Senator WOODLEY (5:09 PM) —I want to begin my speech by recognising the Ngunnawal people, who are the traditional owners of this area we call Canberra. I also want to acknowledge the Wik people and Aboriginal people from around Australia who are down in Canberra and around Parliament House. Some of them are in the public gallery today.

The Wik people are here as beacons of conscience, to remind the federal parliament that the issue we are about to vote on is about moral choice. So that the government and all of us know that they are real people I will mention their names: Arthur Pambegan, Maxwell Wikmunea, Dorothy Pootchemunka, MacNaught Ngallametta, Gladys Tibingoompa, Stanley Kalkeeyorta, Ron Yunkaporta, Lesley Walmbeng, Nelson Wolmby, Steve Lexton, Joe Ngallametta, Peter Tibingoompa, Anthony Kerindun, Angus Kerindun, Norma Chevathun, Clive Yunkaporta, Francis Yunkaporta, Annie Kaikeeyorta, Martha Koo warta, Denny Bowenda and Jacob Wolmby. These are the Wik people of Aurukun. They are the heart of the legislation we are about to debate. I call on every senator in this chamber to recognise and consider the people I have just named, whose lives will be directly affected by the decisions we make today and in the coming days. I want also to acknowledge the other murris who are down from Queensland to watch this debate. I acknowledge their lifelong struggle, which for some decades I also have been involved in.

One of the most outlandish claims we have heard from the minister responsible for native title, the Special Minister of State, Senator Minchin, is that the government wants all Australians to be treated equally. This is a preposterous and meaningless proposition. Aboriginal people would welcome the opportunity to enjoy true equality, but what on earth does this mean? Is the minister suggesting that indigenous people should now try to obtain some equality, to balance out the last 210 years of history in this country? Is the minister suggesting that Aboriginal people would want to murder and rape non-Aboriginal people, steal their children and destroy and devastate their lives for the next 210 years to even things up? I can assure the minister and this chamber that Aboriginal people would never contemplate such behaviour. They are not savages.

Of course the minister is not suggesting that Aboriginal people even things up in this way. I would not even suggest he would think that. But I do know he protests that today's generation should not be held responsible for what happened 200 years ago or even 100 years ago. However, we are responsible for what our generation has done and for what we are contemplating doing in this place over the next few days.

I want to place on the record some of the things our generation is responsible for. In particular, I want to detail the record of the pastoral industry in Queensland regarding its treatment of indigenous workers over many decades. Before I do, I want to point out another myth that goes with the minister's proposition that giving indigenous people the right to negotiate is unfair to pastoralists because farmers do not have the same right to negotiate with mining companies.

But for now I will deal with the myth that white Australians taxpayers are having to contribute vast sums of money to Aboriginal communities. That is just plain wrong. Apart from the fact that Aboriginal people owned and cared for the entire Australian continent prior to European settlement, and we have never paid for it, Aboriginal workers have paid for the maintenance of their own communities for 100 years. Their wages have been stolen and used to prop up consolidated revenue for the white community as well. I particularly refer to my own state of Queensland.

Dr Rosalind Kidd has recently published the results of two years of research on the files of the Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Affairs Department and of various church missions going back to the 1890s. This research formed the basis of her PhD and has been published in a book titled The Way We Civilise. Dr Kidd uses departmental files to show how generations of Aboriginal workers were paid subsistence wages, both for work done on Aboriginal communities and also outside the communities on pastoral properties and at other workplaces.

Aboriginal people's wages, in the first place, were taxed in the normal way. But often those wages were then not paid to the workers; they were given to the so-called Aboriginal protectors who were often the local police. Sometimes wages were not paid at all and police sometimes deducted amounts from the Aboriginal workers' accounts for their own use. Eventually what was left found its way into a fund held by the Queensland government. This fund, incongruously called the welfare fund, was then raided by the Queensland government for generations to pay for expenditure within the Aboriginal communities. I must say all of this is recorded in departmental files in great detail. Much of the fund was also absorbed into consolidated revenue.

Despite the stealing of millions of dollars of the wages of Aboriginal workers in this way, the missions and Aboriginal communities were starved of money for even the basic necessities of life for most of this century in Queensland. The result was the most appalling living conditions, disease and starvation right up until quite recently. You only have to read the reports of the directors of the health departments prior to and during the Second World War and afterwards to be appalled at the lack of humanity of those supposed to be responsible for the health of Aboriginal people in those communities. Just one quote from Dr Kidd's book paints a graphic picture:

The most strident critic and agitator of this period was Raphael Cilento, whose specialties in Aboriginal health and tropical disease led him to concentrate much of his energy in Queensland.

When Cilento took over Queensland's health department in 1934 and shortly after acquired authority over all Aboriginal health matters, he traced a similar path to that of the nineteenth century medical experts who had also battled recalcitrant bureaucracies before finally asserting the centrality of clinical expertise in public health administration.

Within the Aboriginal communities, leprosy was one of Cilento's major concerns. Dr Kidd writes:

Only after further "emphatic representations" did Cilento manage to wheedle 500 pounds out of Hanlon in 1937 for a study of leprosy in the Monamona mission population. The study confirmed his suspicions. Out of just two hundred people, thirteen tested positively to Hansen's disease and a further twenty-five showed latent symptoms. Cilento now ordered Bleakley to close the mission to outside access, and to retain and segregate leper suspects within the mission, regardless of the costs of extra facilities. Bleakley passed on the instruction, but not the enabling finances. When a doctor visited two months later, he reported all crops had died in the drought, cattle were too thin to be killed and the people had been sent bush to survive. The superintendent pleaded that without farming land or funding for food, he could do nothing else.

Cilento wrote a furious letter to Hanlon and I quote: "If an investigation was made with the same care at other Aboriginal settlements, doubtless other leper centres would be discovered." Queensland's Aboriginal population was dying out because of defective medical care in diseases such as leprosy, malaria and tuberculosis, he remonstrated. Wretched diet was the root cause of Aboriginal debility. "Diseases that flourish during conditions of food deficiency continue to threaten the survival of the race and to fill the Lazaret . . . No measure of improvement is of any value if he is to die of malnutrition." Ultimately, wrote Cilento, as he had argued since 1924, "the medical problem of the Aboriginal is at present his only problem."

I would like to say that that is the 1930s and 1940s and that it is different today, but we of course know it is not. Aboriginal health in 1998 is still a dreadful scandal.

I now want to turn to the question of equality between Aborigines and pastoralists. It gives me no pleasure at all to put on the record the actions of some sections of the pastoral industry over decades of driving down the conditions and wages of Aboriginal pastoral workers. Again I quote from Dr Kidd's work, and she quotes from letters and files within the department:

The pastoral industry soaked up rural labour, collaborated in departmental controls, taught skills on the job and provided the main private revenue source for the department—

Senator Boswell —You're in the 1930s. You've got to get into the 1990s.

Senator WOODLEY —It continues:

It worked both ways. Since 1919 pastoralists had profited from a wage advantage of 33 per cent for Aboriginal stockworkers, who formed the backbone of their industry. Even this level was not secure, being subject to negotiation with the United Graziers' Association. Records show that as late as 1950, when the write rate was 7 pounds and six shillings per week plus allowances, Aboriginal station hands received only 66 per cent of the 1938 rate of 2 pounds and 15 shillings and pay rises to 4 pounds and 17 shillings in 1950 and 7 pounds in 1952 were still well under the 66 per cent parity.

When the department lifted the rate of 10 pounds in 1957 the UGA baulked at the `arbitrary' wage increase, trotting out the myths of the irresponsible Aboriginal workers and the brood of costly dependants: arguing, and I quote: that they do not "compare with experienced white stockmen". UGA representatives argued that pastoralists were forced to carry quote "half the tribe" of Aboriginal stockworkers. After a tour of the Gulf country in 1956, deputy director PJ Richards dismissed such allegations out of hand. Noting "the marked and growing reluctance of white stockmen to accept employment in the remote areas of the State", Mr Richards declared "it is becoming increasingly apparent that the continuance of pastoral pursuits depends on Aboriginal stockmen.

Unfortunately, it was equally apparent to Richards that graziers were "more concerned with obtaining Aboriginal labour as cheaply as possible" than with paying wages in terms of the real worth of native stockmen.

Thank God most in the pastoral industry today take a more enlightened attitude—and I recognise your interjection because I was getting to that, Senator Boswell. Minister, do you really mean that indigenous people should be treated equally with white pastoralists given this history of injustice?

Now we turn to the Australian mining industry's record of dealing with Aboriginal people. During the debate in December I placed on the record the struggle of the Wik people to obtain justice over many decades and the injustice perpetrated against them in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. It is a record which shows the excision of thousands of hectares of Aboriginal land for mining interests. In the 1970s, when the promised economic boom through resources development did not occur, right-wing state governments and mining companies, particularly in Western Australia and Queensland, looked around for someone or something to blame. Aboriginal people were an easy target because of the much publicised disputes over mining on Aboriginal land at Aurukun and Nookanbah. During these disputes there was strong official church support for the Aboriginal people.

The tide of official church support turned when two influential church bodies, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Uniting Church Commission for World Mission decided to publish the results of a detailed, professional, joint study into the corporate structure of mining companies involved in the disputes mentioned previously. The study was meant to provide Aborigines with information about the nature of the companies which had oppressed them. The results were published in the form of a comic book, a wall chart and audio-cassettes—in Aboriginal languages as well as English.

Aborigines praised the report as helping them understand what they were up against but the Australian Mining Industries Council objected to the material and lodged formal complaints with all Australian bishops of the Catholic Church and with the national president and state moderators of the Uniting Church. In January 1983, the Episcopal Conference instructed its commission to withdraw the comic-style booklet and the Uniting Church concurred. Church officials and the Mining Council agreed that they would not criticise one another publicly. This left the mining industry free to attack Aboriginal people without fear of being criticised by the church. However, the report done for the church commissions was published as a book in 1983 with the title Aborigines and mining companies in northern Australia. Recently I was given a copy of the comic-style booklet which survived the purge. All the copies of the booklet, posters and tapes were supposed to have been destroyed—apparently some were not. I seek leave to table that booklet.

Leave granted.

Senator WOODLEY —I tell this story to illustrate the lengths to which the Australian mining industry has gone to frustrate the legitimate native title aspirations of indigenous people. The mining industry now seeks to achieve that aim through the Native Title Amendment Bill we are debating in this chamber.

While we are talking about injustice and hypocrisy, I want to point out one of the most blatant examples I have come across in my political career. Throughout the Wik debate conservative politicians have campaigned hard against native title, rubbishing the spiritual and cultural connections that indigenous people have with their traditional lands. That connection is the foundation of native title but conservative forces do not believe in it and do not want Australians to believe in it.

But listen to this little gem from the Queensland Minister for Natural Resources, Mr Lawrence Springborg. He was quoted in the Courier-Mail in an article on the 27th of this month defending his government's decision to pay as much as 20 per cent above market value compensation to farmers whose lands will be flooded by the proposed Nathan dam in North Queensland—I have to say that I would support him. But why, you ask, is he proposing that?

Mr Springborg says that the higher compensation is to recognise the farmers' emotional and physical attachments to their land. Un believable! But the government will not give Aboriginal people more than the market price for their native title land under the Wik ten-point plan we are to vote on. I wonder if Mr Springborg would recognise that indigenous people have those same emotional and physical connections to their land. After all, it is his Premier, Rob Borbidge who has led the anti-Wik campaign in my own state of Queensland.

I want also to make some reference to the Labor Party. I do thank the Labor Party for the daily personal assurances that I have been given that the Labor Party will not cave in to political expediency. But I keep reading reports in the daily press that worry me and confuse me on this whole issue. Certainly I was worried when I got hold of a press release from the Leader of the Queensland Opposition, Peter Beattie, in which Mr Beattie practically performs victory laps around Queensland parliament for his success in getting the ALP to cave in, he believes, on the Wik legislation.

Mr Beattie's release indicates that he has a commitment from the Federal ALP to allow mining leases to be automatically renewed without going through the processes of the right to negotiate. This has been widely reported so you can understand my confusion and concern. However, I accept the assurances given and I do believe that the Labor Party will support the amendments which it moved in this place last time. My only regret is that even with the bill that was passed in the early part of December last year it is still only half a piece of legislation. In terms of what it does for Aboriginal people it is a certainly a compromise on top of a compromise. (Time expired)