Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome Senator Brandis’s commitment that he will follow up the recommendations. I too was a member of the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and heard the stories about stolen wages that people throughout Australia told.

I would like to acknowledge that my home state of Western Australia is now picking up this issue. I very strongly continue to push this issue in Western Australia. I know that members of the Aboriginal community in Western Australia who had their wages stolen—those who are still with us, that is, because many people are passing on before this issue is resolved—will be looking to government for reparation. It is not good enough for the Western Australian government to just say, ‘We are looking into this.’ In June next year the people of Western Australia will be looking for a commitment from the state government to address this issue. The government needs to provide the compensation due to the Aboriginal people of Western Australia who helped build that state. Other states need to follow the Western Australian government’s leadership and investigate these issues.

I also think the Commonwealth needs to look to itself and to its records, because the Commonwealth knew something of this. Some of the evidence indicates that the Commonwealth was advising states—in particular my home state of Western Australia—about how to avoid giving all the child endowment and other payments that were due to Aboriginal people. The Commonwealth also needs to look at its own records to see if it has a case to answer. As yet I have not heard the Commonwealth acknowledge that that is an issue and that it also needs to take some action. So I ask Senator Brandis to, if possible, also raise that issue with the minister.

As Senator Bartlett indicated, last week in Melbourne Dr Ros Kidd launched the report Hard labour, stolen wages in Melbourne. I would like to remind people of what we are talking about here by quoting the speech she gave at the launch:

We are a wealthy nation today in large part because for decades we did not pay those workers whose labour was said, again and again, to be essential to the pastoral industry on which our national development prospered. We are a wealthy nation today in large part because governments around Australia used the savings and entitlements of Aboriginal families for their own profit. We are a wealthy nation today. We have a budget surplus of $17.3 billion. Please read this National Report. Please urge others to read it. Please join the fight to force the men in charge to settle this long overdue debt.

I think that sums it up: Australia was built on the back of the work of these people. White people—non-Indigenous people—whom they worked alongside have prospered. They have built houses. They have managed to create wealth for their families. Continuing generations of people have prospered and live much better lives than the Aboriginal people whose wages were stolen. If the wages that they earned had been paid to them in the first place imagine how that money could have been invested and what it could have done for the circumstances of those people and their families now.

This is an issue that needs urgent attention because these people are passing on. During the inquiry, one of the senior elders of the Kimberley who is affected by this actually passed on. This is so relevant to people’s lives right now and can make such a difference. As I said, I welcome Senator Brandis’s commitment to follow this up, but I add this plea: could the government also look at the Commonwealth’s role, what it knew and whether perhaps the Commonwealth, even to a small degree, has a role to play in helping to recompense peoples whose entitlements were stolen.