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
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