Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Rasping, but it made the point—and that is what this exercise is all about. The member for Shortland has done a very good job in explaining to those who might be listening to this debate on the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Vocational Rehabilitation Services) Bill 2006 our concerns with this legislation. They should be left in no doubt about those concerns. I am going to apologise in advance for spinning off, in my contribution, the speeches made by two of my colleagues. The first is the speech made by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Ms Gillard. The second is the speech made this morning by the shadow minister for Indigenous affairs, Ms Macklin. I want to pick up on some of the issues they raised. The deputy leader, in her contribution, said that this bill:

... is a bill that is all about mistakes. It tries to rectify old mistakes and on the way it manages to make a whole lot of new mistakes. It is ... a grab bag of unrelated measures, ranging from the straightforward to the incompetent. In part it makes some minor changes to social security rules to increase consistency, particularly in respect of CDEP.

It is on CDEP that I want to concentrate my remarks. Others have spoken in detail about what I would describe as the asinine stupidity of the Welfare to Work measure of trying to restrict access to the pensioner education supplement. The measure speaks for itself. The deputy leader made this very obvious point:

This is the Howard government’s approach to moving people from welfare to work—just put people on lower payments, stop them from getting the training they need and then tell them to get a job; and, if they do, then take back most of what they earn.

That is an apt description of where the government’s Welfare to Work policies are at now. Then the deputy leader made a very strong case explaining how Labor supports welfare reform, particularly reform that helps people move from Welfare to Work. She made the obvious point that Labor is, by definition, the party of work and the party of working Australians.

We have heard much, and continue to hear much, from this government about the issue of mutual obligation. That is interesting in itself but it ignores the reality that the concept of mutual or reciprocal obligation in the context of welfare reform was introduced by the Hawke and Keating governments. I well recall the introduction of that concept in dealing with those who were unemployed—their obligations to attend training and to look for work. I well recall the outcry that we received from some sections of the community about having the temerity to require unemployed people to undertake some activity in order to get a benefit from the Commonwealth.

We make no apology for supporting the concept of mutual obligation, but we say the government has no ownership of it and ought not pretend that it does. It ought not pretend that somehow or other its championing of mutual obligation is precedent setting—in fact, quite the reverse. The idea was developed initially by the Labor Party when it was last in government. The government ought to be at least gracious enough to acknowledge that fact. It ought to acknowledge that the reforms introduced by the Labor Party, in my view at least—I am sure the government would disagree—were far more understanding of the need for people on benefits to get into training and to get a job, than are the reforms of the government, as observed by the deputy leader.

For some people, as the deputy leader said, the best form of mutual obligation is a requirement to get a job. But then she made what I thought was a very significant observation—that is, other people start further behind. Some people have an extremely limited education and correspondingly limited job prospects in today’s economy. For them, mutual obligation should require that, in exchange for income support, they get the skills an employer needs and then they should be required to get a job. I think that statement is a very good summary of the reality.

But I would go further. It is all very well for us to talk about individuals getting themselves into a position where they have the skills an employer needs. The difficulty many Australians have is that they are not in that position. They are not in a position to acquire the skills an employer needs, for a range of reasons. One may be the nature of the labour market in which they find themselves. One may be where they live and their access to education and training opportunities sufficient to give them the skills that an employer might require. What I would be saying—and I strongly support the view that people who can work should work—is that we need to understand the reasons why in many instances people find they cannot get work or are out of work. Whilst bland statements about trying to get people in work are useful in some respects, we need to understand that macro-statements of that type, if they are to have any impact, need to comprehend the particular circumstances in which individuals and communities find themselves. If we want people to get a job we need to understand where they live, who they are, what their life experience has been, what their educational opportunities have been and are currently, and the likelihood of them getting a job with the skill sets that they have at present.

There are many Australians, even in this period of very low unemployment and supreme skill shortages, who are either unable to access the education that they require to get into the labour market or unable to access the skill sets that they require through vocational education and training to get themselves into the labour market. That is not acknowledged by the government and it needs to be. There are many other reasons why people are unable to gain employment. It may be due to their family circumstances; it may be that they have responsibility for caring for individuals or family members.

When I talk about the responsibilities that individuals have I make it very clear that mutual obligation, reciprocal obligation—whatever you want to call it—is a two-way street. We have an obligation as a government to provide the safety net that people need if they are in crisis or unemployed. The unemployed have an obligation to seek employment and, where available, to get into training that will give them an opportunity to gain employment. But governments have an obligation to ensure that they are in that position. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that people have access to the education that they require. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that people have access to the vocational education and training opportunities that they require. Unfortunately and sadly this has not been the case.

I wish to build on that by referring to the contribution by the shadow minister, Ms Macklin. She made the point that, on average, Indigenous Australians were over three times more likely than non-Indigenous Australians to be out of work. She made the further point that it is not just a location or a poverty issue, because Indigenous people living in the poorest neighbourhoods of cities are still more likely to be unemployed than their non-Indigenous neighbours. She referred to a report by CAEPR. She then said she wanted to talk about personal regard and responsibility, why it is important, and what else is needed for Indigenous Australians to become economic equals. It was a very prescient request to look at what is required to ensure that Indigenous Australians become equals in this regard.

It is not my intention to repeat all of what the shadow minister said, but she made this point, which I think is illuminating. Half of the Indigenous population is under 25 years old and population growth is even higher in remote communities, particularly in the Top End, which includes all of the Indigenous communities I work with in the seat of Lingiari. This is true right across the Top End of Australia and indeed in Central Australia. In the top part of South Australia in the Pitjantjatjara lands population growth is quite high and there is a very young population with high fertility rates. We need to understand that those people require particular attention. In many of those communities, people’s only access to employment is through the Community Development Employment Projects, CDEP. This government has made changes to CDEP which I have spoken about previously and which I have grave concerns about.

The shadow minister talked about the need for us to think laterally about regional economies and job creation. She referred to Noel Pearson and Warren Mundine, who have advocated the idea of regional economies that have a partially mobile transient work force, part of which would be employed in enterprise and service delivery to the home region and others would seek employment elsewhere and return regularly, investing back in that region. This is not a new model. Indeed, there have been employment enterprises set up in Central Australia, designed to provide work teams to travel across Central Australia to carry out building functions for road maintenance, of the type which have been spoken about by Messrs Pearson and Mundine. So this is not new. It is happening right now but can be expanded further. It relies on a number of things: knowledge of government because they have a responsibility to ensure that to get people into work teams the situation in which they live must be addressed. Unfortunately, as I have said many times in this place, that is not the experience of Indigenous Australians in this country at the moment.

Referring back to the issue of mutual obligation, I have said here before—it warrants saying again—that CDEP was an initiative which came from Indigenous people themselves as far back as the early 1970s. It is seen as the Indigenous equivalent of Work for the Dole, which it predated by almost 25 years. It needs to be understood that its purpose was to alleviate the deleterious effect of unemployment benefits on Aboriginal people. The Indigenous people themselves understood the impact of welfare dependency in remote communities and said to government, ‘We want you to provide us with a capacity to ensure that people in our communities who are getting a benefit from government for being unemployed work for that benefit.’ They understood then, as they understand now, the impact of welfare dependency not only on their young people but on the communities generally.

When we talk about the need for welfare reform and when we pillory Aboriginal people, as often happens in this place, we need to understand that initiatives that were taken by Aboriginal people predated initiatives which are now being taken by governments. The acknowledgement of welfare dependency, which has been echoed by people like Noel Pearson, Warren Mundine and many others, has been talked about by Aboriginal people across Australia for at least a generation. And now we find that governments have been unable to address the particular needs of those individuals and communities. So to get people to work, you need to comprehend where they are, who they are and what their particular situation is. To illustrate the remote communities of Northern Australia where there is chronically high unemployment, let me give you some data about the community of Wadeye.

Less than one-fifth of the adults in the region around Wadeye are employed and the vast majority are tied to the Community Development Employment Projects, CDEPs. Eighty-two per cent of Aboriginal income is attributable to welfare sources, 90 per cent if CDEP is included. That is very significant. We know that Aboriginal people occupy less than half of the 130 jobs outside CDEP—at least they did when this data was collected in the region. We also discover that in 2003 only half of the region’s school-age population were enrolled in school and only half of those enrolled attended classes, and then it was on a mostly irregular basis. There is a correlation there. The issue which I have raised in this parliament on an ongoing basis is the need for our community, the community of Australia, to understand what is happening in these places. Because of policies of successive governments, we do not have the educational outcomes that we require in these communities. Resources which would make it easier for them to get a job are not being addressed to the poverty which these people suffer. If you are not healthy and happy, it is going to be very hard to be educated.

In the context of this community, there are 144 habitable homes with an occupancy rate of 16 people or more. So, just to meet the demand in 2023, you will require another 122 dwellings. We have chronic overcrowding. This is a community with the highest incidence of rheumatic heart disease in the world, so it is not a healthy community by any stretch of the imagination. It has high welfare dependency, high dependency on CDEP and low levels of educational attainment, yet the government is introducing reforms which do not address the fundamental issues here. The fundamental issues are: how you address those underlying issues of poverty, how you provide the infrastructure that is required to give people a safe and healthy living environment, how you provide the nutrition that will get the kids to school in the first place, and how you build schools that will maintain the interest of those young people and provide them with the skills they require to get access to employment or access to training opportunities.

Let it be said, in support of the views being expressed by Messrs Mundine and Pearson, that the people who work in these communities are potentially very mobile. There will be no difficulty at all in attracting them to work in other places provided they can return home on a regular basis. This is not hard. What is hard is getting governments to understand that they have an obligation—the obligation which I referred to earlier. It is all very well to say to the individual, ‘You have an obligation to work or do some other activity to receive a benefit,’ but at the same time governments have to make sure that they have the capacity to get that work or do what they have to do to get the benefit. To do that they need to provide the investment that these communities require so that these individuals can participate actively in a workforce, like any other Australian. Only then will we be able to say that these people are getting equal treatment. It is all very well to be disparaging about the living conditions in which they find themselves, but we need to work with these people, with these communities, to ensure that when we introduce policies such as these they do not hurt and harm them; they help them. Unfortunately, the welfare reform policies which have been introduced by this government hurt people, and I think the government should be condemned for it.

See this speech in context