Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Education and employment are very much what I regard as the key to the door to the modern world for Aborigines. It is the way they are going to fit into modern Australian society, and it is absolutely essential that the government should be there providing opportunities for education and job skills training so that Aborigines can get employment and can fit into modern Australian society. Something like 85 per cent of Aborigines now live in the large cities and towns of Queensland, New South Wales and WA, in big cities like Sydney, Brisbane and Perth and in the larger regional centres of the states. They are just part of mainstream Australia. They access mainstream services like education; they attend schools; they access Medicare; and, increasingly, they are just there as part of our society.

But the group of Aborigines who we really have to be concerned about is not the 85 per cent who live in our large cities and towns of eastern Australia and who are really just part of the Australian community; it is the 15 per cent who live in remote areas like the Kimberley, the eastern Pilbara and way up by the Northern Territory border in communities like Punmu and Kiwirrkurra; in parts of the Northern Territory where it is possible for them not to encounter the rest of the Australian community for almost the whole of their lives; and in parts of Queensland. It is very important that Aborigines living in these areas have access to services which can provide them with job skills training and education.

I was told at a Kimberley economic forum that I went to a couple of years ago that there were something like 6,000 unemployed Indigenous youth, mostly boys, in the East Kimberley alone. That is a very frightening statistic because it means that, while the hotels and tourist trade in the Kimberley at that forum were looking to bring in guest workers from East Timor, there was no suggestion that they could access the pool of 6,000 unemployed young Indigenous people in the East Kimberley, right on their doorstep. That is why Indigenous employment and training programs for remote areas are very, very important.

These people have been able to access CDEP payments for a very long time. But CDEP has been a kind of mickey mouse training scheme. Nobody really expects to get a job because they have had some sort of CDEP training. It is regarded very much as sit-down money. One welcomes the initiative of the government in seeking to set up a remote area training program of the kind that we are talking about. But, like many other programs under the Gillard government, this Remote Jobs and Communities Program has been already somewhat stuffed up.

What has happened is that, in anticipation of this program being put in place, the CDEP were supposed to start the Remote Jobs and Communities Program on 1 July, which is not very far away. The CDEP were told that they would be closed down. They have closed down, but unfortunately no money has come through for the Remote Jobs and Communities Program, and no money is expected for several months. This means that Indigenous people living in remote communities, who have been talked up to believe that there would be a great employment training program beginning for them in the near future, are now faced with the fact that not only is that program not going to start on time but the CDEP, which was providing them with funds to cover their living expenses and so on, has ceased. So there we are. This government has put these Aboriginal people totally in limbo, and I think that is disgusting. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.