Aborigines urged to reject $8m payout
The Courier Mail (Australia)
By: Kristen Smith
September 25, 2001
Queensland's leading academic on the administration of indigenous affairs has urged Aborigines to reject a push to distribute $8 million as settlement of wages and earnings withheld by the state.
The Beattie Government is negotiating for settlement of the Welfare Fund based on the $8 million figure, although government sources in the early 1990s said it should contain about $200 million. During the period from 1897 into the 1970s, up to 80 per cent of the wages and savings of Aborigines were held in accounts administered by community "protectors" and later the state.
In a speech to be delivered today at the University of Queensland, historian and author Ros Kidd questions the Government's fiduciary duty in administering the fund which she said was "habitually raided" by government. The State Government claims documentation of the flow of money is too sketchy to determine what has been stripped.
Such a defense failed in the US when American Indians made a similar claim. In the case of Cobell versus Norton, on the issue of the Native American Trust Fund, a US federal appeals court ruled the Government had a legally enforceable duty to properly manage and account for Indian trust assets.
A legal challenge appears imminent in Queensland with the state's newest Order of Australia recipient, Cec Fisher, pursuing action over withdrawals from his account, discovered after he gained access to his file in 1994.
"In 1955 I came back from Korea after being in the war . . . and 40 years later I see to my surprise that I brought a wife back," he said. "I never had a wife at the time. I was single, but these things appeared on my papers from Cherbourg."
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