Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this afternoon to speak on the failure of the minister to answer this question in a timely manner, noting that he has now answered it. If you look at the minister's answer, you see it falls into the category of 'if you don't ask exactly the right technical question then the department will use every opportunity to deprive you of the actual data that you're looking for,' when you know full well that they know exactly the information you are looking for. So I hope that much of this information does in fact come to light through the Senate inquiry that is now underway, because what's going on is this failed CDP is failing thousands of people in remote communities with devastating consequences on them at a personal level. It seems extraordinary to me that, confirmed at estimates, last year from July to just September, some 54,000 penalty notices were issued. And there have been more than 200,000 breach notices handed out since the new version of CDP began back in July 2015. What's amazing about this is that there are only 35,000 people in this program. So the idea that you could have 200,000 breach notices for a program that has just 35,000 people in it just shows what a heinous, overly bureaucratic, heavy handed program this actually is.

If the government were looking at where they really want to put their energy, where they really want to put their investment, it's not in punitive programs like this. Just think about the effort that it takes to regulate, control and send 200,000 breach notices. If the government were to reinvest that level of energy into supporting activities that are culturally determined by people locally on the ground, that would be meaningful for people to participate in. There are proposals that, frankly, have been about for some time about what these kinds of CDP programs could alternatively look like. We must go down the path of making those changes.

Senator Scullion, like me, was up in Senator Dodson's neighbourhood a couple of weeks ago for the Kimberley Land Council's Kimberley Ranger Forum. It's such a wonderful program that engages people in caring for country, caring for culture, and with meaningful economic and social outcomes. They are the kinds of programs that we should be investing in. We see communities desperately trying to cobble together resources to expand programs like the ranger program and they're being denied the opportunity to do that. A really good example of this were some wonderful women rangers that I met who are using Green Army funding to become rangers, and they've been monumentally successful. But the problem is that the money is about to run out, and they will be without jobs.

So what we see is the failure of the government to engage in the creation of meaningful opportunities, while they've got this heavy handed punitive approach to CDP. What we can see is that suspending people's welfare does not resolve the shortage of remote jobs. We need to see real engagement with these communities to create jobs. Nor indeed does this punitive approach encourage people to move off country in search of work elsewhere. The warnings in the ANU report that closing CDP would increase welfare dependency and impoverishment were indeed warranted. So the closure of the old CDEP and the creation of the CDP has indeed seen increased welfare dependency and impoverishment as a feature of the program. That was a finding of the ANU.

Indeed, they also said that there's a vastly disproportionate application of income penalties to CDP participants as compared to the equivalent program, such as the jobactive program, in non-remote areas. We have just 35,000 people engaged in this program, yet the statistics that were shown to me from APO NT demonstrated that those 35,000 people were subject to just about double the number of breaches compared to the general population involved in jobactive breaches, when in fact there are tens of thousands more people involved in jobactive programs than in CDP. The implications of this, according to the ANU, are profound. What you can see is that participants are incurring multiple penalties in a very short period of time. Again, I reflect back on the statistics I gave before, which were that we had some 54,000 penalty notices in just three months. This includes high rates of serious penalties that result in people being cut off welfare payments for eight weeks.

We know that job outcomes in remote areas are complicated and limited by a range of factors and that this is slow to resolve, but we can't resolve it through these punitive kinds of programs. We've got to resolve it through buy-in from the local community about the kinds of activities that are meaningful to their social and economic development—just as the ranger program does—and that are determined by people themselves, not through this very punitive process that we have with CDP. What we see with the program as it exists currently is increased harm, including poverty, a reported drop in food sales, increasing debt and a greater risk of incarceration when the suspension of welfare payments limits people's ability to make payments towards things like fines. We know that too many people in remote communities are locked up simply because they have fallen behind on fine repayments or can't pay them.

I've spoken to CDP participants whose confusion, frustration and anger about these issues is absolutely palpable. I'm pleased that there are an increasing number of Indigenous organisations and CDP providers mounting challenges against the scheme. I note that the Human Rights Commission have been asked to investigate whether the program is discriminatory, given that it is mostly affecting Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I also commend the ACTU for examining the scheme on the basis that it doesn't provide the kinds of benefits that standard employment should provide.

Behind the scenes, happily, there's a flurry of activity, as Aboriginal organisations concerned about these detrimental effects get organised, and I wish them well for the Senate inquiry that is underway. But, I have to say, it's no thanks to the work of this government and indeed our own Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion, who've seen fit to put this heinous, punitive approach to Indigenous participation in employment in place.

Question agreed to.