Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to acknowledge the great work that Senator Williams does in engaging, and in assisting me in engaging, Indigenous Australians in and around his electorates. When people think about jobs and the creation of jobs, it should not only be a number. This is about being able to engage so much in their own lives—economic independence, moving from poverty in many of these circumstances, is just so important. The Community Development Employment Program and the program that took over from that, the Remote Jobs and Communities Program, tragically ended up as an end place. People used to go into that to go and get a job, but they would end up in that program. I know people who were in that program for 16 years as a training program, and that was the element, I suppose, that we had so much difficulty in shifting. The other issue, of course, was ensuring that people were actually at that program. We have taken the attendance from five per cent when we took it over to 62 per cent now.

But, to move them out of that program, we needed to move them into jobs. We had a 10,000 target 12 months ago; we pushed straight through that target and we are now at 11,200, of which 3,600 have now been there for more than six months. This is a fantastic story, but it is all about the activities that people are involved in. We are not telling the communities; we are working with the communities. They are picking their own tasks. At Manyallaluk they said, 'We'd like to build a church.' I said, 'It's a big task,' but off they went about it and they built their own church at Manyallaluk. You can see that the steelworkers and the carpenters that came from that are feeling really, really proud, and they are now moving into real jobs. They are moving away from a training program. I would like to acknowledge and to thank many others across parliament for their work assisting us in this very successful program.