Aboriginal people robbed of up to $500m under system akin to ‘slave labour’, Queensland truth-telling inquiry hears

Inquiry told even after the second world war Indigenous Australians had their wages garnished and had their lives controlled by the government

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Aboriginal people had as much as half a billion dollars stolen from them by the Queensland government in a system akin to “slave labour”, the state’s historic truth-telling inquiry was told on its first day of hearings.

The first witness to appear in Brisbane on Wednesday was Auntie Lesley Williams, a Goa Koa woman born in 1946 at Cherbourg mission, who was employed in the 1960s as a teenage domestic labourer at a string of remote properties.

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