Australia’s welfare system faces fresh scrutiny after Aboriginal payout
Criticism of a jobs scheme labelled as ‘racist’ has raised questions about Canberra’s approach to welfare and treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia’s poorest areas, Steve Evans reports
The Australian government is wrestling with how to replace a jobs scheme branded “racist” after it agreed to pay A$2m (£1.1m) in compensation to hundreds of Aboriginal people who said they were subjected to discrimination.
The Community Development Program (CDP), which is better known as “work for the dole”, required people in remote outback areas – home to a high proportion of Indigenous communities – to work up to 25 hours a week to receive income benefits. About 80 per cent of the participants were Aboriginal.
Yet a successful class action on behalf of 680 participants of the CDP said it discriminated against them because it set harsher rules than other welfare schemes, while critics said it drove many vulnerable Aboriginal people deeper into poverty.
In settling the long-running legal dispute, the federal government did not admit that the scheme was racist, but it did agree to pay the compensation.
The “work for the dole” programme was started in 2015, before being modified and finally abolished this year, with the federal government in Canberra saying a replacement would be developed by 2023.
Canberra said the scheme was “designed around the unique social and labour market conditions in remote Australia and is part of the Australian government’s agenda for increasing employment and breaking the cycle of welfare dependency”.
But its critics say that it was fatally flawed because the idea was to coerce people into jobs which simply did not exist. They fear that there has been no change of an entrenched government mindset which views the big stick as the way to get people into work, particularly Aboriginal communities in desperately poor areas.
The unemployed on the scheme faced tough conditions if they wanted to keep receiving welfare payments. In areas with largely Aboriginal populations, jobless people would have to start reporting to government unemployment centres from the first day, whereas under the comparable JobActive scheme in towns and cities, there was a 12-month grace period.
In the towns, the obligation was to perform tasks for up to 390 hours a year; in the largely Aboriginal areas, it was 600 hours.
In the remote areas, participants did tasks normally done by paid workers – but the participants only received the bare minimum unemployment payment, often far below the minimum wage. This amounted to about A$10 (£5.40) an hour.
The paternalist impulse in Indigenous affairs is very strong
Some people on the CDP said they were victims of “slave labour”. They had to jump through numerous hoops to keep getting the welfare payments despite having limited access to phones, the internet and transport.
Australian National University researchers found that people in rural areas were 25 times more likely to face penalties than those in non-remote locations.
David McLean, president of the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku, in the deep east of Western Australia, said some people had to travel 1,000 kilometres to represent themselves in person at a welfare office so that their payments would continue.
Mr McLean, who led the campaign, described the CDP as “just terrible”.
“For communities with high costs of living and high levels of poverty, it was very difficult, very stressful,” he told The Guardian.
The Federal Court of Australia found this month that people in the lawsuit had lost nearly A$1,800 (£971) each on average, due to the CDP’s conditions.
The class action was launched in 2019 on behalf of people from 10 communities in Western Australia. The settlement of the dispute shows that Canberra realises there is a problem, according to Dr Lisa Fowkes of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy at the Australian National University.
She thinks there is a broader issue, namely the central government’s conviction that the economy in remote areas can be improved by imposing rules from Canberra.
“The paternalist impulse in Indigenous affairs is very strong and it’s very hard to shift,” she told The Independent.
Some politicians on the right take the view that the way to make people work in poverty-stricken areas is through coercion, but Dr Fowkes thinks that this policy has failed because the jobs simply do not exist.
The mindset she objects to was laid out in 2000 by Tony Abbott, the then employment minister who later became prime minister. “If you don’t have a job we are going to keep on your back,” he said at the time.
Dr Fowkes argues that a better policy would be to work out how to get the jobs there. She said the priority of government should be the creation of jobs – with the involvement of local people – rather than forcing people to look for work which is not available and then penalising them when they end up empty-handed.
“I think it’s staggering. It highlights how hard it is for the commonwealth [federal] government to rethink its approach to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands people, but also to the unemployed in general,” said Dr Fowkes.
It is the second time this year that the right-of-centre coalition government has got into trouble over its tough welfare programmes.
In June, a court approved a settlement worth A$1.8bn (£1bn) to victims of its “Robodebt” scheme after government agencies relentlessly pursued 443,000 people to reclaim money it turned out they did not owe. Debts had been calculated automatically by a computer which got sums wrong, and some suicides ensued.
The fallout from the “work for the dole” settlement is not likely to be as great as that in what was a scandal in anyone’s book. But experts say it does highlight how entrenched the difficulty of improving the economy of desperately poor areas is.
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