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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Daniel James, this is 7am.

At one point during this term of government, Indigenous affairs dominated national debate. Politicians, pundits and the public couldn't stop talking about it.

But after the Voice referendum failed, it’s become something of a taboo. Labor is keen to move on and the Coalition is focussed on scoring points - not offering a plan.

Now with the election weeks away, there are glimpses of what might come next. Labor says it’s about delivering jobs. The Coalition says it’s about cutting waste.

Today, contributor for The Saturday Paper, Ben Abbatangelo, on what the major parties are really offering - and what it all means for First Nations people around the country.

It’s Saturday, April 19.

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DANIEL:

Ben, Indigenous Affairs has more or less fallen by the wayside since the referendum, what sense do you get from both sides as to how they rate it as a priority at this election?

BEN:

Yeah, I mean, to answer this, I'll just go straight to their election platform. So if we think back to the prior election, you know, Labor was really forthright with their policy platform specifically for Indigenous affairs. It started with their commitment to implement the Uluru Statement from the heart in full.

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese:

“I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, I pay my respect to the elders past, present, and emerging, and on behalf of the Australian Labor party, I commit to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full…”

Audio Excerpt

[cheering]

BEN:

Work towards closing the gap, abolish the punitive community development programme, improve housing, invest in First Nations management of land and waters, strengthen First Nations economic and job opportunities and get rid of the privatised cashless debit card. So their platform ahead of the last election was really forthright, really transparent. And if you don't go into the detail of it, a neutral observer would look at it as pretty aspirational.

Now, ahead of this election, if you go to Labor's platform, Indigenous Affairs, Aboriginal people, just anything to do with that portfolio is completely missing, there is nothing.

On the flip side of that, the Coalition's approach to Indigenous Affairs is much like yesteryear. It is consistent with, I suppose, how they approached the referendum, and that is to... from my vantage point or analysis is to punish Aboriginal people.

Audio Excerpt - Michaelia Cash:

“We have serious allegations of both corrupt and criminal behaviour - yes, they are denied, but we need to ensure that this is taxpayer’s money that is being spent appropriately…”

BEN:

And if you look at the Coalition's plan, it is undertaking a full audit of government programmes and expenditure into Indigenous affairs.

Audio Excerpt - Michaelia Cash:

“And isn’t it refreshing though as well to have Peter Dutton as the alternative prime minister of this country, and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as the alternative minister for Indigenous Australians, for the first time standing up and saying ‘if we get elected to government Andrew, we will demand accountability’.”

BEN:

It's launching a royal commission into sexual abuse in Indigenous communities, which is, again, not to actually tackle the challenges that many of our communities face, but it is to demonise them.

DANIEL:

Yes, that interventionist type language that was applied to Aboriginal communities in the lead up to the intervention itself. And it seems that since the referendum's failure, that that rhetoric has come back for political gain. We spoke to the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, after the terrible result for the Closing the Gap report that came out earlier this year. She talked about Labor's new mantra, which is jobs, jobs, jobs. You've been looking into what that actually means, so what did you find, Ben?

BEN:

Yeah, well, you know, Labor's commitment to abolishing the CDP has been years in the making. That's the Community Development Programme, which was introduced by the Coalition in 2015.

Audio Excerpt - ABC Reporter:

“Donovan is one of about 15,000 people nationwide forced into the Community Development Programme; participants lose payments if they don’t attend for 25 hours each week.”

BEN:

What it meant under the scheme was that remote Indigenous people were offered a really simple choice. It is: find a job in places where there often were none, or indefinitely do work for the dole five hours a day, five days a week, 46 weeks a year, year after year, with the majority of that income then being managed through the cashless debit card. And they were forced to work for an hourly rate of $11.20, which was well below that minimum wage of $18.29.

So it is punitive, it is racist, it's akin to modern slavery, and it has been the subject of multiple class actions. And every report that has been commissioned has indicated that it has just created misery within the communities that it is purportedly designed to lift up.

So I suppose to round this little piece out, Daniel, on the history of the scheme, is that when participants withdrew their labour, their income support was withdrawn under the mantra of the time of no work, no pay. So if people in the desert had to drive 400 kilometres to the nearest major city or centre for a hospital appointment, for a doctor's appointment, for sorry business, and they didn't attend the standing around that was forced upon them because there was nothing really to do in these regions, their welfare would be docked and the cascading effects on the families were magnified.

Audio Excerpt - ABC Reporter:

“At least 300,000 penalties have been imposed in two years, including for people away at medical appointments or funerals.”

BEN:

In 2017, Labor first committed to abolish the CDP when they were in opposition.

Audio Excerpt - Pat Dodson:

“The community development program put in place by the current government in remote communities is discriminatory, punitive and ineffectual…and a Shorten Labor government will abolish the CDP and replace it with a new programme!”

BEN:

That commitment firmed ahead of the last election campaign and in the wake of the defeated referendum, it was the first major policy announcement that they introduced.

Audio Excerpt - Jim Chalmers:

“As well as more remote housing we are creating the new ‘remote jobs and economic development program’ with 3000 new jobs in remote Australia to build new skills and new confidence within communities.”

BEN:

But what this Australian National Audit Office report has found is that Labor's $707 million new programme, Remote Jobs and Economic Development, is basically comprising of many of the same failures of yesteryears. It is very much aligned, at least from my perspective, Daniel, with a lot of the neoliberal policy making that has dominated Indigenous affairs in yesteryear.

DANIEL:

So tell me about that, Ben – Labor replaced the CDP with their own jobs program – and now this audit report has come out which assesses how effective their scheme is. What did it say?

BEN:

It spoke about the fact that when the programme was announced by Anthony Albanese in February 2024, that the advice to the government to support that announcement was just not clearly informed by evidence. Labor had promised to develop a new programme in partnership with First Nations people and on top of that had spent the first two years of its term talking about the need to listen to Aboriginal people in order to get better outcomes. But the ANAO report found that the National Indigenous Australians Agency hadn't actually established a governance structure to ensure that Indigenous people were included in decision making until a month before the prime minister announced the new programme.

So it's a pretty scathing assessment. and if we were to think about, I suppose, the expenditure items within the Indigenous Affairs portfolio, this would have to be up there on the podium as one of the most significant investments.

The ANAO report, when you take it in full, speaks to how this is another programme that has largely been conceived by bureaucrats top down. and then, you know, hastily rushed together and once again, superimposed on these communities that I suppose are really looking to bounce back from a couple of decades of policies that have dispossessed, displaced and dehumanised these communities.

Daniel:
Coming up after the break, the Coalition’s plans in Indigenous affairs.

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DANIEL:

Ben, the Coalition chalked up a big win with the failure of the voice referendum, so what have we seen since then in terms of their vision for improving the lives of Aboriginal people?

BEN:

The headline from the Coalition is ‘practical solutions’; you know, we want to ensure that we are pursuing practical solutions to improve the lives of indigenous people.

Audio Excerpt - Jacinta Nampijinpa Price:

“My goal is to halt the pointless virtue signalling and focus on the solutions that bring real change that changes the lives of Australia's most vulnerable citizens. Solutions that give them real lives…”

BEN:

You know, I tried to probe Senator Price on, I suppose, you know the Coalition’s, what they mean when they talk about practical solutions when it comes to Indigenous affairs, but she never responded to those questions. She was clear that in the sense that she believes, you know, Labor's new remote jobs and economic development programme is akin to a broken election promise and that it's been hastily put together and that there's still many missing pieces. She also said that they're committed to encouraging economic independence for indigenous Australians through the private sector and reinsuring that a mutual obligations programme does exist.

DANIEL:

So these are basically announcements. Have they ever actually put any policies out to back up some of these announcements to create jobs for First Nations people the private sector private enterprise what does actually mean in a policy sense? Do we have any idea what the meat is on the bone here?

BEN:

There's no meat on the bone as far as I can say, and this is what I've tried to probe. You know, all of the researchers found that, you know, mutual obligations and the scheme that it sounds like the Coalition wants to revert back to us costs five times as much per participant as the mainstream job active programme and twice as much as the scheme it replaced. And as importantly, that those under mutual obligations also take longer to find work. So it very much contradicts, you know, the narrative of efficiency that the Coalition is running with and importantly also undermines their purported commitment to practical solutions in elevating Indigenous peoples, particularly in remote and rural areas.

Uh, and I'd be interested to get your perspective on this as well, Daniel, but I think one key point is worth noting is that there's a strategy behind, I suppose, putting Senator Nampijinpa Price as the de facto head of, you know, the government's MAGA spin-off of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, and that is to just position Indigenous Affairs as a proxy, as a battleground that they can wedge Labor to. And the expectation is that Senator Price will hold up Indigenous peoples as a punching bag, and the Coalition party and its people who are out on the front lines selling their message are able to just lay some cheap shots when it's politically expedient. And when they think, you know, it can rally the base and be a motivator for their cause. So... That's kind of my lens on it. But I know that you cover this heaps as well, Daniel. What's your kind of take on the Coalition stance for indigenous affairs?

DANIEL:

Yeah, well, the strategy you just outlined proved to be very effective for them. And it was the strategy they used using Aboriginal people, basically as a punching bag, pointing to waste in programmes and in remote communities. When you look across the entirety of government and society, the waste that happens in Aboriginal communities is minuscule as a comparison. But I think, you're right, the Coalition opposition is trying to wedge Labor now because of their success during the referendum. But so far, my reading of it is that they haven't really been able to lay any punches yet.

BEN:

Mm.

DANIEL:

Given the multitude of issues facing Indigenous Australia, things like incarceration rates, life expectancy, suicide rates, the ostensibly the failure of the Closing the Gap agenda, what sense do you have of whether either side really has a plan to address this devastating reality?

BEN:

I don't know if there is, if there's ever been a plan. I feel as though that when you interrogate the detail of what has been proposed, you know, throughout the last couple of decades, nothing that I've seen that has been put forward, I can see being significant in the schemes of closing the gap or emancipating Indigenous peoples from the chronic illness and disease, the hopelessness that exists in many of our communities. It just feels like a kumbaya when the statistics continue to show that mainstream communities continue to break away from ours that are very much stuck in the recesses of a really violent past.

DANIEL:

Ben, it's always very nourishing to talk with you. Thanks for coming on 7am again.

BEN:

Thanks, Daniel. Always a pleasure.

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7am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.

It’s made by Atticus Bastow, Cheyne Anderson, Chris Dengate, Erik Jensen, Ruby Jones, Sarah McVeigh, Travis Evans, Zoltan Fecso – and me – Daniel James.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

Thanks for listening to 7am, we’ll see you Monday.