The Wire

Indigenous people are routinely accused of mismanaging government funds but the stolen wages case turns that argument on its head . For most of the 20th century Aboriginal people were treated like children and not allowed to have control of their own wages, inheritances or pensions. Ros Kidd was researching for her PHd in the early nineties when she came across evidence that much of that money was never returned to the people who had earned it and that it was siphoned off and sometimes used fraudulently by the authorities entrusted with it. Her evidence mainly concerned Queensland and in 2002 the Beattie government agreed to pay aboriginal claimants sums of up to $4000 compensation. Ros Kidd’s book Trustees on Trial is being released today in Brisbane today and she argues that indigenous people in the state are owed much more than that, and says her book contains enough evidence to get a class action going to recover as much as a billion dollars for indigenous workers and their descendants.