Government restricts access to equal wages and payments
During the 1960s, there was increasing pressure for Aboriginal pastoral workers to get equal wages. The government was reluctant to grant Unemployment Benefit payments to Aboriginal workers who were likely to be affected by changes to wages.
... the general position is that unemployed Aborigines on cattle stations would be unable to satisfy the conditions ... of the Social Services Act
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For many years, it was legal to pay Aboriginal workers below the award rate. In 1965, the North Australian Workers’ Union went to court to challenge the government on its rules.
Northern Territory government officials were against the union’s proposed changes because they weren’t in employers’ and the government’s economic interests. They anticipated that many employers would let Aboriginal workers go rather than paying them award rates, increasing unemployment.
To inform the government’s position in the court hearing against the union, the Department of Territories (DT) wanted to know whether or not the Department of Social Services (DSS) would pay Unemployment Benefit to people who were let go from work.
Department of Territories requests information from DSS
These letters are between officials from DT and the Director of DSS, HG Goodes.
In the first letter, the officials asked Goodes to confirm that Aboriginal people wouldn’t be able to get Unemployment Benefit if the equal pay decision passed.
Goodes responded carefully, not giving one overall rule. He said the department ‘did not wish to pre-determine any individual claims’.
However, Goodes did point out that the department wouldn’t consider someone eligible if they stayed living on a station where they had been employed. For many people, stations were where they’d been living all their lives, so to get a payment after being let go meant that they’d have to move away from their community.
Equal pay decision passes and DSS restricts Unemployment Benefit
The equal pay decision made in 1966 came into effect in late 1968. As predicted, many Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Northern Territory lost work.
As foreshadowed in Goodes’s letter, DSS was reluctant to give these workers Unemployment Benefit and the payment was very difficult to access.
DSS encourages people to take up Training Allowance
Following the introduction of equal wage laws, the government introduced Training Allowance in the Northern Territory. This payment was less than minimum wage and less than Unemployment Benefit.
DSS encouraged Aboriginal people to accept Training Allowance. If they received it, they were unable to get Unemployment Benefit.
It wasn’t uncommon at the time for territory and federal governments to work together to limit Aboriginal people’s access to payments, especially to Unemployment Benefit.
Aboriginal people responded to these inequalities and exclusions in various ways. From 1966, workers began to ‘walk off’ the stations they’d worked at all their lives.
The ‘equal pay decision’ described here is the Cattle Industry (Northern Territory) Award of 1966. In Queensland, wages were set by the Station Hands Award. In other states, including Western Australia, wages were determined by the Federal Pastoral Industry Award.
These awards set the minimum payments that employers could pay to pastoral workers. Until 1968, Aboriginal people were excluded from the awards. This meant employers could legally pay Aboriginal people much less than non-Indigenous people.
Even though changes were intended to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers were paid award wages, ‘slow worker’ clauses in the awards were used to continue paying lower wages.
These documents were copied and kept on a file by the Department of Social Services. The file was later transferred to the National Archives of Australia, which holds it as part of the national archival collection.
You can access the file through RecordSearch, the online catalogue of the National Archives of Australia.
Citation
National Archives of Australia: Department of Social Services; A884, Correspondence files, 1909–1974; A2870, Publicity – press releases etc Aborigines, 1963–1973.