Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aged Care, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

In response to a question from ABC radio in Far North Queensland last week about the collapse of the Community Development Employment Program in the region and the financial and social damage that the collapse is causing, the Howard government, through the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, had this to say:

CDEP participants are being engaged in activities that are relevant to opportunities in the local labour market and will build on their employability skills.

One of these so-called relevant activities happened in Mapoon last Wednesday. Mapoon is an Aboriginal community on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula. I ask you, if you will, to picture the scene: a line of half-a-dozen men instructed to pick up litter along the road to the airport. It was an emu parade. What a demeaning and disgusting scene it was that was witnessed at that community last Wednesday.

We stopped emu parades in primary schools in the 1960s. I was a teacher and we did not do them when I was teaching in the seventies and eighties. The fact is that DEWR, with the fine language of ‘building employability skills’ is also talking about sit-down money—that is, money for doing nothing—which this government said it was completely opposed to. It is another practice that Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders find demeaning and pointless, but it is the case that that is also what is happening in Mapoon. That is what the Howard government regards as ‘activities that are relevant to opportunities’ in Mapoon and building employability skills for its people. This is what the Howard government’s sad and warped view of the world has done to a program that Mapoon was using very successfully for community development, enterprise building and the personal advancement of particularly its young people.

The changes to CDEP were intended, according to the usual Howard government motherhood statements, to ‘build on success’, to allow Indigenous Australians ‘to have the same opportunities to get as much out of life as other Australians’, so they can ‘earn a fair wage, achieve their potential and help provide a better life for their children’. But what do we get in reality? We get emu parades and sit-down money. We get a real threat to the future of an entire community.

What does Mapoon think of this? Councillor Ailsa Ling said in a council media release last Friday that ‘in 12 years of managing CDEP we never paid sit-down money’. As for the emu parades, she said: ‘Surely this is not real work. This is just demoralising. As an elected community representative, I am embarrassed.’ Councillor Ling is too polite. The Howard government ought to be ashamed of itself, were it not for the fact that this is a government that is shameless.

Mapoon is a terrific example of a community that has used CDEP money and funds from other federal and state schemes to develop itself on its own terms. It saw a real future for itself and a real future for its young people. Mapoon had become a strong, proud and effective community. The history of this place is a story of community triumph over extreme adversity, of the power of a people’s love of their land and of place.

In the early 1960s, the people of Mapoon were forcibly removed to make way for bauxite mining. Their homes and their possessions—everything—were burnt to the ground in front of their faces. They were then scattered right across Cape York Peninsula for 30 years, but they never forgot where they came from and what they had lost. Over the years, gradually, one by one, family by family, they began to return to Old Mapoon, as they knew it. By 1993 the Marpuna Aboriginal Corporation was established and in 1999 Mapoon again gained community status. Today it is a thriving community. It is successful, cohesive and determined. Its strong community vision and the clear strategies that it has developed to achieve it have won national recognition.

The same federal government that is now doing its utmost to destroy the community announced in 2003 that Mapoon had won the only national award for excellence in local government. Mapoon was the winner out of 350 councils, mainstream and others, that had nominated for the award. The council, apart from its usual responsibilities, runs a very successful fishing and crabbing business, a farm, a home and community care service, a turtle conservation project and a retail store. Mapoon’s road crew is making the transition from a CDEP funded program to a mainstream enterprise in partnership with Comalco.

Now, thanks to the free-market zealots and the other antisocial elements in the Liberal and National parties, Mapoon is reduced to an emu parade and sit-down money. This is because the new private sector CDEP contractor, Community Enterprise Australia, still does not have a permanent presence in the community—it does not have offices or other facilities—and the council fears, and this is the nub, that it does not have the requisite experience and knowledge to be successful. As of today, it appears that CEA cannot account for about 30 CDEP workers following the contract handover from Mapoon Council. I am told that it has informed council that it has 23 people on its books when the total should be more than 50.

Mapoon Aboriginal Shire is also questioning the way in which CEA is conducting itself in this small and very tight-knit community. Mayor Peter Guivarra said:

The current attitudes of CEA are unethical and are dividing the community. They are targeting individuals in the community and playing dirty community politics to try and achieve outcomes for monetary gain.

The divisiveness being engendered by the implementation of the Howard government’s extreme and arrogant policies has directly resulted in police having to be called to Mapoon to ensure that the transition to the new CDEP provider is smooth. I am told that council staff have been abused by a CEA employee over the handover of a CDEP vehicle. Deputy Mayor William Busch said in a media release today:

Mapoon residents should not be directly placed in the middle of CEA management issues. This type of destruction is paralysing this once peaceful community.

Threats and violence have never been the way of Mapoon, and today’s news is very disturbing. It warrants an immediate and independent investigation. But what is now happening today in Mapoon sounds just like the Howard government—willing to be sneaky, dishonest and unethical and to divide a community to get its own way. It is as if these changes have been implemented so as to cause the collapse of CDEP and employment in Mapoon. At the very least they are intended to transfer as much of the cost of service delivery as possible from the Commonwealth to the states and local government.

Another part of the government’s response to ABC Radio Far North was that it had put in place a system that was:

... focussed on obtaining value for money for the Commonwealth in achieving outcomes for Indigenous Australians.

In other words—without the cyclonic spin for which this government is infamous—it is about saving money. There is nothing in these changes that is even remotely likely to improve services to Indigenous communities, to provide more jobs or to make those jobs more meaningful, constructive and satisfactory. These proposals are about saving money. That is it.

There is nothing in these changes to promote self-determination—quite the reverse. They disempower communities and they strip away their pride and sap their strength. Councillor Guivarra said:

The way this mess has been dealt with has been disgusting. This is the craziest thing the Government has ever done to us. They’ve got no idea what it’s doing. It’s just creating destruction.

Councillor Guivarra also asked a very pertinent question. He called on the government to admit to a broader agenda concerning remote Indigenous communities. He asked:

Is mainstreaming the new term for the dismantling of remote indigenous communities?

That is a very good question.

There is a very sinister aspect to all of this, and it has a context that has been enunciated by a number of Howard government ministers and members of parliament. We have had Senator Vanstone describing small Indigenous communities in North Australia as ‘unviable’ and ‘cultural museums’, and questioning whether it is worth spending money to sustain them. These are my constituents, Senator Vanstone. We have had the Member for Herbert, Mr Peter Lindsay, calling for the closure of Palm Island and a return to the days of forced relocation, saying that residents of communities such as Palm Island, Lockhart River and Aurukun should be moved into major urban centres in the name of integration.

We have had the health minister, in his usual arrogant, abrasive and ignorant manner, abusing the hospitality of the people of Torres Strait on a recent visit by hectoring them about their eating habits and their physical attributes, just to top off his extraordinary call for a return to paternalism in Indigenous affairs. The people of the Torres Strait were appalled and angered by the fact that he did not even know the difference between the cultures of the people of the Torres Strait and Aborigines.

We have had the Prime Minister, parroted by others, floating the idea of scrapping communal Indigenous ownership of land in favour of individual ownership. We have had the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs orchestrating attacks on individual Aboriginal communities by making completely deceitful comments about them and going to quite extraordinary lengths to stereotype them. This insidious practice of denigrating Indigenous people and questioning their right to live on their own land is not new to the people of Mapoon. They well remember the insulting and hurtful comments in the Queensland parliament of Mr Kevin Lingard, the National Party member for Beaudesert, on the passage of the bill which re-established this community, when he questioned the fundamental right of the people of Mapoon to return home to re-establish their community. He said:

We are going to be very, very careful when looking at Aboriginal communities in which a certain group of Aboriginal people go off and set up a settlement ... they set up a settlement of maybe of maybe 10 families and expect the Government to provide schools, shops and all sorts of infrastructure. Unfortunately, that is what happened at Mapoon.

No, Mr Lingard, the National Party member for Beaudesert, that is not what happened. These people, finally, 30 years later, were allowed to return home. Now, again, they have to defend their community, and this time it is from the Liberal Party and the Howard government.

We have had the Howard government, in another of its typically sly efforts at silencing its critics, passing electoral changes aimed at hindering the ability of people in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to vote. There can be no doubt about the real intention of the changes to CDEP and the real context of those changes. If anyone has any remaining doubt, let me relate the experience of one CDEP manager who rang DEWR to ask where he was supposed to find mainstream jobs in his remote community. The response he received was this: ‘If there are no jobs in the community then people who want employment will just have to move somewhere else.’ This is the depopulation of community land and communities by this government without naming it. They are just not naming it; they are just doing it. There you have it. If Indigenous people want to ‘have the same opportunities to get as much out of life as other Australians, so they can earn a fair wage, can achieve their potential and help provide a better life for their children’, as the Howard government puts it, they always have one of its wonderful choices: to move off their traditional lands and away from their family and friends.

Indigenous communities in North Queensland have had absolutely no say and no choice in the CDEP changes. They were presented as a fait accompli at the so-called consultations in Cairns in February 2005. These consultations were nothing but a sleazy fraud and a disgraceful piece of bullying by the Howard government. Community representatives who live on distant communities with limited and very expensive air transport were given four days notice of the so-called consultations; many got less than that. Many simply could not attend, either because of the timing or because of the cost. They were supposed to be given a 32-page discussion paper for the consultations. Many did not receive it. I had to provide it to many myself. Then, when those who could make it to the consultations arrived, they found that the 32-page discussion paper was in fact a hit list of items that the Howard government was going to bulldoze through, irrespective of any opposition from communities.

At the time the changes were proposed, fears were expressed about the lack of detail in the tender processes to be used. These fears have been compounded by the experience of Mapoon and other councils. Mayor Guivarra, in his statement last Friday, described the tender process as appalling and said that his council lost its contract despite two independent reports commissioned by DEWR supporting it, as well as five consecutive unqualified audits. He is right to ask, ‘What more does DEWR want?’

In my view, CDEP does need an overhaul. But it needs an overhaul that truly builds on its strengths as a provider of real employment—proper jobs—and genuine, appropriate training as a means of real enterprise building in remote communities, which can only occur when the CDEP is totally connected into the community. This is not the case in Mapoon and many of the communities in Far North Queensland. It does not need an overhaul that turns it into a money-making scheme for the private sector with no understanding of the local situation.

CDEP can, as has been demonstrated by Mapoon, be an instrument of community-wide development through self-determination if the conditions are right. These include closer links between councils and training organisations, an appropriate level of capital and administrative support for councils, and conditions that encourage the recruitment and retention of expert staff by councils. Remote communities such as those in Far North Queensland do have special circumstances that need to be recognised and considered rather than ignored or papered over. The blanket tendering-out of CDEP is poor policy which will have significant ramifications for many communities like Mapoon. I urge the government to revisit this policy and think of the people that they are hurting.