Settler-state ambitions and bureaucratic ritual at the frontiers of the labour market: Indigenous Australians and remote employment services 2011–2017

Abstract

This thesis explores how policy is enacted – in this case, the Australian Government’s labour market program for remote unemployed people, initially known as the Remote Jobs and Communities Program (RJCP) and then the Community Development Programme (CDP). It outlines the development and delivery of the program from 2011, when the then Labor Government identified the need for a specific remote employment program, placing the employment participation of remote Indigenous people (who made up over 80% of the remote unemployed) at centre stage. It examines the changes that occurred to the program following the 2013 election of a Coalition Government, including the introduction of ‘continuous’ Work for the Dole. The focus of the thesis is on how patterns of practice have emerged in these programs, in particular: how providers have responded; how frontline workers navigate their roles; and how ‘Work for the Dole’ actually operates. What emerges is a gulf between bureaucratic and political ambitions for these programs and the ways in which participants and frontline workers view and enact them. This is more than a problem of poor implementation or the subversions of street-level bureaucrats and clients. There is evidence of a more fundamental failure of technologies of settler-state government as they are applied to remote Indigenous peoples. On the remote, intercultural frontiers of the labour market, the limits of centralised attempts at ‘reform’ become clear. Practices intended to tutor Indigenous people in the ways of the labour market are emptied of meaning. The Indigenous people who are the targets of governing efforts fail to conform with desired behaviours of ‘self-governing’ citizens, even in the face of escalating penalties. As a result, government ambitions to transform the behaviours and subjectivities of Indigenous people are reduced to bureaucratic rituals, represented in numbers and graphs on computer screens in Canberra.