Government questioned about oversight of payments

A few weeks before the 1967 Referendum, Member of Parliament Gordon Bryant posed a number of questions about Aboriginal affairs to the government. This Hansard excerpt records his questions and the answers given by Minister for Social Services, Ian Sinclair, in the House of Representatives. 

Bryant asked about Aboriginal people not getting their payments directly. When Aboriginal people lived on reserves, missions or stations, the managers of the institutions often controlled their government payments. Bryant questioned whether the Department of Social Services (DSS) checked how institutions managed payments.  

Sinclair’s answers to these questions showed that DSS had little oversight over how institutions managed payments. He said there was no record of how much managers took. He added that DSS only checked payments were actually going to recipients ‘from time to time’.  

Sinclair said the issue was that states governed Aboriginal people in different ways. He suggested the government would pay Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory directly from July 1967. However, indirect payments remained an issue.  

Bryant also asked about how difficult it was for Aboriginal people to get Unemployment Benefit. He questioned if the government expected people to accept a job that paid less than award rates before applying for the payment. Sinclair replied to say that a claimant in this situation might be seen as refusing work and therefore could be found ineligible for Unemployment Benefit. 

Through these questions, Bryant challenged the government about how they had managed Aboriginal people’s access to government payments.  

Bryant’s opinion was that Aboriginal affairs should be a federal government responsibility instead of being managed by the states. The outcome of the 1967 Referendum, which Bryant advocated for, gradually brought about this change.