Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers take home 84 cents for every dollar the average Australian worker earns. Across a year, that is an 18% income gap, or close to two months of work handed over to the boss for nothing.

The figures come from Towards Indigenous pay parity, released on 24 September by the Centre for Indigenous People and Work (CIPW) and Indigenous Business Australia. The average First Nations worker earns $41.59 an hour against $49.46 for the whole workforce. Over a year the difference comes to about $15,000, and it has nothing to do with effort: First Nations workers put in 33.85 hours a week on average, against 34.19 for everyone else.

For a First Nations truck driver in Mount Isa or an aged care worker in Dubbo, that money covers rent, school shoes and the car rego. Employers and governments describe it as a "disparity". From where workers stand, it is underpayment by race, and it sits on top of most of a century of wages that governments withheld.

The gap is getting worse, or at best standing still. CIPW research director Jane O'Leary says the hourly gap climbed from 10% in 2014 to 16% in 2021 and has barely moved since. Her conclusion is blunt: left alone, it will pass from one generation to the next.

In 75% of occupations, First Nations workers earn less per hour than colleagues doing the same job. Only 19% of occupations show parity. The biggest gaps sit in the jobs we are told will lift people up: professionals face a 19.5% gap and managers 15.8%. Machinery operators and drivers show the smallest gap at 2.9%, and the report finds the smallest differences in award-reliant occupations.

First Nations women carry the heaviest load. They average $40.85 an hour and $60,222 a year, while men across the whole workforce average $51.80 an hour and $96,974 a year.

The report finds that hours, age, education and occupation do not fully explain the gap. It points instead to the legacy of discriminatory wage setting, racial bias in hiring and promotion, weak bargaining power for individual workers, and unpaid "cultural load": the expectation that First Nations staff do cultural work, including carrying their employer's reconciliation and inclusion work, for no extra pay. It also flags that the gap widens where managers have the most discretion over pay.

The report names "historically discriminatory wage setting" as a cause. That phrase covers a lot. For most of the twentieth century, state and Commonwealth "protection" laws let government officials control where Aboriginal people lived, who they worked for and what happened to their pay. Stockmen, domestic servants, farmhands and labourers worked for rations, a fraction of the white wage, or nothing at all. Where wages were paid, governments often put them into trust accounts that the workers could not touch. Much of that money was never paid back.

Workers fought this at the time. In March 1966 the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission ruled that Aboriginal stockmen in the Northern Territory should get award wages, but gave pastoral companies until December 1968 to comply. The Gurindji did not wait. In August 1966 Vincent Lingiari led the walk-off from Wave Hill station, backed by unions across the country, and the strike grew into a nine-year fight for land that helped win the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. When equal wages finally applied, many stations laid off Aboriginal workers and never compensated them for decades of cheap or free labour.

No one knows the full size of the theft. A 2006 Senate inquiry tried to put a figure on it and could not. Some estimates put the amount withheld in Queensland alone at up to $500 million between 1920 and 1970.

Families still fighting for their ancestors' pay

Workers and their descendants have taken governments to court to get this money back, state by state.

Claim

Led by

Period covered

Outcome

Queensland (Pearson v State of Queensland)

Hans Pearson, filed 2016

1939 to 1972

Settled 2019 for $190 million

Western Australia

Mervyn Street, Gooniyandi stockman, filed 2020

1936 to 1972

Settled for $180.4 million, approved October 2024, with a state apology

Northern Territory (McDonald v Commonwealth)

Minnie McDonald, station worker, filed 2021

1933 to 1971

Settled for up to $202 million, with a Commonwealth apology

These settlements matter, but the NT case shows how much the class action model leaves behind. The settlement was built on an estimate of up to 8,750 workers. By August 2025 only 5,761 workers and descendants had registered, and registrations closed on 3 October 2025. Claimants received at least $10,000 each. Litigation funder LLS took $30 million, Shine Lawyers $15 million and administrator Deloitte $3.2 million, and Chief Justice Debra Mortimer criticised Shine's approach as the most expensive way the outreach could have been run.

In north-east Arnhem Land, many families never heard about the case until neighbours started receiving payments this year. Rirratjingu elder Wanyubi Marika missed the deadline, even though his father worked as a labourer for the Defence Force and his mother as a nurse's assistant in Yirrkala during the covered years. The local organisation ARDS had eight weeks and little funding to reach whole communities with a 12-page English-language form that took upwards of two hours per person. It kept going, mostly unpaid, until the deadline.

That fight is live now. Laynhapuy Homelands Aboriginal Corporation and UTS law professor Thalia Anthony are calling on the Commonwealth to set up a national stolen wages redress scheme, run with Aboriginal organisations and open for years. Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy says the Commonwealth cannot change how Deloitte runs the settlement, and has not said whether she supports a national scheme.

The report's own data holds the most useful clue. The gap is smallest in award-reliant jobs and largest where managers set pay one person at a time. Collective wage setting protects First Nations workers. That points to these demands:

What workers can win

The report's figures show the gap is narrowest in award-reliant jobs and widest in professional and management roles, where employers have the most say over individual pay. When wages are set collectively, First Nations workers lose less, so bargaining is a good place to start.

Enterprise agreements can require an annual pay audit broken down by Indigenous status and gender, with the results shared with delegates and a set timeframe for the employer to close any gap. Agreements can also put a price on cultural load. If a position description lists cultural work, or management leans on an Aboriginal staff member to run the reconciliation action plan, the job should carry an allowance or a higher classification to match.

In professional and management roles, published pay bands and clear classification structures would stop starting salaries and promotions coming down to who pushes hardest in a one-on-one negotiation.

Some of the fix has to come from Canberra. Since 2022 employers have carried a positive duty to prevent sexual harassment, and the report wants a matching duty on racial discrimination. Unions should push for that duty to come with their own right to enforce it.

WGEA already makes large employers publish their gender pay gap each year, and adding the Indigenous pay gap to that reporting would show workers which employers are dragging the chain.

On stolen wages, the Commonwealth should set up a national redress scheme with no cap on claims, open for several years and willing to accept oral evidence.

Aboriginal community-controlled organisations should help run it, and payments should go straight to claimants with no litigation funder taking a share. Families who missed the NT, WA and Queensland deadlines need a way back in.

Unions can back all of this by recruiting and resourcing First Nations delegates and organisers, and by writing Indigenous-specific clauses into the claims they take to employers.

Where this leaves us

The gender pay gap is at its lowest on record because women and their unions pushed for reporting, equal pay cases and award reviews over decades. The Indigenous pay gap needs the same sustained pressure. The Gurindji stockmen walked off Wave Hill together when told to wait two more years for equal pay, and the families in Arnhem Land are still waiting for the pay their parents earned. Delegates can start by raising a pay audit and a cultural load allowance in the next round of bargaining.

Sources