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

I acknowledge the contribution from the chairman of the committee and the work of the committee and all its members. It is with regret, though, that I have to say that I am here to present, on behalf of the members for Fremantle, Canberra and Kingsford Smith, and for my own part, a dissenting report. In what may be a precedent in committee reporting, the Labor members of the ATSIA committee were not prepared to endorse the majority report of this inquiry into Indigenous employment. This was not because of any fundamental disagreement with the few recommendations it proposed—although we do not agree with all of them—but because of the report’s failure to come to grips with the gravity of the problem or to suggest policy settings and programs which have any real prospect of increasing employment.

We argued that the chairman’s draft report, as initially presented to us and still largely unmodified in the final draft, needed a major revision. In fact, much of the report is little more than a catalogue of case studies. Those could have formed the starting point for sound deductions about future directions for effective policy development. Instead, they are simply presented without coherent analysis.

The majority report appears to accept untested assertions about various programs and public relations assertions from the private sector as if they are as persuasive as carefully constructed evaluations. Government department and agency claims about the effectiveness of various policy settings are often accepted without question, rather than being subjected to reasonable critical scrutiny and analysis. The purpose of the report, after all, was to try and find out what really worked. Our constructive suggestions along these lines and our request for a major revision of the report so that we could achieve unanimity were initially accepted but later refused, on what we believed to be rather spurious grounds—in other words, in this case, spuriously imposed deadlines that prevented such revision.

After almost three years of hearings, including the evidence of many witnesses, 137 submissions, and travel to every corner of the continent, the conclusions are disappointingly shallow. We argue that the findings and recommendations presented to us in the draft report, and accepted by government members, fall so far short of what is needed as to constitute an insult to the many people who spoke to us.

Sadly, given the resources at our disposal and our truncated reporting time line, the Labor members are not in a position to write a comprehensive report which would fully address these problems. But we can point to areas where a future government should act. We touched on those areas. We talked about evaluation. We asked: what has been successful in generating new opportunities for Indigenous people? What maintains employment for those already in the workforce? What improves labour market readiness? And what helps people over the obvious obstacles that Indigenous people face?

We talked about the Indigenous employment strategy. We asked whether it really has delivered measurable benefits and outcomes to Indigenous people. We focused on the CDEP, and I would say that this report needs to be read against the backdrop of the federal government’s intervention in the Northern Territory and, indeed, its proposal—now writ into policy—to stop CDEP operating altogether in communities in the Northern Territory, despite the ample evidence that this committee received about its success as an employment vehicle for Aboriginal people. This has not been taken into account by the government and has not been reflected properly in the report. But we saw, time after time, the opportunities created by CDEP, where people were in meaningful employment. They were participating in commerce, in shops; they were working in schools and in brick factories; they were working in a range of programs, doing the whole gamut of community activities—you name it, they were involved in it. Yet, now, 8,000 such individuals in the Northern Territory have been sacked summarily by this government and have been moved onto Work for the Dole programs or training programs. They will not have meaningful employment. That, of course, is a shame.

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