Bid to clear path to find work in communities
ROBBIE Katter has launched a fresh bid to help First Australians secure work in their own communities with new legislation introduced into parliament.
The Traeger MP, who represents much of the Gulf Country, has introduced the revised Working with Children (Indigenous Communities) Amendment Bill 2021, which will delegate decision-making powers around Blue Cards to Indigenous community leaders in certain situations.
This is the third time Mr Katter has tried to introduce the legislation.
The Katter’s Australian Party leader said the chronic unemployment and generational welfare dependency was a “cancer” eroding social and economic stability for the state’s Indigenous populations.
Mr Katter said unemployment was “chronically high” in Indigenous communities, with about 36.5 per cent of people on Palm Island out of work, while 28 per cent were unemployed at Doomadgee and Mornington Island.
The statewide unemployment average is 7.3 per cent.
“The Blue Card system is a commendable framework that at its core is designed to reduce the risk of dangerous individuals coming into contact with young people,” he said.
“However there are serious problems with the way the Blue Card framework is used as some sort of a safety blanket by the government, and indeed its scope extends far beyond its purpose to protect kids.
“Overwhelmingly this overreach has a detrimental impact on Indigenous communities where work opportunities are scarce, and more often than not are government roles which demand Blue Cards.”
Mr Katter said state government data showed that people who identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander accounted for 5 per cent of Blue Card applicants from 2017-20, but they made up 22 per cent of rejections.
He said under this bill, some of those people would be granted a restricted Blue Card, but others would not be.
“The purpose of this legislation is to enable local decision-making around the Blue Cards, but only in certain circumstances and never when an applicant had a history of harming children,” Mr Katter said.
“In these instances, final decisions on a Blue Card for that community area only would be undertaken by Local Justice Groups instead of some faceless bureaucrat in Brisbane who doesn’t realise that their ‘tick or flick’ on an application could literally change someone’s life.”
The Mornington Shire Council has officially endorsed the Bill, with Mayor Kyle Yanner saying he had personally faced issues being approved for a Blue Card in the past and knew how f r u s t r a t i n g the process a s s o c i a t e d with the system could be.
“It’s absolutely insulting. There are so many people here in our community who want to change and get into work and then the Blue Cards system just knocks them down,” Cr Yanner said. “The effects of this is it takes the fire out of people’s bellies to try and get into work and then they rebel.
“It’s the people up here on the ground, including the Elders, who should be able to make these sorts of decisions around who is suitable for what jobs.”
Cr Yanner said there was only one worker at the community’s kindergarten because everyone who wanted to work there could not obtain a Blue Card.
“What jobs have we got available to us up here?” he said.
“We know people’s stories and circumstances – of course anyone with serious criminal offences are going to be excluded.
“But when something is historic or petty, which so many of people’s records are, and someone has worked really hard to improve themselves then they should be supported to get into work. It’s just insulting to us that the government thinks we can’t make our own decisions in our communities.”