Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Remote Engagement Program) Bill 2021. This bill will build on the Morrison government's commitment to reform employment services, and is a critical component of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. It is one of the many bills that the Morrison government is progressing during this sitting period to advance the causes of regional Australians, especially Indigenous Australians.

This is a bill that I am particularly glad and proud to stand up and speak on today because this is a reform I have been championing for over a decade, long before I came into this place nearly 2½ years ago. I commend the government for bringing on the introduction to this bill, and I am proud to be part of a government that puts in place such sensible reforms in this area. This bill enables remote communities to co-design their implementation of government services—a real voice to government, if you will. This bill will help reform remote employment services, and it will do it in a way that sees the ongoing rollout of these services adjusted by feedback from populations of remote communities. The reforms will also be piloted in partnership with remote communities, ensuring that support is available to aid in the rollout.

This bottom-up design and implementation is what communities have been asking for for a long time, and it is what we are delivering. Those opposite love to pay lip-service when it comes to the idea of a true Indigenous voice. When it disagrees with their blinkered world view—when communities cry out for things like the cashless debit card, for example—they run a mile and return to their top-down Canberra-based decision-making model. They are more concerned about appeasing latte lefties than actually listening to communities. I will have more to say about the cashless debit card in a moment. Labor's lies in that area really need to be called out.

I go back to the positive reform that is the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Remote Engagement Program) Bill 2021. This bill will provide the framework that allows new approaches to welfare and employment services provision to be piloted in remote communities ahead of wider implementation of the government's budget commitment to the Community Development Program, the CDP, which will be replaced in 2023. Lessons learnt from the pilot sites will inform the design of the new program to be rolled out in 2023. Initially we estimate around 200 eligible jobseekers across the pilot sites will volunteer for this payment.

The collaboration supported in this bill will allow communities to develop programs that are appropriately flexible, enabling the building of skills and capabilities of the people in remote communities. Importantly, this bill will not see a return to the old training for training's sake model that has really been a blight across much of these sorts of programs. In fact, it will move our service delivery in the opposite direction. I've seen the hopelessness that can be overcome when people get a job. I've seen the hopelessness of people undergoing training for training's sake and it not leading anywhere. We know that many people have dozens of qualifications yet no job prospects. Equally, I've seen the positive life transformations that can occur when someone gets a job.

Over the decades governments of different stripes have tried different approaches to employment services delivery in remote Australia. We're constantly learning what works and, importantly, what doesn't in urban, suburban, regional and remote environments. We know that one size does not fit all. Many of the more detailed aspects of this new approach will be set out in legislative instruments and policy guidance—for example, any additional qualification criteria for the supplement and the exact rate of payment—allowing this flexibility to adjust as lessons are learnt and as communities' ideas change over the course of the pilot. This is best practice. It's going to allow first-hand experience to guide the implementation of services.

Australians living in remote communities face complex environment challenges different from those experienced in the city and even regional areas. Remote areas cover 75 per cent of the Australian landmass; however, there are fewer jobs available in remote areas—we know that—with less than two per cent of actively trading businesses located in these regions.

The key reform this bill introduces is a new supplementary payment that will be made to eligible jobseekers in the Remote Engagement Program pilot communities so that they can engage in activities or placements like having a job. The placements will build participants' skills in roles that will deliver goods or services to benefit local communities and provide a pathway for jobseekers to find a job. This bill supports the government's commitment to work in genuine partnership, to co-design, with Indigenous Australians.

The new payment will be paid at a fortnightly rate of between $100 and $190. It will be additional to certain primary income support payments and other supplements for eligible jobseekers. The new payment will not be subject to the income test laid down in the Social Security Act. It can be paid for a maximum of two years, at which time the government will have finalised the replacement to the more wide-ranging CDP.

Why would anyone want to stand in the way of this? No-one would unless of course they were just politically motivated to do so. But we know that this is just how the Labor Party likes to operate. The reality is that communities want to be able to engage in the design of their own program. I listened carefully to Senator McAllister's speech earlier, where she talked about Labor's position. This is a program that allows an opportunity for communities to design the program themselves, for them to have input into it.

There was criticism that there's not enough detail in the bill, but it would be quite disingenuous of the government to put detail in before they've actually engaged in the co-design process. The whole idea of this bill is to enable that to start so that there can then be engagement with the community to design and then implement it, based on that feedback and the community's design. That's why there's provision within this bill to do it by instrument, to have provisions that will be dealt with at a later stage, once that design process has been worked out, so it then can be implemented.

But we know that Labor are often politically motivated—and it's shameless—as with the cashless debit card. I want to call out the Labor Party for their shameless and baseless scare campaign. You would all be aware of it—the lie that the government is somehow going to force pensioners onto the cashless debit card. This scare campaign is ironic, because the government proposed an amendment to ensure that pensioners would stay off the cashless debit card, and Labor voted against that motion. That's the record in this place. Why did Labor do that? Were they afraid that their scare campaign wouldn't work if they voted to prevent pensioners from going onto the cashless debit card?

This deserves to be called out. Yet, on the other hand, Labor have committed to scrapping the card. I've worked for over 10 years dealing with this, in close consultation with communities and community organisations, to see this card implemented. This card has seen a reduction in crime, a reduction in domestic violence and a reduction in ambulance call-outs. It is a card that takes cash out of the hands of drug dealers. And Labor wants to scrap this card. They cite rights, as if government welfare in cash form is some form of right. We, on this side of the House, care more about the rights of children to be fed and of women to be safe from domestic violence. Labor's capitulation to the left-wing base on this issue is shameful. It will see outcomes worsen in our regions, undoing years of good work. Shame on them!

In summing up, I return to what this bill is about. It enables remote communities to co-design the implementation of government services—a real voice to government, if you will. As I said, I listened carefully to Senator McAllister. I'm not going to stand here and say that the CDP program is perfect or that it's a flawless program. In fact, in my first speech in this Senate I spoke about the fact that there need to be significant reforms across the whole employment services area. And I've committed myself, while I am in this place, to be part of the discussion, part of the design and part of the movement to see the changes that are required. But we don't get this from the Labor Party. I sat through the inquiry—and Senator Chandler is here as well; she's the chair of the Finance and Public Administration Committee, which had a good look at this program—and we heard from communities on the ground and from individuals who will be dealing with this program. There's quite some enthusiasm about the opportunity to be part of the design of this program. Yet Labor just takes the political point score, rather than actually dealing with the opportunities that are here. Now, I welcome support for this bill, but, in doing so, they just want to make a cheap shot.

This bill will help reform remote employment services. This is a good thing. It needs to happen. There does need to be reform, and the government's committed to that. But you've got to be able to design it and prove it up first, before you really move forward. This bill enables us to do that. It enables us to put in place, in consultation and co-design with the community, the things that they recognise would work for them. We know that when you run a program from a Canberra-driven, top-down model you end up running a program to the community, and that never works. You've got to run the program with the community.

An honourable senator interjecting—

I take the interjections—this provides the opportunity for the community to be part of the design for a program that works for them. It is the height of paternalism to suggest, by way of this sort of disruption, that communities won't know what's good for them. They're part of the design of this program, and that's a good thing because it's going to get us better results. We've got to see better results in these communities. The reforms will be piloted in partnership with remote communities, ensuring that support is available to aid in the rollout.

This bottom-up design and implementation is what communities have been asking for for a long time. I've spent a lot of time in communities. This year has been a little disrupted—every time I go home after coming over here I have to go into quarantine, and that has limited the amount of time I get to go around the communities. But, just before the last sitting, I had a couple of days where I got out into Leonora and Laverton. I engaged with the service providers out there and engaged with the community. I literally sat on the red dirt out there with a bunch of young fellows that were engaging with an employment program. There is a real desire to see reform in this space. The reform that is enabled through this bill is welcomed by the communities because it's going to make a real difference. This bottom-up design and implementation is what communities have been asking for for a long time. This is enabling us to do four or five pilot sites, and that's a good thing. I'm looking forward to the day when we can roll it out to even more communities. That's going to be even better. But you've got to get it right.

The opportunity that this pilot provides is to trial different things and get feedback; it's a chance to, at times, make a mistake but then learn from it and work out how we can improve the design. Then we can take it out to the entire country to deal with the 50-plus CDP regions across the country and ensure that there is a program that actually meets the needs of the communities and, importantly, gets people off welfare and into a job. Anyone that says to you that there are not the economies in these locations is actually misleading, or they're misunderstanding the opportunity that exists. Where there is population, where there is a community, where there are people, there is an economy and there is an opportunity. We've got to stop this business of having lowered expectations for these communities. It's the racism of lowered expectations which is going to hold back this nation, particularly these communities. We've got to expect, like they do, that things can be better and that, when they're in the driving seat, they can make the difference.

Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] I can't remember ever being in a position to congratulate this government, but congratulations to you for finally realising that the Community Development Program is an utter failure. Despite the expenditure of millions of dollars, the CDP has failed to deliver employment, economic development or a sustainable future to remote communities. It has taken this government six long years to realise that the CDP just isn't working—six long years of participants in remote areas pointing out to this government the fatal flaws in this program, a program that has not led to jobs, opportunity or community development. What it has led to is entrenched poverty, hopelessness, hunger and despair. It has actually caused damage to remote communities and participants, cutting people off from income support, putting additional strains and stresses on families and eroding self-respect and dignity by taking a draconian, punitive approach.

The CDP is discriminatory and it is broken. First Nations communities, individuals and organisations, along with Labor, have been saying this for six years, and it's not just us who have been continually drawing attention to the failures of CDP. This government has always known there are fundamental problems with its remote community employment model, But, instead of listening to the people on the ground and the experts, it has just fiddled around with the program for six long years, fixing nothing and further entrenching poverty in remote communities. I've been asking questions about CDP since I was first elected to this place in 2016. It was one of the first major issues raised with me by Territorians and is still one of the major issues people talk to me about as I travel across the Territory. And, in spite of all the efforts and tweaking and fiddling, the complaints and the issues are still the same: CDP is punitive and pointless and it keeps people poor.

The CDP has been a discriminatory program since its inception. The majority of participants in the scheme—more than 80 per cent—are First Nations people in remote communities. The requirements and obligations imposed on CDP participants are more onerous than those that apply to jobseekers and income support recipients outside the CDP regions. And, because the requirements were more onerous, CDP recipients were in breach of their obligations and suspended from payments for longer and more often than non-CDP participants. The federal government's own review of its remote Work for the Dole program in 2019 found that the First Nations CDP participants were three times more likely to be penalised for non-attendance and were penalised more often. They went without income for longer periods and were less likely to be exempted on medical grounds, despite a much higher burden of disease and illness in remote First Nations communities. Poor mental health or physical health, disabilities and other personal problems also meant people were more likely to be penalised. The most penalised cohort were men under 35. These are men with families—with dependants—who were cut off from income support with no other means of getting money to support themselves and their families, and many people, particularly young people, were completely disengaged from the income support system. Once breached, many did not re-engage with the social security system. Many young people did not engage from the get-go, discouraged by the onerous obligations and sometimes meaningless activities.

The 2019 government review reported that social problems had increased since the introduction of the CDP, including an increase in break and enters by children and young people, predominantly to steal food; an increase in domestic and family violence; an increase in financial coercion and family fighting; and an increase in mental health problems and feelings of shame, depression, sleep deprivation and hunger. Feelings of frustration and stress were reported when trying to deal with Centrelink from remote communities with limited online and telephone access and few opportunities to engage face to face.

The report—your report—said the CDP had the opposite of its intended effect to get people off welfare or 'sit-down money'. In fact, it said quite clearly that the research found no evidence to suggest that penalties were an effective way to generate engagement in the program. The research found that for some jobseekers, penalising them had the opposite effect—it was demotivating and disempowering for participants and so they did not engage. There was no evidence that the CDP had an effect on the number of participants obtaining a job. Remember, all of this was laid out clearly in this government's own evaluation in 2019.

I bring this back to the Senate to remind the government of all the moments you have missed to get this sorted. You had the evidence of CDP's failures well before this. In 2017 the National Audit Office said the CDP cost almost twice as much as the previous Work for the Dole scheme. It cost $10,494 per person to deliver CDP at the time, while the previous Remote Jobs and Communities Program cost $5,071 per jobseeker.

We knew from a report by the ANU Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research in 2018 that there had been a 740 per cent increase in financial penalties since the CDP replaced the previous Remote Jobs and Communities Program in 2015 and that remote workers were 25 times more likely to be penalised than non-remote jobseekers and 50 times more likely to have a serious penalty imposed, which meant up to eight weeks with no payment. This government was even under attack from its own over the CDP, with former Indigenous affairs minister Fred Chaney calling it a 'national disgrace':

Chaney said there was a "total carelessness shown for the hardship inflicted on remote Aboriginal people and the damage being done by this denial of the facts.

"In my view, this policy is a national disgrace. It is a reversion to the attitudes of the past.

"It's another assimilationist, bureaucratic, irrelevant approach that will inflict more hardship, hunger and dysfunction on Aboriginal people.

"It’s not community building, it’s the reverse. The more I see of it, the more I think we are reverting to the habits of the 1940s and 1950s."

So, Mr Chaney was very clear in his criticisms of the CDP, which were published in October 2018.

Did the government take action and dump the fundamentally flawed CDP? Did they go back to the drawing board? Did they actually work with First Nations people and communities to design a scheme that might actually work? Of course not. What they did was again fiddle around the edges, continue to allow people in offices in Canberra to design and implement a program for and about remote First Nations communities.

In 2018 the government introduced minor changes in a new compliance framework, despite every submitter to the Senate inquiry being opposed to the bill. The flawed CDP continued in remote communities. In fact, the current Minister for Indigenous Australians was quite glowing about the CDP in October 2019, describing it as delivering better results on all fronts. He was also very positive about the 1,000-jobs package brought in as part of the March 2019 CDP reforms—the fiddling-around-the-edges bit. This was the program that was supposed to support the creation of 1,000 new jobs for CDP participants in remote Australia.

As of May this year—more than two years after that multimillion-dollar program was started—it has created not 1,000 jobs but only 400 jobs. But the government is adamant that the 1,000-jobs program, which is really 400 jobs, will continue—again, just not learning from what is really wrong about this program. It's as though they don't want to listen to First Nations people who are telling them about what works and what doesn't in remote communities. And what they've been telling them from the very beginning is that this CDP is flawed to its foundations, and no amount of tempering around the edges can change that. A new First Nations led role centred on creating fair and decent jobs and treating people with respect is greatly needed. I was so proud in 2019 when Labor committed to scrapping the CDP and replacing it with a program that would co-design a program that creates real jobs, meets community needs and delivers meaningful training and economic development. I'm extremely proud that this is a policy that we will again take to the election.

This bill does not do that. It falls short in every single respect. It does not create a new employment program. What the government is doing is creating another welfare model that will pay very few participants extra income support money that will still be subject to quarantining to participate in 'job-like placements'. The focus of these placements will be on skills and vocational training only, not traineeships or apprenticeships. With no apparent pathway to employment, it's unclear how the pilot would generate jobs for a community unless that community already has economic activity and job creation capacity. This will not address the existing challenge of on-country job creation for those young people who are leaving education, and it will further entrench the status quo of the existing CDP, of paying individuals to participate in Work for the Dole activities. This policy approach reflects the government's continued failure to recognise that many people on the current CDP are already trained, have worked and will work, if work is available.

This bill sets up a two-tier system across remote communities, as those outside the employment pilot sites do not benefit at all. The detail of what happens outside the pilot sites is scant. There is no advice or detail on a time frame for the rollout of the replacement payment posts for 24 June. While the government has again squandered an opportunity to establish a real jobs program for remote Australia, the new payment offers a financial benefit, taking at least 5,200 for some participants. These participants are some of the poorest and most disadvantaged people in the country.

This government are not creating jobs in remote communities. They aren't looking at all the evidence and lessons they can learn from their past mistakes. In fact, the minister, to this day, has never owned up to the CDP being an absolute failure. He has never said, when introducing this new program, why he is dumping the CDP, what the problems have been or what lessons he has learned from sticking to a punitive scheme they knew was causing harm in remote communities. The issues with this bill and the failed CDP were put very succinctly to the Senate inquiry into this bill by Dr Josie Douglas from the Central Land Council. Dr Douglas said:

Aboriginal people are tired of the endless cycle of poverty, punitive welfare and policy changes that just come out of the blue. In the 21st century it's simply not good enough to have the bureaucracy design yet another version of a failed program. People, young people in particular, need to be able to experience having a job and getting the skills and experience that that offers; otherwise, we are condemning future generations to a pathway of misery, a pathway of nothingness.

My greatest fear is that this government continues down this pathway of misery to nothingness. Generations of young men and women in remote communities are not getting the opportunity to experience the dignity of work and proper wages.

This legislation doesn't put in place a program that will create jobs and give control to First Nations people and communities. The Morrison government had an opportunity here to make a difference in remote communities, to work with stakeholders who have been putting forward ideas and alternatives to the CDP for years, to put in place a program that will create jobs in remote communities—and that will provide people with skills and will lead to hope and opportunity—and to codesign a program that includes this legislation but that is not imposed, where First Nations people and organisations have a seat at the table. But this bill does not do that. It proves that, once again, only Labor will scrap the CDP and work in genuine partnership with First Nations organisations and communities to create a remote area program that does create job opportunities, offers community development, and provides a pathway out of the nothingness and misery that eight long years of this government have imposed on remote Australian communities.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] This legislation is just another version of the flawed and much-criticised Community Development Program, or CDP. While Labor supports this bill because it involves a supplementary payment that offers a financial benefit for a small number of remote jobseekers, it is still very much part of a broken system that does not support job creation or support quality of life in Australia's remote Indigenous communities. In Labor, we believe that Aboriginal people need to be afforded the right to self-determination, and this cannot be achieved through the CDP, which is still very much running for around 40,000 Australians.

The original CDP is a farce of forced labour for those who need support, as opposed to the disrespect they are being shown by this government. Back in 2015, when the government brought in these new programs, it was justifiably then criticised by Indigenous stakeholders as broken and discriminatory, and that view has been upheld in the time that communities have had to live with it. Why should people in the most-remote places of Australia have to work without the same proper wages and conditions as other Australians? One of the CDP's most egregious failings is its removal of choice. People are forced to work in ways that take away a person's sense of self-determination and agency, and this does nothing to support someone getting into secure work.

The discriminatory nature of this kind of work-for-the-dole system has meant breaches and extreme rates of penalties have been applied, causing great levels of disadvantage. These penalties are extreme, particularly given the cost of living in these communities. Under these schemes, people are being paid as little as $286 a week, and that can mean a decision about affording fuel or food for that week. The penalties imposed in this system are much higher than those imposed by urban Australia's jobactive program, and people are 55 times more likely to receive a serious penalty. This is incredible when you look at the inability of people in remote communities to walk into a Services Australia office to plead their case and get these kinds of issues resolved.

There have been substantial negative impacts on remote communities. The program has placed downward pressure on legitimate job creation by creating a pool of thousands of people who have to work without proper pay and conditions. Much of the work they do is similar to that which is properly paid by local government and by not-for-profit organisations. But the work that's done in these communities is not being credited as meaning as such, so people's future job prospects are being undermined. With these kinds of programs we run a very real risk—one we've seen happen—of damaging already flourishing Indigenous jobs, and over the last decade the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in employment and other outcomes has grown. I'm sad to say that government policies such as the CDP have contributed to this gap and to our failure to close the gap in all of the important Close the Gap indicators. This in turn exacerbates social harm and distress.

The government's problem is its attitude to social services in remote Australia. The government thinks that something has to be made so unpleasant and so dehumanising for people that they won't get the help they need and will therefore seek to avoid the system entirely, which is what happens in many remote communities where people just opt out of getting income support, which drags down the whole community's standard of living. We know millions of dollars have been ripped from Services Australia over the years. Has that stopped poverty? No. Has it made it possible for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Certainly not. It has meant that people across Australia have been kept in a state of distress and poverty by a government that cares more for saving money than supporting Australia's most vulnerable people.

Look at the statistics around things like the Indue card, which has cost $5,000 per person on the card. Why not direct that money directly into service improvement in remote communities or into proper wages? There are some 40,000 participants on the current CDP, over 80 per cent of whom are Indigenous. Most of these people will be staying on this current CDP until at least 2024, when the pilot version of the new remote engagement program is reassessed.

This is simply not good enough. We already know that this scheme is broken and that it's not working. It means that thousands of people are staying on a scheme that a Senate inquiry found, as far back as 2017, had failed to deliver on its stated intention to address the lack of employment opportunities in remote Australia. That committee found, as far back as then, that it needed to be abolished and redesigned. So here we are, four years later, with a government that hasn't even begun to listen. It's an entirely useless approach to have wasted all these years when, frankly, any good sense analysis showed that the program was not going to succeed.

Aboriginal organisations have been criticising these programs and also giving constructive proposals, which the government has failed to listen to. This stubbornness has meant that the government is now only bringing forward this trial in 2021. We know that there will be 200 jobseekers in the beginning stages of the program. This will mean that people on JobSeeker could earn extra money on top of their JobSeeker payments of between $100 and $190 a fortnight. That's a good thing, and therefore a reason not to oppose it. But I will be watching very carefully the penalties and the way this program is being delivered. I don't want to see this government make an already bad situation worse, and that has been its very clear record.

Participants in the new scheme will need to work at least 15 hours to receive their payment, meaning that, including the regular JobSeeker payment in their income, it would be equivalent to the minimum wage. Despite the imitation of actual employment, though, participants remain participants; they're not deemed to be employees for the purposes of workers compensation or superannuation. Again, this is simply terrible. It's not good enough and there's no reason that these workers, working for a minimum wage or in a job-like situation, should not have the same workers compensation and superannuation as other people.

It focuses on being job-ready and job-like, with placements expected to build skills and to provide vocational training, the caveat being that traineeships or apprenticeships will not be available. Again, this is simply not good enough. How can the government say its program is there to get people job-ready and will be job-like, building skills, without actually delivering the training programs that are going to enable people to step through? How can this government claim to focus on anything approaching getting people job-ready when it's not offering a pathway to training?

We have already seen places plummet from over half a million in 2011, when there was a Labor government. After many glossy announcements and grand gestures this year, these places in apprenticeships are now a mere 330,000. That's one in five apprenticeships and traineeships that have disappeared under this government. And we know that it's worse in these regional and remote communities. Fewer apprenticeships and traineeships mean fewer job opportunities for Australians and now fewer skilled workers for Australia's future. Businesses, especially in regional Australia, are crying out for skilled and qualified staff, but this government doesn't know how to support the development of these skills. We know how expensive it is to get a plumber, an electrician or people with building trades out to a remote community. Why isn't the government investing in the skills of these communities?

It might make complete sense to this government that it's refusing to spend appropriately on skills. Maybe it wants to create a generation of young people who have not had the opportunities that they should. There's simply no logic to the parameters in the legislation that's being put forward. It makes complete sense for this government to blame those young people who are out in remote communities—without industry, without business and without the opportunity for training—themselves for their outcomes.

Remote Australians are being hung out to dry, skills-wise and training-wise, by yet another new system coming in that does not invest in the skills and training that it purports to want to fix. All it does is offer another stick and another of set of criticisms. There's no job creation or economic development with any truth. We have a government that's displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of on-country job creation for young people leaving education.

Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 1:30 pm, we will move on to two-minute statements.