Better Than Welfare? Work and Livelihoods for Indigenous Australians After CDEP
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BETTER THAN WELFARE? WORK AND LIVELIHOODS FOR INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS AFTER CDEP BETTER THAN WELFARE? WORK AND LIVELIHOODS FOR INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS AFTER CDEP Edited by KIRRILY JORDAN Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research College of Arts and Social Sciences The Australian National University, Canberra RESEARCH MONOGRAPH NO. 36 2016 Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Better than welfare : work and livelihoods for Indigenous Australians after CDEP / editor Kirrily Jordan. ISBN: 9781760460273 (paperback) 9781760460280 (ebook) Series: Research monograph (Australian National University. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research) ; no. 36. Subjects: Community Development Employment Projects (Australia) Indigenous peoples--Employment--Australia. Indigenous peoples--Australia--Social conditions. Indigenous peoples--Government policy--Australia. Indigenous peoples--Australia--Government relations. Other Creators/Contributors: Jordan, Kirrily, editor. Dewey Number: 331.639915 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover photograph: The Pmara Jutunta CDEP Office was formerly a community office. It was reconditioned by CDEP participants in 2007 to become the administrative and organisational centre for the community’s CDEP activities. While CDEP was delivered in a variety of ways across different locations, there were many offices like this across the country. Photo: Will Sanders, 2008. This edition © 2016 ANU Press Contents List of figures ...........................................vii List of tables ............................................ ix Contributors ............................................ xi Acknowledgements ......................................xiii Preface ................................................xv 1. From welfare to work, or work to welfare? ..................1 Kirrily Jordan and Jon Altman 2. Reframed as welfare: CDEP’s fall from favour. 31 Will Sanders 3. Some statistical context for analysis of CDEP ...............51 Boyd Hunter 4. Just a jobs program? CDEP employment and community development on the NSW far south coast .................85 Kirrily Jordan 5. Looking for ‘real jobs’ on the APY Lands: Intermittent and steady employment in CDEP and other paid work .......125 Kirrily Jordan 6. Work habits and localised authority in Anmatjere CDEPs: Losing good practice through policy and program review .....155 Will Sanders 7. Bawinanga and CDEP: The vibrant life, and near death, of a major Aboriginal corporation in Arnhem Land ..........175 Jon Altman Appendix 1: Annotated timeline of key developments ............219 Bree Blakeman Appendix 2: Annotated bibliography of author publications on CDEP 2005–15 ......................................243 Compiled by Bree Blakeman CAEPR Research Monograph Series ........................263 List of figures Fig. 3.1 CDEP employment/population ratio, Indigenous males and females aged 15 and over, 1997–2011 ...........54 Fig. 3.2 The proportion of remote IAREs by per cent in CDEP employment in the 2006 census (%). 75 Fig. 3.3 The proportion of remote IAREs by per cent in CDEP employment in the 2011 census (%). 76 Fig. 6.1 Wards of Anmatjere Community Government Council ...156 Fig. 6.2 Pmara Jutunta CDEP Office 2008 ...................159 Fig. 6.3 Nturiya CDEP Office signs ........................160 Fig. 6.4 Four wards and nine service centres of Central Desert Shire .....................................163 Fig. 6.5 CDEP men’s shed at Pmara Jutunta with Central Desert Shire sign .................................164 Fig. 6.6 Jobfind office in Ti Tree 2009–13 ...................166 Fig. 6.7 Informal CDEP sign 2013 .........................166 Fig. 6.8 Map of 60 RJCP regions ..........................168 Fig. 6.9 New CDEP/RJCP Activity Centre and Office in Ti Tree 2013. 171 Fig. 7.1 A version of the map in Schedule 4 of BACs ‘rule book’ ..183 vii List of tables Table 3.1 Transition probabilities (15-month) between labour force states, Indigenous males and females (percentage) .....61 Table 3.2 Marginal effect of CDEP and other labour force categories on selected social and economic outcomes, 2008 ..64 Table 3.3 Hypothetical simulations of the ‘effect’ of loss of 35,000 CDEP jobs. .66 Table 3.4 Administrative data on local CDEP schemes at time of 2006 and 2011 census (8 August) ....................69 Table 3.5 Working-age population (aged 15–64 years) and major mining investment in remote IAREs by 2006 CDEP employment rates in 2006. .73 Table 3.6 Labour market outcomes for 15–64-year-olds by Indigenous status, Wallaga Lake, 2006 and 2011 ........78 Table 4.1 Labour force characteristics for Bega, Eden and Wallaga Lake Indigenous Locations, Indigenous people aged 15–64 years, 2006 and 2011 ..............................104 Table 7.1 Bawinanga annual reporting 1999–2011 ............184 Table 7.2 Range of BAC activities by headings reported in narrative annual reports 1999–2000 to 2010–11 ........187 Table 7.3 BAC grants, trading and other income, and total income 2000–01 to 2013–14 .........................191 ix Contributors Jon Altman is an economist/anthropologist who first engaged with the Community Development Employment Projects scheme in 1977 when it was established. Since then he has maintained an abiding interest in this highly innovative scheme in his research and policy advocacy for appropriate and sustainable forms of Indigenous economic development from the local to the national. Jon was an academic researcher at The Australian National University (ANU) from 1982 to 2014 and foundation director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research 1990 to 2010. He is currently a research professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University; ANU Emeritus Professor at RegNet: School of Regulation and Global Governance; and Adjunct Professorial Fellow at the Research Institute for Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University. Bree Blakeman is an Australia-based anthropologist and writer. She completed her PhD, ‘An ethnography of emotion and morality: Toward a local Indigenous theory of value and exchange on the remote Yolŋu Homelands in Arnhem Land, Australia’, in 2015. Her research interests include economic anthropology, anthropology of emotions, value theory, psychological anthropology, kinship, sociality of being, feminism and anthropological linguistics. Other interests include property relations and land tenure, poetry and anarchist political philosophy. Bree is currently a sessional tutor and lecturer of anthropology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University. She blogs about anthropology and related topics at: fieldnotesandfootnotes.wordpress.com. Boyd Hunter is IZA Research Fellow and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Research School of Social Sciences at The Australian National University (ANU), where he has xi BETTER THAN welfare? worked for 20 years. He is currently editor-in-chief of the Australian Journal of Social Issues, the official publication of the Australian Social Policy Association (and the only social policy journal in Australia). In addition to his work in labour economics, he has considerable expertise in a range of social sciences fields: criminology, econometrics, economic history, geography, poverty analysis, survey design and analysis and Indigenous economic policy. He was recently awarded, along with John Carmody, the 2015 Sir Timothy Coghlan Prize for the best article in Australian Economic History Review for the paper ‘Estimating the Aboriginal population in early colonial Australia: The role of chickenpox reconsidered’. He convenes the Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours), or PhB program, for the College of Arts and Social Sciences at ANU. Kirrily Jordan is a political economist with a particular interest in all aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment and economic development. Her research includes analysis of various public and private sector programs designed to improve Indigenous employment outcomes, as well as the interaction of these programs with the social security system and new forms of welfare conditionality. Kirrily began investigating the Community Development Employment Projects scheme in 2009 and is currently undertaking research on its replacement—the Community Development Program—as well as other federally funded schemes including the Vocational Training and Employment Centres and Employment Parity Initiative. She is working alongside Lisa Fowkes and Will Sanders as a lead investigator on the Australian Research Council project ‘Implementing the remote jobs and communities program: How is policy working in Indigenous communities?’ Will Sanders began studying the Community Development Employment Projects scheme as part of a PhD, undertaken from 1982 to 1985, on the inclusion of Aboriginal Australians in the social security system. Will was an associate of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) from its establishment in 1990 and became a staff member in 1993. During his years of employment at CAEPR, Will has