The Government Will Have To Fork Out $2 Million For Its Racist Work-For-The-Dole Scheme
The scheme has been described as the government's version of 'The Hunger Games'.
The Morrison Government will pay more than $2 million to remote Indigenous communities, after a lawsuit calling out their controversial work-for-the-dole scheme as racist was settled out of court.
The heavily criticised Community Development Program was redesigned in 2015, and threatened to axe welfare payments for up to a month if recipients failed to work 25 hours a week. The CDP has been implemented in 1,000 remote communities with 40,000 participants involved since. However, an estimated 80 percent of people in the program are Indigenous.
“For communities with high costs of living, and high levels of poverty, it was very difficult, very stressful,” said applicant Damien McLean to The Guardian of the outcome. “That’s why we’re glad the Commonwealth had a good look at it, and seen the problems it caused.”
The class action was originally started in 2019 by a collective of nearly 700 people across 10 communities from Western Australia’s Ngaanyatjarra lands, who claimed the program breached the Racial Discrimination Act. It was argued that the “remoteness of their communities, their low levels of education and literacy, and other aspects of their socio-economic status” made it hard for participants to meet their mutual obligations, as reported by The Guardian.
Northern Territory MP Chansey Paech had previously called the CDP “the Federal Government’s own version of the Hunger Games” and an example of “modern-day slavery”.
“Breaching people and cutting them off any form of social welfare only results in increases in property crime, as people are pushed to the limit, pushed by starvation and desperation,” he said in a 2018 speech to parliament.
Despite a brief pause during the pandemic, the CDP was restarted again in October last year, according to NITV. Federal data showed that 90,000 CDP participants had their payments suspended in comparison to around 26,000 people on the JobSeeker.
A trial replacement to the CDP was announced this October, which will see participants in remote communities given an additional $190 incentive for work-like placements, according to the ABC. The voluntary Remote Engagement Program will be rolled out across the country in 2023.