A class action seeking compensation for about 20,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were part of an Australian work for the dole scheme has been lodged in the federal court. The community development program required remote participants to work up to 50 hours a fortnight, five days a week, 52 weeks a year as a condition of income support, with more than 80% of participants being Indigenous.
Miranda Nagy, a principal lawyer at Maurice Blackburn, said the requirements exceeded equivalent programs in cities. “I would describe the community development program in its design, in its administration and in its effect, as racially discriminatory,” she said. The CDP was introduced in 2015 by the former Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion.
The lead plaintiff is wood sculptor Serena Marrkuwatj Bonson, an artist from Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. She says she was made to paint shells to earn income support under the CDP and was penalised 17 times over about five years, cutting off her welfare payments for four weeks. While caring for her grandchildren, she says she was forced to ask extended family for money to help feed them.
Her uncle and fellow claimant, Yolngu elder Baru Pascoe, signed up voluntarily despite exceeding the age cap, only to find he was unable to opt out. He was required to make mud bricks alongside younger men, work that was “shameful” and “culturally inappropriate” for the senior elder. He alleged the CDP caused harm to his community of Maningrida, saying people were “confused, stressed, traumatised” and that “a lot of people had nightmares, even getting sick”.
The claim covers people in Queensland, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales who took part in the scheme between 2015 and 2021. In 2021, the federal government paid $2m to settle a class action from the Ngaanyatjarra traditional owners’ council, which claimed the program was racist, though it made no admission of legal liability.
Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy said the Albanese government was fulfilling its pledge to dismantle the CDP, adding: “We have invested more than $700m into our new Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program to give First Nations Australians the dignity of real work, real pay and better conditions.”
