Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I wanted to make a contribution to this debate—I'll keep it short. I am going to talk about some of these matters at a later time in the chamber. Firstly, I want to pick up on the comment that around 90 per cent of these penalties were waived. If that is true, all I can say is that I cannot imagine what impact the community would have felt if none of them were. I also was in Warburton during the winter break, and I saw and talked to people firsthand about the devastation—it's true to say 'devastation'—that has occurred in the community in terms of the penalties that have been applied. What the minister conveniently forgets to add is that it was 90 per cent of the eight-week breaches. I have not had the answer, but I have asked this question: what percentage of the breach does someone serve before they are then waived? They don't waive the no-show, no-pay rule. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds—in fact, thousands—of no-show, no-pay people. So that means that people lose money every day, and that is having a devastating impact on community. I've been in the community and I've talked to people about it, and the impact it is having is showing in the shops—in the stores, I should say. It's not fair to say, as the minister also implied, that there's a great move to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups as providers. I haven't seen a lot of evidence of that to date, and there are certainly still a lot of non-Aboriginal providers.

The minister made comments around moving to wages. I was really pleased when I heard at Garma about moving to community based wages, but there's no meat on the bones of the comments at this stage. The minister made the comment at the time they moved from RJCP. There are some issues around RJCP about which I agree with the minister; there certainly needed to be changes, and the communities were very clear about that. They all thought that they were getting CDP—that they were moving to community based wages, when in fact that clearly was not the case. The government have now said they are in fact going to move to that, and I will be very pleased to see that. We've got to take them at their word that they're going to be doing that, but at the moment we just can't judge that because we just don't know what that's going to look like. So I'm not getting too excited until I do actually see directly what exactly CDP is going to look like.

I have, in fact, seen the piles of letters that are turning up—just the Centrelink letters—in Warburton. I have actually seen with my own eyes the letters that are turning up—not necessarily the breach letters, but the letters with which Centrelink is communicating with income support recipients. That's an example of what is happening in other communities. It's terrifying. It's terrifying how Centrelink are communicating with Aboriginal people who are on income support. I have another example in Warburton. In fact, I suspect that Centrelink, when ringing in from Queensland into Western Australia, don't just forget about Australian Central Standard Time; I actually think they're ringing on Queensland time. I think they forget that they're in fact talking to different time zones, because when I myself was in Warburton—and I'll talk about this a bit later as well—twice while I was there they made appointments to ring people and did not ring at the right time. So who knows? Sometimes it might be Central Australian time. Sometimes it might be Queensland time. Who knows? All I know is that it has direct impacts for those on the ground who, if they don't turn up to their interviews, can get cut off. It's appalling.

Addressing CDP, I think we need to get on the record really clearly—which the Senate inquiry will do—the impacts that it is having in real life on people's lives. A lot of people have said to me: 'What happens now with all the damage that's been caused? Do we just forget that? Do we just forget what damage has been caused in these communities from CDP?' I tell you what: Aboriginal communities won't be forgetting the damage that's been caused by CDP.

I will be pursuing the issues that have been raised in Warburton a bit later, but in the meantime I think we urgently need to find out what is happening with CDP and when we can expect to see the meat on the bones of that particular program.