The Greens have urged the Turnbull government to revive a program that paid Indigenous people the minimum wage for work in remote communities, saying work-for-the-dole schemes introduced by both the Labor and Liberal governments “haven’t worked”.
“The CDEP [Community Development Employment Program] was wages,” the Greens senator Rachel Siewert told Guardian Australia. “Everything since then has been: ‘you are on income support’. So the overwhelming feeling from people is: ‘I am not going to get paid any more’.”
Siewert made the comment ahead of a vote by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) executive in Darwin on Tuesday to oppose the Turnbull government’s Community Development Program (CDP), which the ACTU national secretary, Dave Oliver, said could include a legal challenge.
The union argues the program treats Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people like second-class citizens by making them work for below minimum wage.
Oliver said the income support program, which operates only in remote Australia, was discriminatory and deprived its participants, more than 80% of whom are Indigenous, of basic workers’ rights.
“The government should be putting in place policies that incentivise the employment of Indigenous people, not the exploitation of them,” Oliver told Guardian Australia.
The CDP requires participants to participate in approved work-like activities for 25 hours a week, 48 weeks of the year, to maintain their income support payments. People who miss scheduled work hours are docked some of their payment.
Other Australian income support schemes require only 15 hours’ work a week for six months.
A research paper by Australian National University academic Lisa Fowkes found a “significant increase” in the number of remote job seekers who received a financial penalty in the six months since the CDP was introduced on 1 July 2015.
Fowkes said 50,807 financial penalties were levied against CDP participants from 1 July to 31 December 2015, more than double the number of penalties applied in the last six months of the Remote Jobs and Communities Program (RJCP), which the CDP replaced.
Seiwert said CDP had worked in some places “because the community made it work, not the system”.
“I personally don’t think you can tinker at the edges of CDP. You need to go back to the drawing board.”
The union held a rally against the program in Darwin on Monday.
Unions standing together to demand #WageJusticeNow pic.twitter.com/kdtZaTmLln
— Unions NT (@UnionsNT) August 15, 2016
Kara Keys, a Yiman and Gangulu woman and Indigenous policy officer for the ACTU, said imposing a more onerous requirement on a program with mainly Indigenous participants was discriminatory.
She said the program compared poorly with the defunct CDEP, under which people did similar work for wages, not welfare benefits.
“The key issues are that a lot of the work that people are doing [on CDP], they used to be provided a wage to do,” she said.
“It’s kind of inconceivable that you can go from earning a wage and accruing superannuation and all the other benefits of earning a salary to doing the same work for no wage and no benefits.”
A spokesman for the Indigenous Affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, said the program was not discriminatory.
“The statement from the Melbourne-based ACTU is entirely incorrect,” the spokesman said.
“The reaction of the ACTU is predictable and consistent with an organisation that has seemingly not asked people living in remote communities what they actually want.
“This model has been designed by and in consultation with remote communities, where many leaders have been calling for a return to ‘no work, no pay’ arrangements for a number of years, to ensure the program can operate successfully and transition jobseekers into work.”
Keys said she had consulted extensively in remote communities and been consistently told by Indigenous people that they wanted to earn a wage for their work.
