00:00The class action was filed in the federal court yesterday and it focuses on the Commonwealth
00:06Government's former Work for the Doll scheme known as the Community Development Program or CDP.
00:13Morris Blackburn lawyers allege that that program was racially discriminatory towards Aboriginal and
00:18Torres Strait Islander participants because of the disparity in requirements that it put on them
00:23to meet as opposed to the equivalent city-based programs. Now the CDP was brought into remote
00:29communities with a goal to increase workplace participation and employment. Principal lawyer
00:34on the case Miranda Nagy says that the focus or the key focus of this class action is that
00:40disparity in requirements. So she says that while city-based programs required people to work
00:46around 30 hours over a fortnight for up to six months the equivalent remote program the CDP
00:53required participants to work 50 hours over a fortnight throughout the whole year and
00:58those participants were disproportionately made up of First Nations Australians. Ms Nagy also
01:03claims that the program was more likely to penalise First Nations participants than
01:08non-Indigenous participants and she says that they were up to 27 times more likely to be penalised and
01:14that would lead to things like them being issued fines or having their payments cut. It's not the first
01:20time that the CDP has there has been a class action brought against the Commonwealth government over
01:25this program. Back in 2019 communities in central western Australia were awarded two million dollars
01:32after they sued the federal government over this program claiming that it was discriminatory. Minister
01:38for Indigenous Affairs Malindiri McCarthy has responded to this class action and she's noted that her
01:44government is fulfilling its promise to dismantle the CDP program. Her government has since created
01:50a new program called the remote jobs and economic development program and she says that that program
01:56gives First Nations Australians dignity of real work real pay and better working conditions and that
02:03program is to come into effect from November this year. The lawyers on this class action say that it should
02:10impact around 20,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians across some of the most remote
02:16communities here in Queensland, in WA, the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales and they
02:24say that the ultimate goal of this class action is to receive compensation for those unpaid hours, for
02:32stress, financial hardship experienced and also to hopefully revoke some of the fines that were issued to
02:38participants between that period of 2015 and 2021.
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