‘Profiting from the vulnerable’ Job services company got $50m as unemployment doubled in Kowanyama-Pormpuraaw
A Sydney-based multinational company received a five-fold increase in funding to reduce unemployment in a Far North community but the towns’ unemployment rate more than doubled.
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A Sydney-based multinational company received a five-fold increase in funding to reduce unemployment in Kowanyama-Pormpuraaw over an eight-year period while the towns’ unemployment rate more than doubled.
Rise Ventures, an offshoot of Sydney-based, for-profit multinational private company AKG, received $49,245,087 in government money to implement the remote Indigenous Community Development Program between 2015 and 2023 in Kowanyama, a town of 600km north west of Cairns.
Over the same eight years the unemployment rate doubled in the community from 21 per cent to 48 per cent and Kowanyama-Pormpuraaw now has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation after Yarrabah.
Its implementation meant the amount of commonwealth funding given to Rise Ventures for its work in Kowanyama-Pormpuraaw rose from $1,433,128 in 2013-14 to $4,597,351 in 2015-16, before peaking again at $6,955,599 – the same year unemployment in the towns hit 55 per cent.
Kowanyama business woman and former Young Australian of the Year Tania Major said Rise Ventures had failed to match skills with community needs.
“Where are the apprentices, where are the skilled individuals with a certificate IV in horticulture, where are the skilled workers we need for the community?” she asked.
A 21-year-old man from Kowanyama who wanted to remain anonymous said he attended a Rise Ventures literacy skills program, but the class was overcrowded and he still remains illiterate – and a relative explained that he is still unable to tell the time.
Despite the increase in unemployment, Rise Ventures won a further tender to continue offering unemployment services in Kowanyama in 2019.
Then in 2023 it was awarded a competitive government tender, receiving $1.6m to run the local bakery ahead of other local Indigenous groups, as well as core NDIS services, the Pormpuraaw coffee shop and three other enterprises – airconditioning cleaning, gutter cleaning and car detailing.
Ms Major said she put in a bid to run the bakery, but Rise Ventures – who also now run most of the NDIS services in town – were selected instead.
“Rise have been here since 2010,” Ms Major said.
“They are getting all this wrap around funding, so why haven’t they skilled up locals to run the bakery or run the NDIS?”
“It’s not their job to keep people in unemployment and develop enterprise themselves. They are taking advantage of the fact they are not skilling people to run businesses.”
The application of the CDP also remains controversial.
The CDP was a work for the dole program in remote, usually Indigenous communities, implemented by the federal Coalition government in 2015.
It has since been axed by Labor.
“You are getting $6m a year to address unemployment and getting people to work for free, at least make sure the skills being built match the industry demand,” Ms Major said.
The group, which has no Indigenous board members, has offices in Singapore, Canada, the UK and Italy.
In 2019-20, the last time the company made its annual financial statement public, it showed it recorded $49.8m in revenue and a $10.4m profit before tax in the year to June 30, 2019.
Kowanyama has an average life expectancy of 54 and more than 90 per cent of the population is Indigenous.
The now scrapped CDP program required participants to do up to 760 more hours of unpaid work a year than other Job Seeker recipients to receive their welfare benefit.
This usually worked out to 25 hours a week without any Fair Work Act protections and with eight-week noncompliance penalties for those who did not participate.
Australian Council of Trade Unions Indigenous Officer Lara Watson said the program was a “drain on the coffers”.
“These were wage jobs for anyone else in the country but they were doing it for a Centrelink payment,” she said, adding that CDP noncompliance led “people to lose their power or lose their housing all-together, especially when these services were directly deducted from their Centrelink payment”.
Across the country several Indigenous leaders have described the CDP program as “unfairly punitive” and “racist”.
In 2021, the federal government settled a class action group from the Ngaanyatjarra Lands near the Gibson Desert in Western Australia.
The group had launched a class action against the program saying it breached the Racial Discrimination Act by disproportionately penalising remote Indigenous people.
A spokeswoman from Rise UP said “long-term unemployment is a problem throughout all remote regions of Australia”.
She said that “generational unemployment is a complex issue that requires a multifaceted approach” and sadly there was “no easy or quick fix”.
“Among the many initiatives we have delivered are a range of micro-enterprises from a bakery, retail, lawn mowing and furniture making, all of which provide employment and career opportunities for local community members,” the spokeswoman said.
“Our goal is to hand over the running of these businesses to the community in due course, this is part of the process.”
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Originally published as ‘Profiting from the vulnerable’ Job services company got $50m as unemployment doubled in Kowanyama-Pormpuraaw
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