Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share 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.