Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

Under standing order 74(5)(b), I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

The catchcry of this government has been, 'We want to be doing things with, not to, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities,' yet the introduction of the CDP, in regard to consultation, would be rated as a failure. Despite the government's stated intention of wanting to engage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, families and communities, no such consultation has indeed occurred. The CDP, as we have heard through our own visits to communities, through our own investigations and, indeed, through Senate estimates, has absolutely impacted, in an extremely negative way, on the lives of individuals, families and communities.

From the range of questions Labor senators put during the estimates process and, indeed, these unanswered questions on notice to the minister, we can see that the CDP is not transparent. We have spoken to organisations on the ground and to affected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and they don't understand the process which has been imposed upon them. But that's about all we do know for certain. There is little evidence, if any, that the CDP has been successful in getting people into sustainable jobs, which surely must be the intent of this program or, indeed, any program. Its forerunner, the Remote Jobs and Community Program, known as the RJCP, was just in its infancy when the government declared it to be a 'disaster'. There was no long-term investigation into how it was operating; it was just stopped and cut. Then, seemingly without consultation, the CDP was rolled out.

One of the claims the government makes is that there are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations running the CDP program—and there are. But many of those organisations were simply transferred over from the abandoned RJCP scheme. They don't have any power to change or apply local circumstances to the CDP. They are merely a conduit for the government's harsh CDP agenda. As one of the submitters to the current CDP inquiry suggests:

It is therefore a government choice as to whether the largely government provided economy is a welfare or an employment based economy.

When we look at remote communities, we can see that they rely on governments for infrastructure delivery, for houses, for medical centres and, indeed, for service provision. The government is a large potential employer in communities. But it is their choice whether they provide an economy to remote communities or create further welfare dependency. It comes as no surprise to me that that submitter was none other than the Liberal former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander minister, Mr Fred Chaney, who has been the lone Liberal voice on injustice after injustice to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and in particular to those in remote communities.

I've only had a short amount of time to have a look at the answers provided to me today, but certainly one of the concerns that all Labor senators expressed after the last Senate estimates was the number of compliance investigations. In just eight months there were nearly half a million. When we raised those questions at Senate estimates, the minister, Senator Scullion, offered us a briefing. Certainly he said that to me privately. Well, we called his office to organise that briefing—and guess what? We're still waiting. It never came. We waited several weeks for this offered briefing to materialise. I can certainly, outside of the chamber, provide the name of the individual that we spoke to in his office about the briefing, if the minister is interested. I certainly don't think it's appropriate to put it on the record publicly in this place. We were still waiting, so we submitted our questions on notice, and we waited and we waited, and we waited. And I think to have to wait a full month after the due date is tardy to say the least.

And so at 10 past 12 today, we informed the minister's office that we would be using the standing order after question time, and we were told that the minister had signed off on the questions, but they were 'floating around' in the department somewhere. Again, that is extremely tardy. This issue of CDP is a very, very important issue. I was up at the Ng Lands last year, in a very remote community—I'm sure the minister knows it well—and I know that Senator Dodson, too, visited that community to see firsthand the devastation that CDP is creating in those very small communities. English is not widely spoken there. Most people speak language across those communities. Indeed, wherever we went we were expected to have an interpreter, because, as I say, not only is English not widely spoken, it's not widely known. And I saw in that community breach letter after breach letter after breach letter.

There's a story out of Warburton on that. One of the questions we asked the minister today is: what sorts of records are kept? We were informed that participants are not given breach letters—aren't advised when their payments are breached. Well, that completely flies in the face of a four-page, extremely technical letter that was sent to a young woman in the Warburton community. As to her circumstances: again, if organisations on the ground had one iota of flexibility, she would never have been breached. She had served some time in a detention facility and had been released on orders, and those orders prohibited her from attending the Warburton community. As we also know from comments that Senator Malarndirri McCarthy made in this place last week, people in these communities don't have addresses. They don't live at '10 Smith Street, Warburton'. All of the mail is collected centrally. So she got a letter from the department that was just addressed to 'Miss So-and-so, Warburton'. She wasn't there, because she had an order against her which said that she wasn't allowed to go back, for the time the order prevailed, to the Warburton community. So she was in an adjoining community. The community knew that, and no doubt the CDP provider knew that, but somehow that message didn't make its way through to Centrelink.

Another interesting thing that happened was this. Again, local knowledge is really what we want to be applied in these situations. Anyone who visits the Ng Lands knows that they operate, for the most part, on central desert time. But Warburton doesn't; Warburton operates on Western Australian time. So when the required phone call was organised, the officer from the department residing in Queensland just assumed that Warburton was on central desert time, which it isn't. So she never got the phone call. But that was a strike against her. There was simply no investigation made; she was just told: 'You didn't show up for your appointment.' Even though the officer had arranged that appointment on central desert time, and Warburton is on Western Australian time, that was a black mark against her name. Again, if we'd been able to have that input of local knowledge, that would not have occurred, because someone could've told the Queensland officer: 'Hang on a minute—unlike the rest of the communities in the Ng Lands, Warburton is on Western Australian time.'

As I said, what's well known about that community—potentially not well known by an officer in Queensland, but certainly by those of us in this place who have visited—is that English, for most of the people in that community, is not spoken, and indeed is not well known. Her letter is four pages—four pages of technical jargon that she wouldn't have been able to understand in any event. But that flies in the face of the information that I've waited a whole month for, which tells me that those letters are not even sent. So not only do communities not understand the CDP and its implications; apparently, the government does not either. They told me in questions delivered to my office today at 1:41 that somehow no breach letters are given out, and yet I have a breach letter addressed to a young woman in Warburton. What's going on there?

So the CDP is a mess. We are having an inquiry into the CDP because, clearly, people are doing it really tough. The other evidence I heard in Warburton, and indeed saw with my own eyes, is that children are going hungry when a person is breached. Children are going hungry because there's no money in the community. They are relying on the person in the home who maybe has an age pension to provide for the whole community.

Indeed, this is not just about the Ng Lands. Last week, Twiggy Forrest came here and said the answer to the problem is to roll out the BasicsCard. We on this side know that there is no single answer to the generations of dispossession that have been foisted upon our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. And, from speaking to agencies firsthand in Kununurra, I can tell you that there is a problem with the BasicsCard. It is being cashed out by the local taxi drivers. Taxis are allowed to be used on the BasicsCard, so the drivers are exploiting the community. They give out cash but keep most of the money for themselves. And I'm told it's children that are doing this. I'm also told that burglaries have gone up in Kununurra. Why? Well, we know what young kids do when they're hungry: they break in. The BasicsCard is not creating all of the problems, it's CDP as well. So Mr Forrest needs to look a little further than his one-size-fits-all. He needs to speak to people in Kununurra and see what's happening. If it's widely known that that's what taxi drivers are doing there, and seemingly it is, then how come Mr Forrest missed that basic truth?

I'm told that the CDP and the BasicsCard are strongly contributing to what's happening in Kununurra. So I'm disappointed that the minister chose to ignore our questions for a whole month. And there are processes in this place to get information. I didn't necessarily want to go down the questions on notice route. By contrast, when I asked the Attorney-General for a briefing on the McGlade matter, I very quickly got a very thorough briefing by one of his staff. I was able to ask lots of questions. It was a very thorough briefing. I asked for it and I received it. Unfortunately, when the minister offered the briefing, we waited and waited and nothing happened. I put on notice questions about my very serious concerns about the CDP program. Those questions had remained unanswered until, at 10 past 12 today, I did the minister the courtesy of letting him know we would be doing that—and suddenly the answers are forthcoming. I haven't had a proper opportunity to give close scrutiny to those answers, but my first reading of them is that they fly in the face of other information we got from Senate estimates. I will leave my remarks there.