed adequately by any means, and certainly not in my own state of Queensland. There has been some response, but, as I would remind the Senate, recommendation No. 6 of this report specifically recommended that the Queensland government revise the terms of its reparations offer to the victims of the stolen wages fraud so that, among other things, people are not required to indemnify themselves from further legal action in order to accept the pittance that was offered and so descendents of those who were defrauded are able to access some claims.

I was in the town of Normanton in the Gulf Country of Queensland last week and had a meeting with about 30 or 40 Aboriginal people, some of whom are in their 80s. They were recalling decades of underpayment, non-payment or confiscation of wages—purportedly for safekeeping. The building on the reserve that they were forced to live in when they were forcibly rounded up decades earlier had been paid for by money confiscated from their own inadequate wages. They are getting pretty tired of waiting. This is an urgent matter and it does involve the federal government. I would once again urge all members of the committee to keep the pressure on about this. I urge Minister Brough to act on this and to pressure the state governments around the country, including the Queensland government, to act. People are tired of waiting. Many of them are getting old. The evidence is clear. The time for action is now.

Debate adjourned.