Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to the debate on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Community Development Program) Bill 2018 as well. The Greens oppose this bill. We are highly critical of the CDP program and have opposed it since it started because of its discriminatory nature. This bill entrenches that discriminatory nature despite the government saying it's better. The fact is that different rules will apply to people living in remote communities, and let's face it: those are overwhelmingly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The bill still entrenches discrimination, because different rules will apply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote communities. The number of hours that will be required will be reduced from 25 to 20, but that will be for 46 weeks of the year—in other words, most of the year—and it starts immediately, whereas in the broader community, the broader Work for the Dole program, it's 15 hours, you don't start for 12 months and it's for six months of the year. So it's discriminatory in its very nature.

We believe that the program should be scrapped. We believe that there is a need for reform. We start from the Aboriginal Peak Organisations Northern Territory submission to the committee but also their much broader proposal that has been out there for a while—and they did submit it to the committee review of this bill. They have a much more supportive, less punitive, less top-down approach that would genuinely deliver funding for training and jobs. Along with this proposal go 6,000 subsidised jobs. Firstly, the community is very clearly calling for community wages and to go to an approach similar to that of the former program, CDEP. So the government has not delivered what the community asked for in the first place. Secondly, the job opportunities just aren't there in these communities.

This program seeks to apply the targeted compliance framework, commonly known as the TCF, which the CDP participants were exempt from when the welfare reform bill went through. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are subject to CDP will unfortunately have much more interaction with the system, so they'll have more chances to be subjected to compliance failure and will end up in the basket where very significant penalties apply which are not able to be waived. So, from every front that you look at this, it is bad legislation and should be opposed.