Abstract
In much of remote Australia where a sizable minority of Indigenous people live, labour markets are able to employ only a small fraction of the working-age Indigenous population, a legacy of Australia’s settler-colonial past and present. In this chapter, we do two things. First, we describe the former Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme as a basic-income-like programme. Using survey data from 2002–2003 to 2014–2015, we examine the impact of the abolition of the CDEP as a proxy for a future basic income scheme on cultural participation. We find that the existence of CDEP was associated with a modest increase in cultural participation, especially in attendance of sporting carnivals. Second, we argue for the implementation of a true basic income scheme in remote Australia as a first priority for a staged programme nationally.
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Notes
- 1.
Here we use the term post-colonising after Moreton-Robinson (2015), where the term refers to the active and continuing nature of non-Indigenous colonial occupation of Australia, as distinct from post-colonial contemporary multiculturalism.
- 2.
Clearly what is termed ‘remote’ from the perspective of the settler society is not remote for Indigenous people who have occupied these regions for millennia. Relying in this chapter on official statistics, we adopt the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ definition of remoteness, a classification that is best considered an index of inaccessibility to population centres and consequently services (Holmes, 2009).
- 3.
In the 2016 Census, 49.8 per cent of employed Indigenous people living Very Remote areas were employed in ANZIC Divisions ‘O’, ‘P’ and ‘Q’, a classification which excludes a further 11.7 per cent working in the largely state-funded Indigenous sector, classified as ‘S9559’ or ‘Other Interest Group Services’.
- 4.
A statistically negligible 2220 people remained grandfathered on CDEP by 16 March 2015 (Hunter, 2016).
- 5.
Altman, Buchanan and Biddle (2006, p. 149) were critical of the 2002 NATSISS for potentially ignoring the economic significance of ‘cultural’ work like hunting and gathering and art and crafts, a critique that was ignored in subsequent 2008 and 2014 surveys.
- 6.
Specifically, the propensity of working-age remote-living Indigenous persons to participate in the CDEP in the 2002 NATSSIS was modelled using logistic regression. Our model predicted CDEP participation of individuals on the basis of their age, sex, state or territory of residence, whether English was the main language spoken at home; whether the persons identifies with a specific Indigenous tribe, clan, language group, regional group or mission; self-assessed health status; whether the person had a profound disability; whether the person lived in a house that was owned or being purchased, rented privately or in social housing; whether the person ever attended high school and whether the person had attained a post-school qualification at Certificate III level or higher. Interaction terms and quadratic terms were used where appropriate. All predictor variables in the model were significantly associated with CDEP participation. McFadden pseudo-R2 for the model was 0.12.
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Altman, J., Markham, F. (2019). Basic Income and Cultural Participation for Remote-Living Indigenous Australians. In: Klein, E., Mays, J., Dunlop, T. (eds) Implementing a Basic Income in Australia. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14378-7_5
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