In 2011 the then Labor Government announced that it would be reforming labour market programs operating in remote Australia to make them more community driven and better adapted to the diverse circumstances of remote Australia. The result was the Remote Jobs and Communities Program (RJCP) which started in 2013, which then became, under the Coalition, the Community Development Programme (CDP), the heart of which is Work for the Dole. This seminar is based on research into the development and delivery of these programs from 2013 to 2017. It focusses on what 'goes on' in the name of policy - the way that processes are adopted, how they are used, and how they are experienced by those who are its intended targets.

What emerges is a gulf between the representation of policy action at the bureaucratic and political level and the ways that participants and frontline workers understand and enact the program. 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 communities. On the remote frontiers of the labour market, the ‘expertise’ of central policy makers founders and the Aboriginal people who are the targets of governing efforts fail to conform with desired behaviours of ‘self-governing’ citizens, even in the face of economic coercion. As a result, Government requirements are reduced to empty bureaucratic rituals, represented in numbers and graphs on computer screens in Canberra.

Biography: Lisa Fowkes is a PhD candidate at CAEPR. Prior to starting the PhD she worked for many years in the employment services sector, and continues to consult to sector organisations. More recently she has been working with an alliance led by the Aboriginal Peak Organisations, NT to develop an alternative to the current CDP program.

Media: https://soundcloud.com/user-763545963/lisafowkes21march2018