Government discusses impacts of payments on Aboriginal people

Questions arose around whether government payments were impacting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people negatively after they began to get payments directly in the 1970s.

This excerpt from Hansard records government officials discussing the issue following newspaper reports that alleged that Aboriginal people in Western Australia had been using their government payments on taxis and alcohol.

In this excerpt, Labor representative Adrian Bennett from Swan in Western Australia asked about these newspaper reports.

Minister for Social Security, William Hayden, responded that there was a tendency for reports like these to be ‘exaggerated and dramatised for public effect’.

Instead of responding about the reports, Hayden commented on the broader impacts of payments on remote areas. He said Aboriginal people in remote communities were going through a ‘rather severe cultural jolt’ after getting access to government payments directly.

When asked how to fix this, Hayden suggested the government look into the matter further before acting. He said there would be more problems if the government tried to control how Aboriginal people spent their payments. He spoke about how the payments had already caused issues and suffering in some families and communities.

These concerns led to ministers visiting Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia to investigate the impact of payments. Senior public servant and Arrernte man Charles Perkins, was publicly critical of this scrutiny (Perkins 1974).