A followup report ............. sure
Quote:...............Labor went to the 2007 federal election promising to re-invigorate CDEP......... But having won office, the Rudd government simply continued the "reforms" started by Brough and Hockey.
By 2009, three decades after it began, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Jenny Macklin, announced CDEP would be abolished in "non-remote areas with established economies".
One of the ironies is that Labor won office in 2007 claiming, repeatedly, that the biggest problem with the Liberals' policies in Aboriginal affairs is they adopted a "one size fits all" approach. Macklin's CDEP policy is based on nothing more than lines on a map.
The small community of Mungindi, for example, is just 150 kilometres from Toomelah. It has kept its CDEP. But Toomelah falls within 30 kilometres of a major centre, Goondiwindi, where, says Macklin, there are "local job opportunities".
Had Macklin read Marcus Einfeld's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity report then they would have realised that it was sparked by a massive riot in Goondiwindi in 1986, led by more than 100 Toomelah residents protesting appalling levels of racial discrimination and notably, their inability to secure employment.
And had she bothered to ask Rene Adams about the work history of the region, she would have discovered that in the 20-year history of the program in Toomelah, no single CDEP participant had ever left the program after securing a job in Goondiwindi.
"Goondiwindi is a lot better than what it was, but it's still a racist town," Adams said.
Adams' view is backed by Elaine Edwards, deputy chair of the Toomelah-Boggabilla Local Aboriginal Land Council, who along with other senior elders, met with Tracker in Goondiwindi recently. They all agreed that racism means Aboriginal people still struggle to find employment in Goondiwindi.
Adams had previously tried warning the Minister personally. In 2009, prior to the abolition of CDEP, she phoned into a live interview Macklin was conducting on ABC Radio in Tamworth, ambushing her on the air.
She did it again in 2010 and 2011, and also wrote to the Department of Employment and Workplace relations on the likely impact on the community.
"We had to do reports for (the government). We predicted it would be bad, but we never predicted it would be this bad. It's five or six times worse than we thought," says Adams.
And she wasn't alone in warning Macklin of the impending disaster. Numerous submissions to a parliamentary inquiry into the legislation abolishing CDEP warned Macklin of the dangers of her policy, including a combined submission from Professor Jon Altman and Dr Kirrily Jordan from the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR).
"Rather than the stated aim of shifting CDEP participants into so-called 'real jobs', the likely result is shifting people out of active work through the CDEP scheme and onto long-term income support," they wrote. That is precisely what has occurred.
In late 2009, Jordan completed a second report, this time specifically into the CDEP operations in the APY Lands in South Australia. Unlike Toomelah, the APY Lands was not considered close enough to "real economies" to lose CDEP altogether, but it was slated for reform.
Jordan noted: "This preliminary analysis concludes that although some of the measures introduced in July 2009 have had positive impacts, the changes to the scheme itself are tending to undermine the productive capacity of CDEP and induce a return to 'sit down money'.
"This is ostensibly what the government seeks to curtail and indeed what the CDEP scheme itself was designed to minimise." ...............
..............Abolishing CDEP in regional communities around the nation might not have had any impact on the bottom line of Jenny Macklin's department, but the impact on the community of Toomelah was devastating.
"All the people who were on CDEP are basically unemployed now," says Rene Adams.
With the closure of CDEP, the community store, with its two dozen employees, was forced to close. That means a loaf of bread is a 14 kilometre drive away in Boggabilla.
"We lasted 26 weeks, but it finally collapsed," says Adams.
Under the Rudd government's schools stimulus package, around $600,000 was spent on building a new school canteen at Toomelah primary. It began to serve not only as a source of food for schoolchildren, but as the only "store" in the community.
Today, even the school canteen lies vacant, courtesy of repeated break-ins. There is, of course, no night patrol in Toomelah anymore either.
No-one is cleaning up the community anymore; the cemetery crew is gone, the civil services have ground to a halt. The street lights are blacked out, there's no-one to attend to local plumbing or basic repair and maintenance of community assets. .........
............Violence in the community has increased exponentially, so much so that more than 60 videos of fights between local residents have been posted on YouTube in the past year. A punch-up in the street has become the entertainment of choice for a community in serious decline.
"Mental health issues and suicides have increased......
https://newmatilda.com/2012/07/06/why-toomelah-collapsed No
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