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

Today I want to talk about an issue which has received a fair bit of public prominence over the last week or so, especially after the publication by the Australian of an article by Shirley McPherson, who is the Chairperson of the Indigenous Land Corporation. In the article headed ‘Business in bush means an end to welfare trap’, Ms McPherson canvasses a range of questions in relation to the Community Development Employment Projects scheme.

Firstly, I welcome her contribution—not that I agree with a lot of it—because I think we need a public debate about this important question. I note that it spurred others to make comment and produced a number of headlines which I found rather distressing. I know that many Indigenous people certainly in my own electorate found them distressing and that Indigenous people elsewhere in Australia would have found them equally distressing. The headline ‘Aborigines could lose the dole’ was in the West Australian on Thursday, 23 February, and the headline ‘Purge on Aboriginal work-for-dole’ was in the Weekend Australian. Then an article about Indigenous bodies not being able to hire Aborigines was in the West Australian on 22 February, the same day that Ms McPherson published her article in the Australian. In that article in the Australian on 22 February, Ms McPherson mentions a number of the operations which are run by the ILC. She says:

In a letter to the minister, I pointed out that many of the properties owned by the ILC are not exactly hardship posts. Home Valley Station, 120km west of Kununurra, is a tourist resort, near the famed El Questro homestead of the Kimberley. Mimosa Station is near Gayndah in Queensland, Roelands Village Orchard is 20km east of Bunbury, WA, Roebuck Plains Station is 20km east of Broome ...

On the very day that Ms McPherson put this article in the newspaper, a person whom I know and respect and trust rang Roebuck Plains from Broome and inquired as to whether there were any jobs, because they had three young people looking for work. Not only were they told there were no jobs; they were also told there were no traineeships. This person advises me that he is not aware that Roebuck Plains actually advertised vacancies at the Job Network providers in Broome. If that is the case, that is a major worry.

There is no doubt that there is a need for a debate about the CDEP program. There is no doubt that people need to understand that this issue of Indigenous employment is one which we need to confront as a community. But we need to understand some facts: the history of the scheme and what it was designed to do in the first instance. I want to make an observation in passing about a comment made on the ABC by the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mr Brough. He said:

It has been something that has been repeated to me by various elderly Indigenous communities throughout the NT. So far be it from wanting sit-down money. More and more Indigenous leaders are telling me that that is what has destroyed their society.

I have been working with Aboriginal communities since the early 1970s. Those very statements were made to me at the time CDEP was developed. Why was it developed? Because Aboriginal people said they were sick of getting sit-down money. So what did they get as a replacement for the dole? They voluntarily contracted with the Commonwealth to have a work for the dole scheme. That is what they did because they were sick of communities getting sit-down money.

As John Altman pointed out recently, the CDEP scheme was not originally established to provide a stepping stone to permanent employment. He refers to research that he undertook in 1977 when the scheme was first introduced, in which he indicates:

... it was established to diminish the potential negative social impacts of unemployment benefits (passive welfare) as social security payments were extended to remote indigenous communities. The community control scheme sought to do this by providing flexible and part-time work to meet the participants’ diverse aspirations.

That is what we need to understand. The CDEP may well be an issue to do with passive welfare; but understand its origins. Its origins were an attempt by Indigenous Australians to move off passive welfare and go to work. That is what it was about.

What we need also to comprehend is the way in which this program has grown. Research again undertaken by Professor Altman indicates:

Between 1981 and 2001 the proportion of the Indigenous population employed in the CDEP scheme increased from 0.8—

in 1981—

to 10.9 per cent—

in 2001. He continues:

In 2002 the CDEP scheme accounted for over one-quarter of the total employment of Indigenous Australians, with 13 per cent of the working-age population being employed in the CDEP scheme.

The debate about CDEP and its appropriateness or otherwise is something we need to have, but we also need to understand that CDEP has been used by successive governments as a warehouse because they were not able to provide adequate and appropriate labour market programs for Indigenous people who were otherwise unemployed. That is what has happened: they have been shifted from the unemployment queue to CDEP. Once you are on CDEP you are counted as being at work. It is a nifty scheme. You move people off the unemployment queue and put them on CDEP, and then you do not count them as being unemployed.

The fact is that successive governments, particularly successive governments since 1996, have dropped the ball. They should have been doing what the Labor government was doing: providing transparent access from CDEP into labour market programs, so that you had traineeships for Indigenous people on CDEP and you had people being taken out of CDEP, put into traineeships and hopefully put into work. But we have seen the burgeoning of CDEP as a way of putting people into boxes. We need to revisit what this is all about and say that we need to provide access for people who are on CDEP to proper training and proper employment opportunities.

We know that there is high dependency on CDEP in very remote communities. Why is this? Simply because jobs are not available. It is also because, as we know from other sectors, people appreciate that the skill base of communities is low. Why is it low? Because they do not have access to basic educational services. So we see poor performance in numeracy and literacy.

This morning I had the good fortune to be at a hearing of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs when we had a submission from the Minerals Council of Australia about employment issues. The mining industry have taken—one of the things I commend to Ms McPherson and the cattle industry—a proactive approach to their community obligations in the communities in which they work, understanding that there are differences across Australia and that what might be appropriate for Western Sydney may not be appropriate for the north-east Arnhem Land or the Kimberley. We need to also appreciate that the skill levels will be different. The mining industry have said: ‘Hang on. The old rhetoric’s gone. We’re no longer throwing bombs at one another. We want to see a partnership. We want to take a lead in that partnership. We want to provide real work opportunities for Indigenous Australians.’ They are to be commended for it. We do not see the same in other industries. We certainly do not see the same in the pastoral industry.

I commend to the House the fact that we know there are young Aboriginal Australians who are working their darndest to try and get employment in the pastoral industry. I note there was a report about some young Territorians who have been working at Katherine rural college to gain skills that will get them employment in the pastoral industry. They have done that because they see the need to get those skills so they can access the work that is available on pastoral properties.

The best way to proceed on this issue is not through these hurtful headlines but to sit down and talk reasonably with people and get reasonable outcomes from those discussions. That will happen when you adopt the view that this is about change and when you accept responsibility as a government. It is not about blame but about accepting responsibility. Accepting your responsibility as a government means accepting your deficiencies in not providing appropriate resources for the social determinants of health: housing, education, employment opportunities and those sorts of basic infrastructure requirements that go towards giving people a better standard of living. When you do that—when you provide people access to work opportunities, whether they are in north-east Arnhem Land, the Kimberley, Central Australia or Sydney—you will find people will take up those opportunities. They will not be put off attempting to do so.

I note the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation, a CDEP organisation, have put a proposal to the government for it to fund Aboriginal rangers to work to help solve this issue of illegal fishermen coming to Australia’s shores. What has the government done? Senator Macdonald has rebuked them. Why were they rebuked? He said they did not have the skills and he was not prepared to fund them. Of course that is an insult and it should be seen as an insult. (Time expired)