Dole cut call if Aborigines won’t work
Patricia Karvelas and Stuart Rintoul: The Australian | August 21, 2008
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24215668-601,00.html
WELFARE laws should be overhauled to force Aborigines to take jobs or face immediate cuts to their dole payments – even if it requires moving away from their homelands.
Labor powerbroker and indigenous leader Warren Mundine told The Australian yesterday the Rudd Government should introduce hardline welfare reforms that forced Aborigines to take work all over the country, with consequences for those who refused.
Commenting on the effect of the Government’s plans to import workers from Pacific nations to fill seasonal vacancies, Mr Mundine said welfare reforms started with the quarantining of payments in the Northern Territory, but must now extend to the reform of the labour laws.
“How stupid does Australia look when we are flying people in from overseas to do these jobs?” he said. “How can we have an entire industry out there under threat because we can’t get people to work here.
“There’s not enough encouragement in the system to get people off the dole and into these jobs.
“There has to be tougher rules, because indigenous people just aren’t taking up the jobs … If you’re not prepared to put your hand up for a job, no matter where it is, we shouldn’t have to continue paying the dole. The vast majority of indigenous people need to work and are ready to work.”
Cape York indigenous leader Noel Pearson joined Mr Mundine yesterday in attacking the Government’s proposal to import 2500 workers from Tonga, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea to fill seasonal shortages.
He said it would be a “tragedy” if unemployed Aboriginal people were overlooked in favour of imported Pacific islanders under the new guest-worker scheme.
“It would be a tragedy if it had to be farmed out to other nations,” he said.
The Government hopes its three-year trial of bringing in 2500 Pacific islanders could be rapidly increased to 25,000. But the Australian Horticulture industry is adamant it would take local workers, including indigenous people, if it could get them, and industry representatives insisted repeated attempts to hire unemployed Aborigines had failed.
Mr Pearson said a failed fruit-picking initiative he promoted three years ago, under which Cape York youths were shipped into fruit-growing areas, was “tremendously successful”, even though few of the Cape York workers remained employed.
Asked whether the Government’s Pacific jobs solution was a threat to indigenous employment, he said: “I think it is, because at a time when entry-level work is shrinking, these are areas where our people can show they can enter.”
Mr Pearson said the scheme he promoted in 2005 involved “the most difficult end of the labour market – young indigenous people with no skills” – and some Cape York workers had since shown “heaps of aptitude” working at abattoirs in Wonthaggi.
Tracey Leo, former head of the Northern Territory Horticulture Association, said she had been campaigning to get indigenous workers “for a very long time”.
“The bottom line from our end is you cannot force people to work,” she said. “All the attempts we have made in getting indigenous workers involved have failed. The best form of aid for anyone is employment and opportunity.
“If we can give people work, it’s a win-win situation, but they just won’t take the work.”
Mr Mundine, a former ALP national president, said he sympathised with industries facing shortages but unemployment would be turned around only by changing the laws and rules.
“There has to be reform,” he said. “How can we have 22,000 low-skill jobs go begging when we have so many indigenous people who are unemployed?”
Opposition indigenous affairs spokesman Tony Abbott said he supported a dramatic overhaul of the welfare laws to force people to take up jobs.
“Unemployment benefits should be suspended in places like Mildura during the picking season if jobs can’t be filled,” he said.
But he took a softer line than Mr Mundine, arguing that forcing people to move great distances for work might not be possible or fair.
“It’s not entirely realistic to force people to move vast distances,” he said. “But if unskilled work is readily available in a particular area, unemployment benefits should no longer be available.”
Labor says the Liberal Party is split over the Pacific Seasonal Worker Scheme, with key MPs expressing support for the plan, while Brendan Nelson and Mr Abbott condemn it.
The Opposition Leader said yesterday: “Don’t we have our first priority and responsibility to Australians, particularly those who haven’t got work.”
However, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said the guest-worker scheme would in “no way stop indigenous Australians from getting a job as a seasonal worker”.
“Overseas low-skilled seasonal workers will be employed only after employers have demonstrated they have first made reasonable efforts to employ Australians,” she said.
Ms Macklin said bosses would be required to commit to participate in programs for the training and career development of people who might not be job-ready, particularly income-support recipients, indigenous Australians and those from refugee programs seeking work. But Ms Macklin would not say whether she supported a tigher welfare system to force indigenous people into jobs.
Comment:
If Prime Minister KRudd really wanted to ease the burden of farmers trying to rope in cheap labour for fruit picking, then rather than paying millions to train and fly in a pack of coolies from the Pacific Islands who (on the surface at least) will take the majority of their earning back to their own third-world island nations where they can live in relative luxury and boost those economies, KRudd would spend the money on the long term unemployed of all races in this country by setting up a similar sort of scheme, whereby free transport to and from remote farming communities or assistance to move and permanent facilities for temporary accomodation would be provided for volunteers and the long term unemployed that do not have a valid reason not to be forced to participate in the scheme “with consequences for those that refused.”
But no, Chairman KRudd in the footsteps of Prime Minister Keating wants to create another avenue to speed up the multi-racialisation of Australia at the expense of the current Abo and White inhabitants. Abos already live in abject squalor because of a combination of their own culture, personal choice and successive government’s unrestrained handouts without any thought as to the consequences. Whites on the other hand who are long term unemployed are often branded as unemployable by employers and job agencies, and are cast aside in favour of non-White immigrants and refugees from the third-world that are prepared to work for a pittance in squalid conditions. Combine that with the preferred status that refugees have with with government housing bodies and we find that the quality of life gap between White and Black is narrowing as many demand, but not in the way they want. The Australian Abo remains in abject squalor and the White man through lack of income, lack of housing and forced subsistance income via government handouts is quickly joining him.
Stop the importation of Pacific Island coolies! Stop non-White immigration! Do it now and neither Abo nor White Australians will be forced to live in the abject poverty of the third-world – unless of course that is how they choose to lead their lives.
Cailen.
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