First published on the Brisbane Times website

Nearly two-thirds of an "insulting" $55 million State Government offer for wages stolen from indigenous workers remains unspent.

The reparations fund was set up in 2002 to partially repay about 16,400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers wages that were withheld over a 100-year period.

A figure of $55.4 million was put forward "in the spirit of reconciliation" despite a historian's estimate that workers were owed ten times that amount.

Just 5500 people out of about 9000 applicants made successful claims for the $2000 and $4000 payments.

The State Government is now considering what to do with the remaining $36 million after the scheme closed in January last year.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Minister Warren Pitt said one option was to distribute the money between people who had already made successful claims in the past five years.

Mr Pitt said a working group set up to discuss the matter had also proposed using some of the money for educational scholarships and local and oral history projects.

The reparations plan was criticised in 2002 as a token gesture and it came under fire again in Brisbane today at the launch of a national report on the matter.

Author and historian Rosalind Kidd said the amounts offered were "insulting".

"To offer people $4000 maximum for a lifetime's missing money is just ludicrous," Dr Kidd said.

She said the true amount owed to indigenous workers who never saw their wages, savings, endowments and pensions was close to $500 million.

In the vast majority of cases, government officials kept accurate records of the state-administered trust funds and accounts.

Indigenous workers were usually covered under an "Aboriginal Protection Act". They were paid at a much lower wage rate and needed government permission to access their money.

Democrats senator Andrew Bartlett said Mr Pitt's effort to consult the community on the leftover funds was appropriate but he blasted the 2002 offer.

"That initial $55 million offer was and remains an insult and a joke - probably 10 per cent, if that, of the total amount stolen and misappropriated by government agencies," he said.

"People did work (and) they didn't get paid for it. They're owed their wages back - everybody should be able to agree to that."

Ruth Heggarty spent her teenage years performing domestic duties on a number of rural properties for five shillings a week (the equivalent of 50 cents).

The 78-year-old was given half her weekly wage and the other was put into a bank account she never had access to.

"No one had control of that money, the government had control of it," Ms Heggarty said.

"You don't dare go in and ask them 'have I got any money left over' or 'can I have a look at my account' because there were no bank accounts."

She successfully claimed $4000 from the fund but said the State Government should move fast to distribute the rest of the money to her fellow claimants.

Senator Bartlett said the matter was a straightforward case of "government-wide, deliberate, pre-meditated fraud".

"This is not the Government's money. This is the money of people who earned it and who've not been paid," he said.

"This injustice is clear cut, it is literally black and white and it is unresolved," he said.