Reviews and Comments – Trustees on Trial
At a time when organisations representing Indigenous people are routinely accused by governments of mismanaging their funds … this book explains that for a century, Australian Aborigines were quite literally robbed bind, by governments and public servants who were under fiduciary duties to protect their earnings…
You have heard about the Stolen Generation: this is the story of the stolen wages…. Millions of pounds were lost in unprosecuted thefts and frauds as ‘protectors’ and policemen and others through whose hands the funds passed helped themselves to Aboriginal earnings… The scandal lasted into the 1980s, through the era of the corrupt Bjelke-Peterson government. Dr Kidd is unsparing in her criticisms of the politicians responsible for this long-running breach of duty owed to a vulnerable people…
The truly shocking fact is that details of these defalcations were available, in public accountability reports, for many years. Yet few in Queensland cared. Certainly not the journalists … And where were the lawyers?
A signal virtue of this book is its explanation of how Australian jurisprudence lags behind that of Canada and the US, where class actions based on equitable concepts of trust have enabled Indigenous people to obtain damages when the state has abused fiduciary duties owed to them. Plainly, governments have moral obligations to protect vulnerable citizens and legal obligations to compensate them for loss caused by mismanagement or malfeasance…
Geoffrey Robertson. Foreword for Trustees on Trial. July 2006. [FULL TEXT]
[F]or over a decade Dr Kidd as been a tenacious and dedicated advocate for the rights of Indigenous people. She has focused especially on the gross inequities that occurred through and under the various ‘Protection Acts’ that operated in Queensland from the 1890s to the 1980s…
In 1996, Dr Kidd was an expert witness in the Palm Island Wages Case… [Another aspect of the stolen wages] is central to Trustees on Trial. It concerns the fate of the savings, wages, endowment payments and pensions of Indigenous people that were controlled by the State of Queensland under the Protection Acts…
Dr Kidd has harnessed all her considerable skills as a historian … She meticulously documents the devastating impact of the Queensland Government’s administration of Indigenous affairs under the very laws that purported to protect Indigenous people. The book records instance after instance of the misappropriation, misuse and loss of moneys taken into care by the ‘Protectors’. Tragically, the loss of these moneys has resulted in many Indigenous people being caught in a cycle of intergenerational poverty that persists to this day…
Perhaps the greatest value of Trustees on Trial is to lay bare the historical record of financial mismanagement and the moral failure of previous Queensland Governments to act on evidence of systematic underpayment, fraud and suspect dealings with trust money. The book gives justification for the often expressed view that the issue of stolen wages is one of the great scandals of Australia’s history…
Dr Kidd’s book makes a very valuable contribution to understanding why the stolen wages scandal is still a live issue. It should be read by every non-Indigenous person in Australia so that they can understand the continuing resentment and frustration simmering with Indigenous communities over the Stolen Wages.
Trustees on Trial roars with the injustices inflicted on Indigenous people through the withholding of their wages. Dr Kidd painstakingly documents the Queensland government’s policies and actions demonstrating the dereliction of duty and the many failures of the government to protect the interests of Indigenous Queenslanders…
Dr Kidd devotes a good part of this book to the proposition that the Government of Queensland placed itself in the position of trustee or fiduciary in control of the lives of Indigenous people with all the usual obligations of fiduciary, to act in the best interests of the persons concerned ie., the Indigenous people of Queensland… Dr Kidd gives us example after example of monies wrongfully withheld, misplaced and misappropriated by officialdom under the Protection Acts….
Dr Kidd’s book joins that group of highly informative research texts exposing the record of what actually happened on the ground to Indigenous people and in this instance, it was the sustained misappropriation and misuse of moneys earned by and belonging to Indigenous people.
Dr Kidd has been tirelessly devoted to the issue of recovering the stolen wages since 1994. Her research has contributed to various cases before the Courts and her campaign efforts have pressured the Queensland government to make the offers referred to in the book, the processes around which and the quantum of which she rightly criticises. Dr Kidd has exposed yet another failure of contemporary Australia to fully understand and come to grips with past injustices on terms acceptable to Indigenous people.
But how many Aussies know that for a century Australian Aborigines were robbed blind of all their rightful wages by state governments and bureaucrats who were charged morally and in law to protect their earnings? Dr Rosalind Kidd … turns the tables on white Australian governments in this devastating book. She brings a legal perspective to the realities of history…. It is a scandal of breathtaking proportions….
Alan Gold. Review in Good Reading. February 2007. [FULL TEXT]
Trustees on Trial is a compelling portrayal of a profoundly sinister facet of Australia’s enduring treatment of Indigenous people. Dr Rosalind Kidd reveals how, from the 1890s and for almost a century, those who were coerced into living and working on government missions and reserves in Queensland were surreptitiously stripped of most of their wages. Significant portions were instead diverted into trust funds run by the government …[where]…large portions were illicitly siphoned off to subsidise government coffers and investments while impoverished Indigenous people suffered further….
The Queensland Government’s offer of recompense … was calculated by them to be worth a churlish $2,000-$4,000 a person. Dr Kidd, along with many commentators and Indigenous Australians, is unsurprisingly scathing in their rejection of the offer…
Dr Kidd provides powerful precedents from Canadian and the United States courts which have ruled on similarly appalling policies and practices which saw governments withhold, mismanage and defraud indigenous people of the money they held in trusts. The courts have determined that the onus of proof was on the government to show it had properly managed and accounted for indigenous money, not for indigenous people to prove they had lost the money…
Dr Kidd’s assertions are cogent and compelling. With the supporting documentary evidence she references, lawyers would be able to put forward a persuasive case against governments…
Trustees on Trial: Recovering the Stolen Wages is a harrowing account of Australia’s enduring past, painstakingly and courageously researched and engagingly written by one of Australia’s most informed authorities.
Helen Burrows. Review for Indigenous Law Bulletin, Vol 6, Issue 25, February 2007. [FULL TEXT]
From 1897 to 1997 the Queensland government effectively appropriated wages payable to Aboriginal workers … much of the money appropriated was either lost or even stolen by its custodians. Obviously, this was morally wrong, but strangely the Queensland government still does not seem able to fully recognise this.
[Trustees on Trial] is really about the meaning of trust and fiduciary law and explores the shortcomings of those concepts. As such, it is of particular interest to the lawyers who are interested in more than just the mechanics of the law…. Given the absence in Australia of comprehensive laws allowing the bringing of class actions (something documented by Kidd), … it would be unrealistic to expect that lawyers would have rushed into what could only be uncertain litigation…. However, the stolen wages issue is one, like tobacco litigation, where funding could serve a bona fide social purpose…
Robert Richards, Review for Law Society Journal of NSW, Vol 45, February 2007. [FULL TEXT]
The story Kidd documents is that the trustees who had a fiduciary duty to protect and preserve the interests of their Aboriginal charges did not in fact do their duty very satisfactorily, but diverted wage money and other Aboriginal resources to projects of their choosing or in some cases simply pocketed it for themselves… What happened to these lost wages is the theme of this book….
This book is well written, well indexed and gives useful summaries of the relevant Queensland laws and regulations (1865-1990). It cites a list of cases from United States and Canadian courts and makes comparisons with North American practice respecting Indigenous peoples that, Kidd finds, was more forward looking than Australia’s. In all, a valuable book to be read and kept on one’s shelf as well as making a good start for pursuing research on this topic in the other states and territories.
John Martin. Review for Australian Aboriginal Studies. September 2007. [FULL TEXT]
Aboriginal organisations are frequently accused of mismanaging funds. Here, Ros Kidd turns the tables to ask how the Queensland government, as self-appointed trustee, has administered the wages and pensions that were siphoned into its trust funds for more than seventy years….
Kidd asks whether the stolen wages can be legally recovered, rather than reclaimed through magnanimous but inadequate conciliatory gestures. She looks to the history of fiduciary duty in the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia…
Ros Kidd has carved herself a niche in the Stolen Wages campaign since her days as a postgraduate student at Griffith. Her thesis, published as The Way We Civilise, now a standard undergraduate textbook, was based on files that the Queensland government later must have wished had never been seen by any researcher. ..
Regina Ganter. Review in Australian Historical Studies Vol 39(1) 2008. [FULL TEXT]
Dr Kidd’s second book, Trustees on Trial, picks up where The Way We Civilise left off…[It] examines how Australian jurisprudence has consummately failed to right the financial wrongs perpetrated on Aborigines by mainstream Australia’s elected representatives…
[Dr Kidd] presents arguments that the power the state of Queensland exercised over its indigenous inhabitants rendered them vulnerable to and dependent on the government to the extent the former became the trustee of the latter. As trustee the government owed a fiduciary duty to those whose affairs it administered. And Kidd’s research proves that the state was guilty of multiple and sustained breached of that duty. Kidd says international courts would likely find the Queensland government was under an enforceable fiduciary duty to protect the interests of Aboriginal people…
The point Trustees on Trial makes is that in the normal course of white affairs, institutions which mismanaged their clients’ interests would not be exempt from judicial scrutiny… All those who don’t want to believe that Aborigines were and are denied the same human and legal rights as white people and who don’t understand why many Aboriginal families continue to live in poverty, should read Trustees on Trial and The Way We Civilise…
Margaret Wenham. ‘Financial wrongs a black history’. The Courier-Mail. 16 February 2007 [FULL TEXT]