CDEP gets a dubious supporter

The April 2 Australian reported that ITEC Employment and its related entity Community Enterprises Australia (CEA) are preparing a submission to the federal government that will argue “the pendulum has swung too far in favour of the jobseeker”, in relation to changes to the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) on Aboriginal communities.

CEA is the largest CDEP provider in Australia, according to the article.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the pendulum swinging “too far in favour of the jobseeker” meant, perhaps, people were finding work.

In fact, under Labor’s changes to CDEP, many Aboriginal people on communities have been shifted from doing meaningful, essential community service work, funded by a Centrelink base rate plus hourly top-up wages, to receiving “income support payments”, which are effectively Newstart payments but recipients need to work for them (a more honest name is “work-for-the dole”).

The changes are part of Labor’s “reformed CDEP”: a way of keeping its 2007 election promise to not scrap CDEP as the Howard government said it would, while taking control over CDEP out of the hands of communities and watering it down to a work-for-the-dole scheme. Unlike CDEP, income support payments, like Newstart, can be quarantined onto the Basics Card. (As part of the NT Intervention into Aboriginal communities', introduced in 2007, 50% of Aboriginal welfare recipients' payments are put onto this voucher-type card, that can only be spent on approved goods such as food, clothing and medicine.)

Between April and June 2012, all those participants currently on the “old CDEP” scheme (ie those who were employed by CDEP before the reformed scheme was introduced in July 2009), will be moved onto an income support payment (work for the dole. When making enquiries about this to Centrelink, I was optimistically told “Unless, of course, they have found a ‘real job’ by then”.

Labor has not created more meaningful, salaried, “real jobs” on communities. Swinging the pendulum too far in the jobseekers’ favour has not, it seems, meant government investment in community-controlled employment programs.

Despite the apparent pendulum swing, and despite Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s promise “to ensure that every Australian who can work, does work" (quote from her speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia conference in February), no money has been found to, say, pay the garbage collectors on communities, currently working for the dole, the award rates they would be paid if they worked in Darwin.

While Labor’s plan is for the eventual wind-up of the old CDEP, keeping Aboriginal people on work-for-the-dole programs is all too convenient- not to mention cheap- for Labor to move to create fully paid, equitable employment on communities.

According to CEA and ITEC Employment, the problem is “Centrelink is not penalising Aboriginal people in bush areas on the dole who avoid mutual obligations”, the Australian reported.

The job service providers’ submission will reportedly call for the “restoration of CDEP ‘wage-like’ payments”.

Many Aboriginal workers across NT communities, who have found themselves providing essential services for not much more than the Basics Card and lose change, are also campaigning against the scrapping of CDEP. They argue that, rather than close it down and shift people onto unemployment lines, the money should be spent converting CDEP positions into salaried jobs at award rates.

However, I don’t think Aboriginal workers campaigning for Jobs with Justice have found an ally in CEA and ITEC. According to the job service providers, restoring CDEP “would allow providers to implement no work, no pay principles on the ground in the communities”, as opposed to the “‘weakened’ compliance regime” that is work-for-the-dole.

CDEP was an initiative led by Aboriginal communities in the 1960s and ‘70s, in an attempt to combat the negative effects of “sit-down” money. However, coming from job service providers who stand to make much money from winning government contracts, and who are bemoaning the softening of penalties against Aboriginal people on welfare, we should be very cautious of this particular call defending CDEP.

Once again, discussion is focused on carrot-and-stick tactics for punishing Aboriginal welfare recipients. This distracts from where the spotlight should be: the government’s complete unwillingness to work with communities to take positive steps towards creating real, fairly paid, community-controlled, employment.