Rebuilding Employment Services in Indigenous Australia: it’s time for action

Strong reasons make strong actions

History of King John, Act Three, Scene Four.

 

A major Parliamentary report, titled Rebuilding Employment Services, was tabled in Parliament last week. The report was produced by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Workforce Australia Employment Services. This media release (link here) by the Committee Chair offers a good high level summary of the thrust of the report. The full report (link here) provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the employment services sector, and represents the most fundamental review of the sector in some decades. An article in The Conversation also provides a high level overview (link here)

 

I don’t propose to offer a detailed summary or critique of the report as I do not feel qualified to comment on the detail. I would however note that the employment services sector is crucially important for First Nations people given their over-representation in the most disadvantaged cohorts of Australian society, and their extremely low employment status as can be seen by a quick look at the data for target 8 in the Closing the Gap dashboard (link here). In 2021, only 55 percent of First Nations people nationally were in employment, compared to 77 percent of the mainstream community.

 

The Committee makes the point at various points in its report that the Community Development Program (CDP) which operates across remote Australia was not part of the remit for this review, albeit there are clearly numerous cross over issues, not least the underlying principles that the new report is advocating in terms of the use of punitive sanctions and reliance on work for dole. The Government has spent the last year ‘consulting’ about a new remote jobs program, with very little substantive progress (link here). Given the crucial importance of employment to overall wellbeing, and the sorry state of remote Australia as documented in numerous posts on this blog (eg link here), it strikes me that the Government’s apparent decision to opt for a ‘go slow’ implementation approach is both self-serving and difficult to justify.  

 

Reading though the report, I thought there were three issues worth pointing for their relevance to Indigenous policy.

 

The first is recommendation 31:

Para. 9.122   The Committee recommends that the Australian Government:

•         review the boundaries of Community Development Program (CDP) regions with a view to incorporating clearly urban areas (such as the southern area of Darwin) into mainstream employment services while allowing a ‘buffer’ or ‘overlap’ zone where people can choose to be allocated to CDP or mainstream services; and

•         simplify the process for jobseekers who move regularly between remote and non-remote regions and give consideration to allowing a person to nominate one program through which they will be primarily serviced and stay attached to that service.

 

This strikes me as a reasonable recommendation, but a second order issue. Given the lack of progress to date of the reform of CDPO, it will likely be years before the issues raised here are addressed, not least because the parliamentary committee listed the recommendation for implementation in the medium term (Table 16.1).

 

The second issue is recommendation 49:

Para. 13.145 The Committee recommends that the Australian Government co-design and trial a ‘Work in the Community’ community employment program in a limited number of regional areas and places with entrenched disadvantage, including the following key elements:

•         Voluntary participation and choice of placement.

•         Projects that contribute to community development, identified based on mapping of community need.

•         Jobs of varying duration and intensity with appropriate payment.

•         Work-like experiences with skills development and in-work training.

•         Success be defined around improvements in capability, health, mental health, connectedness, self-esteem, skills, and confidence rather than expecting entry into open employment in the first instance though open labour market pathways should be actively encouraged and facilitated.

The Australian Government should also consider providing a right of return to the program to give clients confidence and security to pursue open employment.

 

The discussion of this proposal can be found at paras. 13.136 to 13.145 in the report. Notwithstanding its tentative tone, the recommendation is in my view of huge potential significance. Whether it is picked up in urban and regional Australia is perhaps neither here nor there, but if it were to be applied in a much more wholesale manner across the CDP region (in essence remote Australia) where there is a structural shortage of job opportunities that makes the whole ’jobseeker’ model a nonsense, it would be a game changer. There is of course a need for more detailed work to be done to develop such an approach for remote Australia, to cost it out and to engage with relevant stakeholders. A proactive Minister and Government with real concern for improving Indigenous social and economic outcomes would grasp this recommendation and run with it. Obvious steps a Minister might take would be to task the NIAA to develop a policy paper fleshing out such a community employment program, its costs, an implementation strategy an assessing the risks and opportunities that might arise were it to be progressed. Such a paper might be produced within two months and fed into the May 2024 budget considerations.

 

The third issue worth noting is recommendation 68:

15.129          The Committee recommends that as a priority, even before a new commissioning model is fully developed and implemented, the Australian Government prioritise the recommissioning of First Nations specialist services in areas with high populations of First Nations jobseekers and jobseekers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Priority should be given to commissioning Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations.

 

The discussion underpinning this recommendation can be found in paras 15.114 -15.116. I wholly endorse this recommendation. The point I wish to make however is to note how this is a good example of a parliamentary committee adopting and taking seriously Priority Reform 2: Building the Community Sector set out in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. The National Agreement is in my view the cornerstone of future Indigenous policy reforms in Australia and despite its shortcomings, it is encouraging to see its existence being implicitly recognised in the Committee’s work The Committee indicates that this recommendation should be implemented int eh medium term (Table 16.1). I suggest however that there is a need for more urgency, for the NIAA to map out an implementation plan in the short-term identifying the constraints and opportunities to moving more quickly and moving ahead. Whatever occurs in the mainstream program must also be implemented in the CDP operating in remote Australia.

 

Finally, given the significance of the issues dealt with in this report for Indigenous Australians, it is to be hoped that the Minister for Indigenous Australians and NIAA take a strong and proactive interest in pushing for the implementation of these reforms sooner rather than later. This is not a matter that should be left to the Employment portfolio alone.

 

Given the extended period of policy inaction that coincided with the national debate on the Uluru Statement and the proposed Voice, it strikes me that the obvious way to shift mindsets and rebuild trust is to push ahead with positive policy reforms that benefit Indigenous people across the board. The recommendations highlighted in this post are an obvious place to start.

 

 

1 December 2023