Abstract
This paper focuses on a particular issue in relation to what is known as the Wik debate. It argues that for over 70 years Queensland pastoral leaseholders financially benefited from a government-initiated system of wages under which the labour of Aboriginal pastoral workers was priced at about a quarter the cost of white labour. The system, begun by an AWU-supported Labor Party Government to protect white wages in the pastoral industry, was maintained and cynically exploited by successive Queensland Governments, firstly to off-set the costs incurred from the policy of rounding up Aboriginal people and placing them on reserves; and secondly, to provide a fund of money that could be drawn on to support general governmental expenditure. By supplying pastoralists with cheap Aboriginal labour, Queensland Governments gave pastoral leaseholders the financial viability to retain and develop pastoral leases which otherwise they may have had to surrender back to the Crown.
Highlights
This paper focuses on a particular issue in relation to what is known as the Wik debate. It argues that for over 70 years Queensland pastoral leaseholders financially benefited from a government-initiated system of wages under which the labour of Aboriginal pastoral workers was priced at about a quarter the cost of white labour
From 1897 until 1968, when the responsibility for setting Aboriginal pastoral wages passed to the Queensland industrial commission, the control of Aboriginal pastoral labour was wholly in the hands of the State Government
Successive governments exercised their powers to provide pastoral leaseholders with cheap labour in exchange for the opportunity to use the wages for their own purposes, which included further subsidies to the pastoral industry
Summary
In the 1992 Mabo[1] decision, the High Court of Australia acknowledged that though Aboriginal ownership of land survived British colonisation, it was lost when a parliament alienated the land for freehold or leasehold title. The question of Aboriginal land rights in relation to pastoral leases was not at issue and was "left to another day". That day arrived in 1996 when the High Court was faced with deciding whether a nineteenth century grant of a pastoral lease by the Queensland Government had extinguished the rights of the Wik peoples over their land. This paper focuses on a particular issue in relation to what is known as the Wik debate It argues that for over 70 years Queensland pastoral leaseholders financially benefited from a government-initiated system of wages under which the labour of Aboriginal pastoral workers was priced at about a quarter the cost of white labour.
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