Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Community Services) Share this | Hansard source

Today I want to speak frankly about welfare dependency and the policies that we need to get more Indigenous Australians into jobs and into business. We all know what welfare dependency does: it takes away people’s dignity and it certainly takes away their sense of purpose. This is the case in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. So any government that cares about people will do all it can to foster people’s capacity to participate in work and to gain purpose through work. There are many issues for any Commonwealth government to address, but first of all I want to touch on some facts. On average, Indigenous Australians are more than three times more likely than non-Indigenous Australians to be out of work. And it is not just about location, because Indigenous people living in the poorest neighbourhoods of our cities are still more likely to be unemployed than their non-Indigenous neighbours.

A study last year by the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research highlighted this point using 2001 census results. It found that:

… the Elizabeth area of North Adelaide had one of the nation’s highest urban unemployment rates for non-Indigenous people at 21 per cent. Among Indigenous residents of Elizabeth, however, the unemployment rate was 34 per cent. In Macquarie Fields in Sydney, non-Indigenous unemployment was 11 per cent compared to 30 per cent for Indigenous residents. In Brisbane, Inala recorded a very high level of non-Indigenous unemployment at 19 per cent, yet the Indigenous unemployment rate of the suburb was 35 per cent.

The study also found that the rate of upward mobility amongst Indigenous people in our cities had not improved. The ingredients of poor education, poverty, racism and being socially marginalised pose significant barriers to Indigenous young people in our cities. The situation is, however, worse in remote areas, where, according to ABS labour force data, unemployment continues to get worse in real and relative terms.

Of course, it is never good enough to just focus on the problems. I certainly do not intend to get swept up in the history or culture wars debates about remote communities. What I want to do today and to continue to do in this portfolio is talk about personal regard and responsibility, why it is important and what else is needed for Indigenous Australians to become economic equals.

Labor certainly has the policy mind to understand the way that social order, education, economic participation, health and culture are linked. We also know that, when it comes to Indigenous welfare and employment, we cannot afford to take an apologist approach. We cannot and we will not be making policy that makes white people feel good, whether they are white people from the bureaucracy or the left or the right of politics. What we want to do is develop policy that works. It will be an approach based on experience and looking at what is achieving results, not an ideological approach—pragmatic and local, certainly not a Canberra blueprint. Sometimes, I have no doubt, it will need to be unconventional.

We will take a fair approach to welfare that hinges on personal responsibility as much as it hinges on investment in an individual’s capability. I certainly agree with Noel Pearson when he says that too often the approach in welfare is to make excuses and absolve people from personal responsibility. But, equally, Labor will not be indulging in the ‘blame the victim’ chorus of social conservatives. We are talking about Indigenous empowerment, not victimhood; responsibility, not excuses. Professor Larissa Behrendt from the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning in Sydney has said:

It was paternalism that condemned generations of our people to poverty and welfare dependency.

Half of the Indigenous population is under 25 years of age. Population growth is even higher in remote areas, particularly in the Top End of Australia. Labor wants to do one thing in particular, and that is to encourage our Indigenous young people who have gone off the track to stop and choose the path that will win them social and economic power, self-esteem and respect through education and work. We know, from the high-quality research done by the likes of the Dusseldorp Skill Forum, that the best way to keep our young people on track is to keep them engaged in education and training. If young people—and this of course is true for Indigenous and non-Indigenous young people—leave school early they are going to require considerable investment in mentoring, possibly wage subsidies, on-the-job training and specific efforts to get them back into education. All of these things are required to come together to defeat the destructive habits and low expectations that unfortunately typify people who leave school early. As I say, that is true in both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

Governments also have a responsibility to make sure that the disincentives in our social security and tax systems are addressed, as is the way in which they intersect with the CDEP system for Indigenous Australians. We want to encourage the decision to study and to work, not the reverse. That means looking at all of these major payment systems, whether it is social security, CDEP or the tax system, to make sure that they encourage people to work and that they do not have serious disincentives that discourage people.

We know it is also true that many Indigenous Australians carry out work while on CDEP payments that in any white community would actually be properly paid for—work such as long day care, driving a school bus, natural resource management, rubbish collection, and the list goes on. These issues need to be brought into the equation to address the serious levels of unemployment.

Last year, Senator Penny Wong, Labor’s shadow minister for workforce participation, released a discussion paper which she called ‘Reward for effort’, which explains how Labor will bring obligation and opportunity together. We intend to put the ‘mutual’ back into mutual obligation by making sure that people who have participation requirements also have training or study opportunities for them to get ahead, and to foster their independence. We intend to back it up with measures designed to give financial backing to those who will benefit from an investment in their skills.

But of course these ingredients for reform are not going to be enough for remote regions where labour markets are limited. In many remote parts of Australia, there simply are not the jobs. In some places, we know, there are jobs, and I will touch on some very good examples of that in a minute. Unfortunately many of the Indigenous people in these regions do not have the skills to take on those jobs. It is also the case, as I have just mentioned, that there are a number of jobs being undertaken by CDEP recipients which, in other communities, would be properly paid for.

We are all very aware in Australia that our current prosperity has been forged on the back of a minerals boom. That is happening literally in the backyards of many Indigenous Australians. Sixty per cent of mines in Australia neighbour an Indigenous community. Recently, a Rio Tinto report into the Pilbara region found that in 2004-05 the Pilbara produced $12.9 billion worth of exports, of which $53 million went back into the Pilbara. That is less than half of one per cent that went back to local government and local people.

It is true, I think, that all governments over the last few decades have been sporadic spenders, whether it is on employment support, regional development—you name it. It is as if governments of all persuasions have been administering an emergency relief budget rather than governing for the future. I want to quote one of Labor’s recently elected Indigenous members of parliament, Ben Wyatt, from the Western Australian state parliament:

If we continue down the path that all governments have gone in respect to Indigenous affairs, in respect of our regions, we are, in effect, accepting the ultimate demise of our regions and simply applying a palliative economic drug to ease the pain on the way to the economic grave.

He also argued:

... bringing to remote Aboriginal communities the real market forces of job search after years and years of palliative economics will bring ... nothing but disaster.

Like him, I do not think there is any point in throwing money at Job Network in remote areas if there are no jobs to fill or if people do not have the skills to fill them.

Labor accepts the argument of National Indigenous Council members that government can act as an enabler of the goal of getting Indigenous people into work. In September last year NIC member Wesley Aird said, ‘Economic development is not happening fast enough.’ Another NIC member and the Chairman of Indigenous Business Australia, Joseph Elu, stated that he was tired of the lip-service being paid to economic development by business and the government. He said:

There’s all sorts of things like ‘We will endeavour to employ indigenous people in the mining sector, blah, blah,’ but there’s no actual targets.

A couple of months later there were threats of mass resignation from National Indigenous Council members over this issue. So I think all of these commentators would agree that we must go beyond the palliative economics of the past that have become the norm for these Indigenous regions. It does seem that the current government has an ideological allergy to stimulating economic growth in remote Indigenous regions. It seems content to leave these regions to free market forces—a neglect that is just not tenable.

What we really need to do is look at some of the ideas that are being put forward in a very positive way. Noel Pearson and Warren Mundine have advocated the idea of regional economies that have a partially mobile, transient workforce. Part of the workforce would be employed in enterprise and service delivery in the home region while others in the workforce would seek employment elsewhere and return regularly, investing back into that region. The Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre, land councils and forums like the Kimberley Appropriate Economics Roundtable have done excellent work on untapped potential in remote regions. This potential encompasses the arts, tourism, land and sea management, carbon trading, construction, and the pastoral and mining industries. Just last Friday the economist Jon Altman submitted to the Senate inquiry into Australia’s Indigenous visual arts and crafts sector that, with the right support, the Indigenous arts industry could grow three times in size. Right now there are an estimated 45,000 Indigenous artists throughout Australia.

One of the issues that is very topical at the moment is carbon trading, but I wonder how many people know that some of Australia’s pioneers in this field are an Indigenous mob in western Arnhem Land. The potential for greenhouse gas abatement contracts is immense for traditional owners with large tracts of land and skills in resource management.

Another very important issue is the promise of native title in terms of jobs and economic development. Unfortunately, this promise has not been delivered to our Indigenous people because native title representative bodies have not been adequately resourced to do so. This is despite repeated calls from both industry, particularly the mining industry, and the National Native Title Council. Recent research from Griffith University showed that half of the agreements analysed were either ‘basket cases that should never have been entered into’ or had delivered pitiful returns. So more than a decade of native title law has been a major disappointment to many Indigenous Australians. Their dividends from the minerals boom have been few and far between. Noel Pearson commented on this issue in the latest Weekend Australian. He wrote:

... the present situation is that the terms upon which mining takes place in Australia wreak more burden than benefit to indigenous peoples, most of whom live in the dust of development.

He continued:

... the federal Government has continued to legislate to weaken the indigenous position ... They are now proposing another round of amendments that further threaten the capacity of indigenous people to deal with developers.

We saw that legislation debated in the parliament this week. It is very clear to Labor that this government is not committed to Indigenous Australians getting jobs, getting their businesses going, making sure that they can take advantage of all the opportunities that exist both in the cities and in remote and regional Australia. In particular, the government seems to have locked the promise of native title in a bureaucratic void.

Indigenous Australians want to be able to improve their standard of living through economic development and work. I intend to embark shortly on a study tour of successful Indigenous projects and enterprises happening in urban, regional and remote areas around Australia. A number of these projects are about Indigenous Australians getting their businesses working and getting Indigenous people into employment. It is happening, and if we get the opportunity, we intend to make that success the basis for our action in government. We will be guided by what works. Our whole approach in Indigenous affairs will be to see what works, to scale up the projects that are working and to encourage them, and to do the things that are the responsibility of the federal government by making sure the social security and tax systems do not get in the way of Indigenous people’s desire to work and by providing the skills and training that people need to get the jobs they so urgently desire.

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