Thousands of Aboriginal workers whose wages were paid into official trust funds and never returned have been compared to Nazi slave labourers in a secret government document.

Last month the main body representing Australia’s 430,000 Aborigines demanded a formal inquiry into revelations that from 1900 to 1969 New South Wales (NSW) state authorities took wages and other endowments from some 11,500 Aborigines.

The Sydney Morning Herald on Monday published details from a secret policy document it said was written about the so-called “stolen wages” in late 1999 or early 2000 by the then-director of the NSW state community services department, Carmel Niland.

Niland and her boss, Community Services Minister Faye Lo Po, were seeking at the time to pressure state authorities into reimbursing the money, the Herald reported.

It quoted Niland as comparing the treatment of the Aborigines under the trust fund program to schemes under which “various private companies used slave labour under the Third Reich, including BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz”.

The money, now estimated to be worth up to 70 million dollars (55 million US), was placed in trust funds set up for indigenous peoples but was never paid out.

Postwar German governments and these companies have negotiated a program to compensate the former slave labourers, she noted in the report.

Niland and Lo Po documented the stolen wages issue in a memo submitted to the state cabinet in April 2001 and leaked by the Herald last month.

State officials acknowledged receiving the report from Niland, but said it needed more work and that a new version would be issued in coming months. Niland and Lo Po subsequently left government.

The Sydney Morning Herald said Niland’s policy document comparing the stolen wages issue to Nazi slave labour was obtained under freedom of information laws.

“I am determined that we are now going to provide some measure of justice to the beneficiaries or their designated heirs – however belatedly,” Niland was quoted as writing.

Among those who could be entitled to compensation are former “apprentices” who were removed from their families, made state wards, then sent to work until the age of 18 as domestics or farm labourers.

The “stolen wages” claim echoes the so-called “stolen generation” policy under which some 100,000 indigenous children, many of mixed Aboriginal and European parentage, were taken from their parents and put into foster care from 1910 to the 1970’s.

The government has refused repeated demands from the Aboriginal community to issue a formal apology for the stolen generation policy, which was carried out under laws based on the belief that Aborigines were a doomed race and that it was humane to give the children a Western education.

The current NSW community services minister, Carmel Tebbutt, told the Herald authorites were hampered by a lack of documentary material and the complexity of different trust funds set up for Aborigines.

“There is no resistance on the part of the NSW government to return the money. If there is a way of returning money to these people we will do it,” she was quoted as saying.

Aborigines today represent about two percent of Australia’s population but suffer far higher rates of poverty, ill-health, imprisonment, sexual assault and substance abuse.

Agence France Presse, Channelnewsasia.com, March 1, 2004