Mike Byrne
The July 17 Courier Mail exposed the staggering depth of the state Labor government's handouts of taxpayers' money to some of Australia's largest corporations conducting business in Queensland. A total of $21.5 million was handed out to 42 companies in "investment and incentive" grants last financial year.
Premier Peter Beattie's corporate generosity stands in stark contrast to his government's appalling position on compensating Queensland's Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders for generations of stolen wages, estimated at up to $500 million dollars. The Beattie government has only offered $55 million as settlement, which has been rejected as inadequate by former workers.
Queensland Socialist Alliance Senate candidate and Indigenous activist Sam Watson told Green Left Weekly of his distress at being bombarded by Premier Beattie's constant crowing about this state's wealth and prosperity.
Watson said: "I step across the river and walk into Musgrave Park and I see my uncles and aunties sitting there quiet, still waiting for the wages that they worked and sweated for. It was their hard yakka that built this place into what it is, but so typically they have been banished into the park to live and die, out of sight and out of mind, many miles away from the front page of the Courier Mail."
Watson also said that "Queensland owes generations of Aboriginal workers millions of dollars in stolen wages and must pay up! If we fail those old people, our children and our grandchildren will forever carry the shame of the stolen wages and this place will never be rid of this great crime."
According to Watson, the "politicians are just sitting back waiting for those old people to die ... We don't want coffin money, we just want justice!"
From Green Left Weekly, August 4, 2004.
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