Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Remote Engagement Program) Bill 2021, and I move the amendment that has been circulated in the name of Senator Brown:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate:

(a) notes:

(i) that the proposed pilot remote engagement program is intended to replace the current remote employment program, the Community Development Program (CDP),

(ii) that the Government is the architect of the current failed CDP and the bill again delays long-overdue changes to this program,

(iii) concerns that this bill could entrench a welfare model, rather than job creation, economic development and self-determination, and

(iv) that this bill does not address fundamental issues in remote Australia such as housing and essential services; and

(b) calls on the Government to adopt Labor's policy of a remote employment program with real jobs, proper wages with full conditions, and meaningful community control".

This bill, and its remote engagement pilot program, was the government's first test of its commitment made to First Nations people on closing the gap. Let's be clear: it has failed the test.

The Prime Minister was very happy to stand in the parliament and talk all about the government's new partnership with First Nations peoples 'to fundamentally change how governments and First Nations people work together to achieve reform'. But this bill does not measure up, because the government failed to consult with the people affected by the bill. This bill discredits the partnership agreement the government made with the Coalition of Peaks and the First Nations people they represent. And it's very on-brand, isn't it, for the Prime Minister: always an announcement, never a deliverable.

Rather than consulting with First Nations people, rather than delivering a remote employment service that will create jobs and economic development and rather than addressing the underlying challenge of living in remote Australia, the government has decided to delay any change to the status quo and conduct a two-year pilot program. This is years after senators in this place—Senator McCarthy, Senator Dodson and I, as well as others—participated in a wideranging senate inquiry into the CDP, which was when the then minister, Minister Scullion, told us he was going to reform the CDP. So where are we? We have a pilot program and further delays.

Living in remote Australia is becoming increasingly more challenging. On average, remote Australians have shorter lives, higher levels of disease and injury and poorer access to health services than people living in metropolitan areas. This is caused by multiple factors. In addition to a lack of real jobs, there is a lack of adequate housing and a lack of access to essential services. These are real challenges.

AIHW data from 2018 shows that almost one in five Indigenous Australians is living in chronically overcrowded housing. Nationally, it's 18 per cent of First Nations people, compared to just five per cent of the general population. The level of overcrowding increases with remoteness, affecting over 20 per cent of adults in regional areas and over 48 per cent of adults in remote communities. The highest levels of overcrowding in Australia occur in remote Northern Territory areas. On the basis of the 2016 census, about 27,600 Aboriginal Territorians live in overcrowded houses, and 10,700 of those people are considered homeless.

This overcrowding and lack of adequate housing affects every aspect of community life. It increases the levels of domestic violence and suicide. It impacts on mental health. It increases a lack of safety, poor hygiene and the spread of disease. During the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing the issue of overcrowding has never been more important.

This problem is well known at all levels of government, and it is a continuing national shame. This bill continues that shame. It is an immense disappointment. Last year, the government signed up to revised targets in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, including a reduction of overcrowded housing. This bill fails that test. Nothing will fundamentally change for CDP participants in remote communities. What remote Australians are being offered, without consultation, is a two-year trial of new ways to undertake work-like activities. We don't know what 'work-like activity' means, but we do know that it won't mean real jobs. We don't know who will be eligible to participate in the trial, but we do know that these volunteers must stay on JobSeeker.

The new remote engagement program is just another Work for the Dole scheme; it is not a new employment service. It is unbelievable that the government continues down this path. It will not be replacing the CDP with a program targeting job and skill development. It's just undertaking a rebranding exercise. The two-year pilot is a rebranding exercise. It is the CDP by another name. A Labor government will replace the CDP with a genuine remote employment program, one that puts in place the best elements of the community development employment program, a program that creates real local jobs with proper wages and conditions and offers meaningful community control and a pathway to self-determination.

When the CDEP was operating in remote Australia jobseekers could do more than just receive their unemployment benefits. They could take on real local jobs created and administered by local First Nations communities and be paid at around the national minimum hourly rate. The CDEP offered a genuine alternative to being on welfare. There were flow on benefits for remote communities: meaningful control, a pathway to self-determination, a scheme operated under a flexible funding model that allowed communities to complete self-identified projects. This government appears to genuinely have a problem with the idea of Indigenous self-determination. I remind the Senate that the CDP was designed and implemented by this government. It is a broken and discriminatory program and it has been operating under various iterations since 2015. It's a remote Work for the Dole program. It's much harsher, with many more compliance requirements than are expected of jobseekers in other regions of Australia. I have seen with my own eyes the humiliating conditions that participants are subjected to, humiliating conditions for grown men and grown women literally working with garbage in some of the centres that I visited.

Time and time again the government tries to fiddle with the requirements of the CDP to make it less onerous, but it cannot be fixed. The Senate inquiry into the effectiveness and appropriateness of the CDP found that the program was an abject failure. Expert witnesses to that inquiry argued that the CDP was discriminatory and that it actually acted against job creation. The CDP was acting as a pool of cheap labour. These experts also said that the CDP was damaging, because more than 50 per cent of all penalties imposed on jobseekers across Australia were for people on CDP. The repeated breaches and imposed penalties resulted in the loss of income payments, causing financial distress and increasing poverty. I can well recall people fronting our committee and explaining that in their community many people just disengaged because the endless compliance requirements, the humiliations and the breaching meant that it was just not worth it. Financial distress and poverty resulted in more local crime and increased family violence. All these outcomes are well-known. They are not unknown to the government. They were acknowledged by Minister Scullion when he promised to change it years ago.

Why is the government being so stubborn? Why does it continue to reinvent and rebrand this failed program? Why doesn't it listen to remote Indigenous communities and leaders? I fear that it is because the government believes it knows best for remote Australians. It was just two years ago—2019—when the government said it would get to the bottom of remote jobseeker concerns on CDP by undertaking an evaluation. That evaluation found that most participants thought that the CDP had been bad for their communities and that the high penalty rates were discouraging people from participation in these work-like activities. Here we go again—same program rebadged.

Rather than responding to the concerns raised by First Nations people, the government has come into the parliament with a bill that offers more of the same. Aboriginal Peak Organisations Northern Territory, APO NT, told the Senate committee inquiry into this legislation that what the government still fails to understand is that CDP participants are already trained. They have worked and will work if there are jobs available. And data shows that nothing is changing for remote Indigenous communities under a Work for the Dole program. APONT also tell us that:

Over the last decade the employment 'gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in remote Australia has grown. Poverty, and the social harms that arise from it, have increased.

I'm not surprised, because the evidence from providers we spoke to in the inquiry some years ago was that, even when people undertook training, the provider didn't maintain a register of the people that had completed the training. Even when a job did become available in the community, the provider had no way of identifying which members of that community would be suitable for that work—because actually tracking what had been accomplished in the 'work-like activities' wasn't a part of the brief for these providers. What a disgrace.

Labor has many concerns with this bill and with this pilot program and they are, primarily, that it is just another government delaying tactic. It does not tackle the real challenges of living in remote Australia. It just kicks the issue down the road until after the next election. It brings back another Work for the Dole program, not a genuine remote employment service. But the bill does one thing: it will establish a remote engagement participation payment—a supplementary payment for volunteers in addition to their income support, and this payment—up to $190 a fortnight for 104 weeks—will be offered for undertaking these new 'work-like' activities. It's not for very many people. It's for 200 identified participants in the four identified pilot sites.

This is not a reform, it's a delay. Only the minister knows what the compliance regime attached to this pilot will be. But we do know that participants will not be offered the normal protections of other workers, like wages, leave, entitlements and superannuation. They will not be offered traineeships or apprenticeships. They will have no guarantee of a real job at the end of the two years. And the lack of detail in the bill means we do not know whether the pilot program will be discriminatory or compatible with human rights. The minister asks us to take this government on trust. But it has broken so many promises to First Nations people, the most recent being its failure to deliver a voice to the parliament, its failure to deliver a referendum on constitutional recognition in this term of government, and its absolute failure to roll out a national vaccine strategy for First Nations people. The government cannot be trusted to improve the lives of First Nations participants on CDP.

First Nations people do not need the government to adopt this delaying tactic. They are very clear: they want to be listened to, they want the CDP to end, and waiting two years is too long. They want action that addresses the challenges of remote living, challenges that affect their lives and are holding them back. A Labor government will end the CDP. We will listen to First Nations people and put in place a program that generates economic growth and creates job opportunities, because there is no substitute for paid employment. Labor respects the closing the gap approach to policy and program development. We will work with local Indigenous organisations on the kinds of local programs that will make a real difference, and our programs will be implemented by Aboriginal community controlled service providers and will include large-scale Indigenous employers in remote Australia. Their expertise will be central to the design of any new employment program

This bill, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Remote Engagement Program) Bill 2021, says it all. It reveals that the government has a problem with the idea of First Nations self-determination. Yet again, the government has not positively responded to the views of First Nations people. Yet again, it has adopted delaying tactics as a means of tackling a major problem, offering the parliament a slight nothingness as the way forward on addressing a big issue. We don't need two years of delay with a pilot. First Nations people have been telling this parliament and telling this government clearly and for many years that they want a new employment program implemented across the country, one that helps address the underlying challenges that are holding them back. What's the use of a trial in just four remote locations, when a good employment program should be flexible enough to be tailored to the needs of every community from the beginning? Remote Australians are tired of waiting. They should not be asked to be patient and keep waiting.

The situation in remote communities is dire. We won't stand in the way of the passage of the bill. The participation payment will provide benefit for some, a small number of CDP participants in those communities. But for the other 29,500-plus active CDP jobseekers—those who are unable to volunteer for the pilot—nothing will change for them. They will not receive the participation payment and they will remain on the CDP until sometime in the future—after the next federal election, I imagine, and most likely until 2023. This is not a good outcome, and it's not how a Labor government would approach it. We will listen to First Nations people. We will work with them on a program that gets people into local jobs, gives people hope and helps end poverty in remote communities.