Marion Scrymgour (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Northern Australia Joint Select Committee, I present the following reports: Northern Australia workforce development: final report; and Interim report energy, food and water security.

Reports made parliamentary papers in accordance with standing order 39(e).

by leave—As chair of the Joint Select Committee on Northern Australia, I am pleased to table the committee's final report Northern Australia workforce development. The report seeks to address the multifaceted challenges we face in northern Australia. The shared goal is to create an intergenerational workforce that can harness the potential of our resources and of our people.

The report comprises six chapters and covers a range of issues. It makes a number of recommendations, including establishing an equivalent committee by the 48th parliament and extending the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility well beyond its current termination date of 30 June 2026, going back to a time when northern Australia was seen optimistically as a land of potential and opportunity. The reality has been more one of hard graft sandwiched between boom and bust cycles. In northern Australia, progress has been further stymied by a legacy of inadequate foundational infrastructure.

There are two key priorities that we focused on. First, we want to support industries that can sustain and develop the north, especially those industries that can have a direct contribution to Australia's northern economy. These include long-term mainstays such as mining, agriculture and tourism and emerging sectors such as renewable energy. Second, we want to leverage employment to underwrite and maintain social wellbeing and advancement. This application is particular to the many remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities spread over a geographically vast terrain of comparatively thinly populated territory. These communities constitute and validate Australia's occupation and sovereignty over much of the top half of the continent. An early paragraph from the report states:

… throughout remote Northern Australia there are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities living on land to which they have traditional associations and obligations. Australia's near neighbours in South-East Asia and the South Pacific assess Australia's maturity and evolution to some extent by reference to how successfully we are managing to weave these communities into the tapestry of our nation. Australia's own expectations in this regard are not being met, and the challenges being faced are complex and intractable. These challenges include social disengagement arising from the absence of social validation and associated loss of discipline and self-esteem which comes with not having sufficient, structured paid employment. Creating and maintaining jobs in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities is an important end in itself, which justifies subsidisation or part-subsidisation of employment to counter the health, including mental health, and family dysfunction harms many Northern Australian communities are experiencing. Harnessing opportunities in private sector enterprises is obviously preferable wherever it can be facilitated.

On our various trips in northern Australia, we had a look at—particularly in the Northern Territory, where in the 1970s the Commonwealth was directly running the Northern Territory, Aboriginal people in the communities used to be paid money under what was called the training allowance scheme. This was usually referred to as a training wage. There was less access to the mainstream economy, and communities needed to be considerably more self-sufficient than they are now. Many communities had their own bakeries, market gardens and piggeries. Working in a designated community job for a number of hours a day was a social norm. By the end of 1973, all communities reported that the training wage was gone, replaced by the standard Australian entitlement to unemployment benefits—what some Aboriginal people right across northern Australia called 'sit down money'.

In subsequent years, a result of an innovative self-help initiative pioneered by various Indigenous communities in conjunction with a visionary federal public servant Nugget Coombs, the Community Development Employment program came into being—not to be confused with the similar sounding more recent measure of CDP. Both programs could not be more different from each other. Under CDEP, a lot of participants talked about how they forewent their entitlement to receive unemployment benefits. They would instead be employed by a local community council or organisation to work for a CDEP wage. The work hours didn't amount to full-time work and the work tasks were often mundane and repetitive. But there was value both in the outcome of the task and in the fact that Aboriginal adults were busy and engaged in work for the benefit of the community. As someone with a long connection to local government in the Tiwi Islands, I can attest to the difference CDEP work brought to the islands in pride and the simple visual of the communities.

CDEP has had its many critics, and Aboriginal communities noted that. There were those who said it just parked participants in dead-end positions rather than energising them to go out and look for so-called 'real' jobs. There were concerns about cost shifting, particularly in the context of taxpayers' money going to local government councils. It was said that those workers should have been paid from a separate local government funding bucket where the local community had an enterprise arm and employing CDEP workers in a shop, mud brick factory or art centre, expanding their working day by paying top-ups from enterprise income. The complaint was that the taxpayer was being dudded. We talked to the various people who'd worked with organisations like Bawinanga in Maningrida, and people were saying they were getting an unfair business advantage.

What really put the nail in the coffin of CDEP was that, at the commencement of the Northern Territory Intervention, it was clear that CDEP workers were avoiding being income managed and that was not acceptable. Things changed and welfare programs came in, first a remote jobs community program under Labor and then CDP under the coalition. In each instance, a lot of the participants were not treated as wage earners but instead were treated as human works in progress, being coaxed down a path towards a notional 'real' job while at the same time being the recipient of a government benefit with strings attached.

For the most part, there were no real jobs; instead, people were directed to undertake Work for the Dole under the guise of a mutual obligation as an after thought. These schemes and their associated strict compliance rules have been supervised by outside job placement contractors. These contractor businesses and agencies have made a fortune while the participants have lost heart, and we saw that right across a lot of the feedback we got in Western Australia, in the member for Durack's electorate, throughout the Northern Territory and also in north Queensland. Successive new generations of adults have come into the system who have never got to experience the self-esteem and community recognition which CDEP used to take for granted.

As the committee travelled across northern Australia, in particular the Northern Territory, we had a look at what has been achieved since the abandonment of this work program and what did we get. We got remote communities where endemic unemployment is baked into the social structure, where one aspirational training module leads to another. We got increased domestic violence. We got disengagement of young people, and the appalling associated scourge of youth suicide. We got a stream of failures of long-established community organisations, some of them long gone, some of them hanging on by a thread following contract after contract being awarded to outside.

But on the plus side, we got the preferential awarding of very limited employment opportunities to a minority made up of mainly the skilled and the gifted. It is great when the skilled and the gifted can find their way into the job market with the full-time 'real jobs' that are available. But for most, and what we saw right across northern Australia, the social crises our communities are experiencing don't arise from or relate to the skilled and the gifted; instead, they arise from and relate to the enormous cohort of the unskilled and the ungifted, a significant number of them challenged or even impaired. These are people who might never get into full-time 'real jobs' but who are nevertheless capable of undertaking honest, basic work of a kind which used to have a social status back in the CDEP days. We can go back to that model, as we saw across northern Australia. People who don't want to work can get sit-down money and remain under strict compliance rules, including income management through the BasicsCard. But, for people who do want to work, we as a country should make sure that they get CDEP-type jobs with local community employers. They should be able to do that even if their education and training background is poor. They should have the chance to do basic work under a 2020s equivalent of CDEP and be paid a non-income-managed basic wage.

This kind of subsidisation of work is taxpayer money well spent and serves as an important protective shield against a suite of toxic social harm. It is why we have recommended that the program to replace CDP, which replaced the RJCP in 2015, provides for a program participant to be paid wages under employment contracts with community based employers for stipulated work undertaken rather than being participants of a government transfer payment and for participants to be eligible for superannuation and top-up payments.

Most of the population of this country is concentrated in coastal towns and regions, but as a nation we see ourselves as an indivisible whole. If we want employment and economic growth across northern Australia, which is a reality for most Australians, we need to invest in and, yes, subsidise our remote communities to make them viable and functional. We have to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who live in these communities the support and the incentives to resist the temptation to go and live in towns. We need them to instead make a success of their communities on country. It starts with the dignity and recognition of employment in a basic job.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone. We had many submissions when we travelled through the Kimberley, through the Northern Territory and also through northern Australia. The member for Leichhardt certainly provided some fantastic meetings. As the deputy chair of the committee, I want to thank the member for Leichhardt. I also want to thank the member for Dawson and also my colleagues on the Labor side. The committee was one where there were very few disagreements. We had our disagreements, but we managed to work through them. The final report showed that there wasn't a dissenting report. I think that there is a commitment from all members of the committee to look at the issues right across northern Australia. Unless we fix what's happening across northern Australia, the rest of Australia will suffer. So I want to thank everyone who participated. There were many submissions. In my report, I touched on the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. When we looked across northern Australia, we looked across many of the incentives that can happen. I think we've got to bring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into an economic future. If we don't do that then we will lose another couple of generations. It's really important that Aboriginal people see themselves as part of the solution and not the problem. I think getting economic development in an honest and right way will mean there is a future, particularly for the younger generation.

I thank the staff. The member for Dawson, I know, will talk about them. There's been a huge changeover of secretariat staff, but I do want to thank them, going back to all of the early staff that travelled with us and the current staff. Whilst this is the final report on workforce development, there is an interim report on energy, food and water security, and that will be the next report. The other report that the committee will finalise next year, when parliament resumes, is the report that we will submit on the inquiry in terms of the cyclone reinsurance.

Andrew Willcox (Dawson, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I fully support the fine words from the member for Lingiari. The Joint Select Committee on Northern Australia undertook a northern Australia workforce development inquiry. The committee received 83 submissions and held public hearings in eight different locations. We produced an outstanding report, with 12 commonsense, clear, concise recommendations. We've got a good group. We work together. We put the politics aside. We get the job done, because every single person in our committee wants to do the best they possibly can for northern Australia.

I acknowledge the chair, the member for Lingiari, Marion Scrymgour, and the fine work and leadership that she's given this committee. She's given everybody a fair go at all times. I thank you so much for that. The deputy chair, the member for Leichhardt, has indulged me with this today because he's retiring—Warren Entsch. Thank you very much, Warren. We are so fortunate to have members, including a chair and deputy chair, that know so much about northern Australia and who are so passionate about northern Australia. You can see that through this report and the delivery of it.

I'd also like to acknowledge the secretariat: the secretary, Alan Raine, and research officers Dr Ros Hewett and Jason See. Thank you for your good work. We really appreciate it.

I believe recommendation 1 in the report is the most important:

The committee recommends that the House of Representatives and the Senate reconstitute a Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia in the 48th Parliament.

Northern Australia contributes so much to the country's wealth, to our food supply, and even to our country's defence. Northern Australia is the land of opportunity. Another important recommendation is No. 11:

The committee recommends that the Australian Government, when developing and implementing measures to address housing shortages in Northern Australia, consider the provision of suitable housing for both families and people in other situations, including young, single workers in rural, remote and very remote communities.

I'd just like to explain to the House that in our travels we came across many First Nations communities where there were lots of houses for families. However, the families then became overcrowded, and some of the young people who had to do shift work or come back in from their job couldn't get the appropriate rest required. We think that, if we can get some more single workers' accommodation built, we'll have a lot better outcomes for some of those communities.

I would also like to just touch on something that is a little bit outside the scope of the inquiry, because it didn't quite fit within workforce development. But we did identify two things that are a big problem for First Nations people, in a couple of communities in particular, and those are rheumatic heart disease and strongyloidiasis, which is essentially worms. This is a big problem. You can't ask people to go and get a job and work if they're unwell. I've got a commitment from our chair and our deputy chair, and we're going to go through some of those recommendations and pass them on to Health and see if we can get a better outcome for some of those communities. I think we definitely should be able to do that. With those few words, I look forward to speaking to the report in more detail in the Federation Chamber. I fully endorse the report and recommend it to the House.