Mostly Indigenous remote jobseekers still need to work more than double hours of non-remote jobseekers for same income

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

An overhaul of the remote work-for-the-dole scheme announced in the federal budget has been criticised for maintaining racist and discriminatory requirements on its majority Indigenous participants.

On Tuesday the federal government revealed a $1.1bn redirection of funding to reform the three-year-old community development program (CDP), a system which was criticised last year in a Senate inquiry as overly punitive and unfairly affecting vulnerable people.

The Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, said the reforms were the result of an “extensive consultation period of co-design” with Indigenous groups, and would “increase support for the most vulnerable job seekers, while ensuring more job-ready participants move into work”.

The Human Rights Law Centre and Aboriginal Peak Organisations of the Northern Territory (Apont) cautiously welcomed parts of the budget changes but said overall the measures were “piecemeal” and fell short of what was required and that which would drive up social disadvantage.

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The scheme covers 75% of Australia’s land mass and about 1,000 remote communities. About 83% of its 35,000 participants are Indigenous.

Participants earn, on average, about $11 an hour for up to 25 hours of work or work-like activity for 46 weeks a year and face strict penalties for non-compliance. The changes, which begin in February, will cut the required work hours to 20.

Non-remote jobseekers are required to work 20 hours a week for only six months of the year.



Adrianne Walters, a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, said it was “mind-boggling” that the difference in requirements remained, albeit slightly modified.

Remote work-for-the-dole scheme is racist, ACTU head Sally McManus says Read more

“Equal pay for equal work is a core tenet of Australian society. The federal government must eliminate the blatantly discriminatory requirement, which sees people in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities forced to work more hours for the same basic Centrelink payment as people in cities,” Walters said.

Scullion said that under the changes CDP participants would be subject to the same compliance measures as any other jobseekers “regardless of where they live or which government program they participate in”.

The Jobseeker compliance measures are scheduled to become stricter in July with escalating consequences for non-compliance, including financial penalties and cancellation of payments for four weeks.

Walters said the government was happy to subject remote communities to a “harsh, one-size-fits-all penalty system” but still discriminated against them with higher work hours.

A spokesman for Apont, John Paterson, said the more onerous compliance measures were likely to drive up poverty and disengagement.

“The government’s own data indicates that people subject to the remote CDP scheme are already at least 20 times more likely to be financially penalised,” he said. “Unfair financial penalties have already seen parents struggling to put food on the table for their kids.”

About 146,700 financial penalties were placed on participants in 2016-17, mostly for failing to attend appointments, a rate about four times that of its preceding program.

Fred Chaney, who was minister for Aboriginal affairs under the Fraser government, said the CDP meant higher obligations were placed on Indigenous people than any other unemployed people.

“The Howard-Rudd-Gillard-Abbott and now Malcolm’s government have all followed a process of trying to use penalties on Aboriginal people to achieve their social ends, and I think it’s a dead end,” he told Guardian Australia.

Indigenous leaders say remote housing in jeopardy after ‘devastating’ budget cut Read more

“From the time of the intervention on, you see a determination of government to keep Aboriginal people in the Centrelink system and often in circumstances where there are extremely punitive conditions applied to them.”

The Greens senator Rachel Siewert said the reforms were “an admission of failure” by the government.

“They’re certainly not the reforms we were looking for and they’re certainly not the reforms that will generate real change,” she said.

Siewert said the 6,000 new wage-subsidies – which will provide employers of CDP participants up to $21,034 for two years – “sound great” but questioned how they could be offered in communities where there were not enough jobs.

“How about seriously investing in human services, that’s what these communities need – good community services,” Siewert said. “There’s a genuine care economy in these communities that we could be investing in and we’re not ... Have a real strategy there.”

The Australian council of trade unions has called for the total abolition of the program.

“The Turnbull government has monetised the exploitation of marginalised Indigenous communities because it thinks there will be no political consequences,” said national campaign coordinator Kara Keys.

“The fact that many workers in this program are working for organisations and for-profit businesses in roles that would be paid anywhere else in the country is an indication that minister Scullion and the Turnbull government are once again turning their back on Indigenous workers in favour of businesses and their profits, who are able to access a pool of free labour.”