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As one of Australia’s oldest government agencies, New South Wales Treasury offers a unique lens on Australia’s collective history, notably the colony of NSW. This history includes the exploitation of Aboriginal peoples, their lands,  and resources. It includes policies funded by Treasury that were both good and bad.

The truth is that this land and its many people’s history is much older than 235 years. Aboriginal people lived in what is now known as Sydney about 20,000 years ago, when Aboriginal people retreated around 20 kilometres from the east as sea levels rose after the last ice age. At that time, Aboriginal people were managing the land and economy for many thousands of years in what has been described as ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’. When we learn of the history of New South Wales and its Treasury, we should ask ‘How must this have looked to Aboriginal people from the time of colonisation to today?’.

Sydney became ground zero for the introduction of not just colonisers but diseases too. Different foods, animals and farming practices were introduced from the opposite hemisphere. The lack of understanding of the climate and intergenerational land management practices brought about environmental disaster. The introduction of animals like cows and sheep saw clear waterways turn brown and rivers silted. Colonists falsely dismissed Aboriginal people as nomads with no ownership of land, as they did not use fences and did not replicate or follow European political, religious or social systems. Colonists did not understand how to manage the Australian landscapes, and its animals effectively and largely ignored the practices Aboriginal people had developed to maintain the environment. As the colony spread across the countryside seeking pastures for livestock, the gold rush and the construction of railways, Aboriginal people were driven from traditional lands and had an alien society and economy imposed upon their existence and ways of being and knowing.

Despite these challenges, many Aboriginal people successfully carved out a place and life in the changing landscape, a changing society, and a new economic realty - all within their own cultural framework. And yet, Aboriginal peoples remain and thrive. Currently, there is work being done to revitalise Aboriginal languages. It focuses on recreating what was taken away from Aboriginal people’s – from language, connection to place and religions.

Work like this will help correct the hidden history of the colony and help leaders of tomorrow to know and understand our collective past. We invite you to celebrate and explore the enduring spirit, drive and determination of Aboriginal peoples, the Treasury, the colony, and the State. And let us never fade our Old People’s hope of a better tomorrow.

Treasury's evolution over the last couple of hundred years has had its moments. By and large it's been a process of major professionalisation. When the Treasury started in 1824, the Treasurer and the small number of staff that the Treasury had were really not professional economists or accountants and there were a lot of issues around auditing and a whole lot of things, but particularly after the gold rushes in the 1850s Treasury really got its act together and the officials that were employed became increasingly professional and incredibly sharp and that process continued right through the 20th century. So today the Treasury is a highly complex beast dealing with a huge number of issues In some ways they're not that much different to what they were dealing with in the 19th century, but we now have things like computerisation and digitisation, and the speed in which mity has has moved everything. Treasury is a very different place than it was two centuries ago. I think the most fascinating story that emerged out of the history of New South Wales Treasury was the story about the dismissal of Premier Jack Lang in 1931. Lang refused to pay back debts to the London money market and there was a huge public kerfuffle, but Lang also wanted to be able to pay public servants, so what he did was go around with some Treasury people to two banks, Bank of New South Wales and the Commercial Bank of Sydney, and took two cheques along and emptied millions of pounds out of the banks and brought the money back to the Treasury and hid it in vaults that they used to put gold in in the 1850s, and surrounded the vaults with armed policemen to stop it being stolen. But unfortunately for Lang, Sir Philip Game, who was actually very friendly to Lang, was forced because of political and other pressures to sack Lang on the 31st of May in 1931. There are a number of rather fascinating things that came out of the book and we've called them moments rather than milestones in Treasury because they're about things that people wouldn't normally associate with the Treasury. For example, the Opera House lottery, which there were 468 lotteries over about 30 years, which paid for the Opera House and that was basically administered originally by the Treasury. Things like decimal currency, where Treasury had a very important role to play in redrafting legislation and a whole lot of things, but that work was incredibly invisible and I think that's a theme that runs through Treasury quite a bit.

Aboriginal people had an economy for many, many thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. They were trading foods and other resources but there was also a spiritual and cultural dimension to their interactions economically.

When Europeans arrived in New South Wales, the Frontier, starting in Sydney in 1788 and taking decades to spread violently throughout the state, really disrupted Aboriginal ways of life quite profoundly, from the violence itself but also the dispossession of lands. But Aboriginal people responded in the wake of that Frontier in a very culturally informed way. They tried to stay as much as possible living on their own traditional Country and they tried to live as much as possible under their own terms.

A good example of how Aboriginal people adapted to this new colonial world was a Sydney man from Botany Bay named Maroot who along with his wife, whose name we sadly haven't got recorded, set up a fishing business in the 1830s after working on whaling ships. He was a man who had been born just after the arrival of Europeans. He'd seen and experienced that huge impact of that arrival and the dispossession and disease and violence, but he responded by setting up his own business. He also was given a lease of land on Botany Bay where he built a hut for his wife and himself, and built several other huts which he then started to rent out to local fisherman. So, he was a landlord collecting rent from those huts, as well as making profit from his fishing business and running tour guiding services around Botany Bay as well. That's an example of someone who responded in a way that kept him on Country, and using the skills and knowledge that he already possessed.

The economic history of Aboriginal people has been overlooked alongside their broader histories of Aboriginal people in New South Wales since 1788 for a couple of key reasons. One is a long-standing belief, incorrect but it refuses to go away, that Aboriginal people somehow are not able to change without losing their authenticity. And so it stops us from seeing these really creative responses that Aboriginal people made to the situation they found themselves in, in colonial New South Wales, and particularly stops us seeing that these responses were also culturally informed. So, they weren't an abandonment of traditional ways, they were actually a continuation and an adaptation.

Jeffrey Eagar was one of the early treasurers in New South Wales after self-government in 1856 and he was very important partly because he'd had banking experience. So he was a good in terms of financial management but also he's a bit of a visionary. He was aware that the colony had to be opened up in some way after the gold rushes of 1851. So many tens of thousands of people had come and what do you do with all those who didn't find gold? Many of them rushed back to the city, but there wasn't enough jobs. So he was keen to open up the interior of the land and he had a very clear sense of what needed to be done, how to build infrastructure and how to pay for that infrastructure. He was a very good Treasurer because he could work out a way to face what you might call the major problem of every Treasurer - how to allocate very scarce resources among competing demands. The colony of New South Wales operated via free trade so export industries were very important. But to get the produce of the interior to the ports so it could be exported you needed some way of getting the goods, the produce from the interior into the port. Roads in New South Wales for the first 30, 40, 50 years The Colony were terrible lots of just basically bullock tracks and things like that. Very slow getting the produce over the mountains. So a Great Dividing Range back to Sydney took weeks. Now, once the rail was in you could get it there within 24 hours. And so railways offered the best way of getting all the products out of the interior into the port city of Sydney. Initially it was wool, then later wheat and then after 1869 when the frozen meat trade came on. Frozen meat could be exported to the metropolitan cities of England and Europe. The railways also were important in allowing the population to go out into the land. It allowed for regional development. A whole range of towns became cities in the interior. As it moved into the interior it was obviously cutting across country. And country for the indigenous people means something very different for us westerners. The capitalist society, it's just property for sale or lease. But for them, it's part of a whole cultural system. Now while there's not much record of what happened to the indigenous population in terms of the laying of the tracks, Eveleigh Workshop soon became one of the largest employers of indigenous New South Wales people. And it was very important for them when they were taken off their land, removed from their tribal lands, there was a job opportunity for them in Sydney. The railways of the colony of New South Wales were initially able to be financed internally, largely because of the money from the land sales and leases and internal loans from within the colony. Gradually as the rail network had to spread further and further inland, capital was needed. From the 1860s they started to think about tapping into the London Capital Market. London, by the late 19th century, was the most important financial centre in the world. And, of course, New South Wales was a very prosperous colony. So, New South Wales had no trouble raising loans in London for the expansion of its rail network. New South Wales had been doing very well in borrowing overseas, but by the late 1880s problems had started to occur internally. The expansion into the interior had to be financed in some way. So there was banks, there was building societies and something they called land banks. And these had financed expansion out further and further. The problem was that further and further out, there was less return on the capital investment. So gradually a lot of these land banks and building societies and some of the big banks even found that they weren't getting returns on their capital. So they had to start calling in loans. And once they started to do that there was a bit of a domino effect. Externally the London Capital Market also started to have problems. One of the major banks there, Baring Brothers, had been lending, apart from Australia, but to America and South America. And in the late, I think it was late 1880s, 1889, 1890, Argentina defaulted. And it was basically, in today's terms, on billions of loans. Billions. So that had another repercussion back. Baring Brothers in London started to call its loans in from the colonies and suddenly the banks in New South Wales all started to have to call in loans. So it was just a domino effect leading to the whole depression.

One of the key roles of Treasury in the early part of the 20th century was changing the social contract, which is basically what we as individual citizens agree to give up in terms of our rights and privileges for the greater good. What this meant is that Treasury in the first Decades of the 20th century actually had a really important role in some key areas of looking after fellow citizens. They included a major contribution to housing, both social housing but also providing low cost home loans for low income earners.

Another really important area that Treasury got involved with was insurance through the, not interestingly named Treasury Fire Insurance Board, but that actually became one of the most powerful financial bodies in New South Wales in that decade. Because a Labor government was in power during that time, one of the things they were interested in was taking some control of the means of production, so Treasury also became responsible for the finances coming in from state enterprises like brickyards as well as the the dockyard on Cockatoo Island. Treasury also made sure that right from the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 that state employees not only had their salaries secured but actually that, if they joined the military, state government would pay and match that salary from then onwards.  

In addition, the state government through Treasury also promised anyone who served from New South Wales in World War I would get a fair deal in terms of their pension, so actually the state matched the Commonwealth 
pension of 1 pound per week for anyone who was returned with disability from World War I, and also the state through its housing board, made sure that homes were going to be built for severely disabled veterans who returned from World War I service. Finally at the end of the decade we had the dramatic so-called Spanish influenza or pneumonic influenza pandemic, a little bit like the COVID-19 a century earlier. One of the initiatives introduced by the state government through treasury was to provide some relief for people who'd been economically disadvantaged by following state government regulations around the pandemic. So for instance, if you were a landlord or a business owner you'd be able to claim back some of your expenses lost by closing during the key moments of the pandemic, and in fact New South Wales was the only one of the Australian states to provide that sort of compensation for citizens and business owners and landlords to make sure that the state continued to prosper into the 1920s. At the time of Federation, a lot of Australians didn't expect very much of their governments. They thought they were there to just provide some basic services and look after them a little bit, but in those two key decades from 1901 to 1920 the social contract changed quite dramatically and so by the end of World War I and the end of the Spanish influenza pandemic many citizens here in New South Wales expected our government to provide a huge range of services for us and were willing to pay taxes and duties in return. Treasury had a really fundamental role in shifting the dial on that social contract in those two decades to make sure that we all contributed far more equally so that we all benefited to the maximum.

What happened in 1942 was a lot of bad stuff. The Japanese were in what is now Papua New Guinea. Darwin was being bombed. There was a Japanese mother ship toodling down the Australian coast. So the Commonwealth was looking to have an efficient revenue source being that it sought to aggregate income tax that was being levied by itself, which started in 1915, and all the states. It first put this to the states in 1941 and the states said 'no thank you we like it just like it is, we'll keep our money and give some to you'.

Then into early 1942 and into the middle of 1942 the Commonwealth took unilateral steps whereby it gained the power to uniformly levy income taxation at the Commonwealth level. It made provision that it would grant back to the states the an amount equivalent to what they had been raising before the takeover, and the significant proviso there was they were only going to get the money back if they vacated the income taxing space.

Hell yes, it was an argument! The last premier's conference was in early 1942 where William McKell, the New South Wales Premier and Treasurer, put the case that where the Commonwealth to do this and take all the unilateral power to levy income tax, the states would lose their ability to govern themselves because they would no longer have the financial independence to raise funds on their own terms to spend it in their own way. Ultimately that argument did not succeed the common acted unilaterally and in a subsequent challenge in the High Court to the package the states did not win, that's why we have the system we have today.

It further entrenched what is called a financial imbalance between the states and the Commonwealth government. That means that the states have the majority of the duties to deliver services whereas the the Commonwealth collects the vast majority of revenue and then distributes it back to the states. Why wasn't the arrangement reversed after the war? Well if you got the keys to the treasury would you be giving them back in a hurry? Probably not! The original report that preceded the Commonwealth takeover what recommended the war plus a year for the Commonwealth to retain the power. After the war when asked again the Commonwealth answered 'we may keep it for some little time'. That was in 1946, seventy eight years would seem rather a long 'little time'.

The Depression of the 1930s in New South Wales had a devastating effect. It was a period of enormous social and economic deprivation. It was a period also of political dislocation and polarization. A quarter, perhaps even a third of the workforce was unemployed you had homelessness evictions, but you also had political polarization too, both left and right. There was a sense of the whole economic and political and social system being under an unprecedented pressure, and it was devastating for many people at the time, and it was remembered as a devastating trauma for decades afterwards. This was an experience that totally shaped the lives of of whole generations of people in New South Wales. Well, Jack Lang was the leading Labor politician in New South Wales of the 1920s and 1930s he came from a working class background, but he'd made good as a real estate agent and an auctioneer in expanding western suburbs of Sydney. He was by no means in the early days a radical Labor politician, but he acquired radical allies and certainly by the mid 1920s when he first became Premier he was regarded as a a left wing figure and when he became Premier for the second time in 1930 he became a rather frightening figure for many conservatives and people of the middle classes as the Labor Premier an adventurous Labor Premier who came to office with quite a radical program and determination even in the Great Depression to implement it. The Lang plan was a very radical means of dealing with the Depression. What he was basically arguing for was a suspension of payments on New South Wales' overseas debt a suspension of interest payments a kind of default was the term that was being used at the time. This was being driven really by the fact that the state was running out of money. Lang had a program that he wanted to implement. He came to office saying that he would look after those who were least able to look after themselves, and all of this was happening in the midst of the Great Depression.

New South Wales public servants in Treasury had the job of implementing the Lang plan as best they could. Their role was to provide Lang with advice, although he was regarded as a bit of a lone wolf, so someone who tended to keep his own counsel. He was a strong figure he wasn't someone who felt he needed to rely heavily on others, but public servants acted in a conscientious way to implement the government policy of the day, but that involved extraordinary measures. The Treasury was essentially converted into a kind of bank.

A conflict emerged between the NSW government and the federal government because when the NSW government defaulted on its debt, under the existing financial arrangements it became the Commonwealth government in Canberra's responsibility to pay the shortfall and then to try and recover cover what monies they could from New South Wales and so this inevitably led to very difficult circumstances for NSW Treasury officials who were placed in in the difficult position of trying to prevent the Commonwealth from coming in and actually acquiring them the New South Wales' money as a result of those defaults. In early 1932 a new federal government came to power in Canberra, the Lyons United Australia Party government, a non-labor government, and it took a much stronger hand against the Lang government than the previous federal labor government in Canberra. One of the things that it was determined to do was to ensure that it would collect the cash that New South Wales wasn't paying in its interest rates. It passed legislation to strengthen the federal government's hand and the response of the New South Wales government was to go and withdraw large amounts of government money from the private banks and transfer it into the vaults in Treasury in Bridge Street. So the job of the public servants was basically to go into the banks with suitcases and government cheques and to fill those suitcases with money and take them back to Treasury so the federal government couldn't get its hands on the money. Treasury effectively in that period became a kind of bank, if you won the lottery you would come into the Treasury building to collect your winnings. Treasury officials became responsible for ensuring payments to teachers, to public servants, you had instances of Treasury officials actually going armed on trains taking money out to country areas to ensure that people were being paid - police and teachers and so on.

So it was an extraordinary situation in which Treasury had to take on a range of roles clearly that it was never designed to do. So Lang always had a really solid core of supporters in Sydney in particular amongst Labor diehards, but certainly as the level of disorder and chaos developed and the I guess the general sense of irregularity around a lot of these financial issues occurred, his popularity did decline and there was great fears I think among the middle classes perhaps the better off working classes that the state was descending into a kind of chaos and you had paramilitary organisations arming and drilling the most famous and high-profile of those being the New Guard here in Sydney, but you also had secret organisations called the Old Guard in country areas preparing for the possibility that they might have to take power. So there was a general sense of chaos that certainly led to a decline in Lang's popularity and really formed the basis I think for his eventual downfall. So the Lang government was dismissed by the Governor.

Many Australians think the only time this has happened is 1975 with John Kerr and Gough Whitlam, but in fact there was a kind of precedent in May 1932 when Governor Philip Game on the third of May dismissed Jack Lang. It was very different from 1975 because Philip Game made it pretty clear to Lang that if he didn't mend his ways he was going to dismiss him and the pretext for that, the reason that Game gave for having dismissed Lang, was that the government had given an illegal order to New South Wales public servants really about the control of those funds that properly belonged to the federal government. So in the wake of Lang's dismissal and then the election of June 1932 that saw the United Australia Party victorious in a landslide there was a lot of repair work to be done I mean relations between the New South Wales and federal governments were very poor. Relations between Treasury officials in New South Wales and their counterparts in Camberra had also been, as you would expect, very difficult, and so there were a lot of relationships like that that needed to be mended. The money was returned from the vaults of Treasury back into the banks and with the changing government policy in New South Wales it was much more cooperative, much more willing to follow the kinds of policies that had been agreed by the federal and state governments which were a policy of really what was called deflation, cutting back government spending. The federal government was much more willing to deal with New South Wales and so eventually you know you did have uh a much more cooperative relationship develop between the Federal and state government over the issue of New South Wales is very large debt and the policies to be pursued by the government in New South Wales.

496 lotteries were held between 1957 and 1986, all to fund one building. That  building is now one of the most iconic in the world – the Sydney Opera House!

Originally budgeted at $7 million, the final cost of the Sydney Opera House was $102 million. This was funded by special state lotteries, with a total of over 86 million lotto tickets raising funds to build the famous landmark.

NSW Treasury played a crucial backstage role, managing the funding process created under the Opera House Act of 1960. The idea of building an opera house was as controversial as Jørn Utzon’s architectural vision, but Premier Joe Cahill was a passionate advocate and NSW Treasury was charged with ensuring the project’s financial viability amidst intensscrutiny and budget blow outs. Treasury’s responsibilities included keeping a spare set of 
lottery marbles in the Treasurer’s office safe.

The lotteries not only funded the Opera House but also changed the lives of many winners, providing them with financial security and new opportunities.

Sandra and Steven Megalooikonomou, migrants from war town Greece won $200,000 in 1958. The win enabled them to buy house in Bathurst Street, Liverpool and shopfronts in Campbelltown.

Further west, retired grazier C. S. Robertson Mittagong rejoiced after his big win saying: ‘I have never had so much money in my life… this will help me move out of this hick town.’

The first winner of the Opera House lottery was company director Oswald Sellers who arguably did not need the cash. When reporters outside his Point Piper mansion asked to see the winning ticket, the suspicious Sellers angrily retorted ‘Who do you think you’re quizzing, go to hell!

The iconic Sydney Opera House was built through the political perseverance of Premier Cahill, the architectural genius of Jørn Utzon, the sound financial management of NSW Treasury and through 86 million lottery punts by the citizens of NSW.