in brief: indigenous workers in abbott government receive $19,000 less per year
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Just as we thought things with the newly appointed Abbott government couldn’t get any worse.
News has broke that the government’s initiative to bring ‘to bring indigenous policy under the PM’s control,’ by employing ‘260 Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander bureaucrats’ into the Department of the Prime Minster and Cabinet, is going to be paying those new Indigenous employees $19,000 less per annum than ‘their new white colleagues [who are] doing the same jobs.’
Not only that, but ‘in another blow to Indigenous voices … the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples says it is sacking two-thirds of its workforce … after the federal government cut its funding.’
Statistics show that the PM&C is ‘one of the public service’s best-paid departments and among its least culturally diverse.’ The plan was implemented to reduce this diversity gap, but has failed in making everything equal for the new employees.
Furthermore, a spokesperson on Friday said ‘there would be no movement on wage … among PM&C works’ for quite a long time. Mr. Abbott’s office did not comment or respond about the wage gap and the loss of jobs.
This pay gap comes as a surprise after, in May 2013, the Gillard government ‘provided a further $15 million in funding to flow over three years.’ However, that money is clearly not going ‘to be paid,’ said Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion.
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Who knows what’s going on here? The pay gap may reflect less hours worked, or it may reflect what the Indigenous public servants were being paid under their old job, or that they do not have as much experience as the public servants who already work for the same department. It is difficult to make a final judgment; clearly the paper in reporting this want to make it look like a scandal, but if those hundreds of indigenous public servants agreed to come over under those conditions, is it such a bad deal?
One interesting fact noted in that story is that over 800 non-Indigenous public servants are *also* making the move to the new government department on the same pay as the Indigenous public servants.