What Cape York communities can do to help themselves

We have a hard road ahead of us and we have set ourselves a difficult challenge: to see if we can change the future for our currently dysfunctional society in Cape York Peninsula. To see if we can change direction so that our people can rise up in the world, a world where our current position is at the lowest and most miserable bottom end.

The first part of the journey down this difficult road, was to get our thinking straight. Across the full range of policy thinking about our people’s affairs, there are ruling nostrums that are fatally flawed. Some of the misconceptions are subtle – but profoundly decisive. I will quickly reiterate some examples of this wrong thinking:

• it is true that our people are frequently victimised – but to see ourselves as victims weakens us, it makes our people resign themselves to continued victimisation (while the fewer apparently capable people defend them as victims).
• racism is a terrible burden and impediment that our people are forced to endure – but we must not make it our disability, otherwise it debilitates us and succeeds in its purpose of destroying our resolve to survive and prosper as a people.
• the welfare safety net exists as a universal entitlement of all citizens – but we don’t have a right to languish at the dependent bottom end of society, we instead have a right to a fair place in the real economy (ie. a greater right).
• everything we do must be "culturally appropriate" – but in practice "culturally appropriate" usually means substandard in terms of quality, expectation, performance and achievement.
• it is true that the ultimate explanation of our parlous condition is our history, our dispossession and consequent trauma – but these explanations frequently do not confer ready solutions, other than to reiterate the responsibility of Australian society to assist our people to rise out of our problems and to take our rightful place in our country. Rather, there are more immediate explanations of our problems – passive welfare dependency, grog and drug addiction – which require, and are amenable to, practical resolution in the present.

Confronting our poor thinking will be an ongoing process. The leadership that is developing and the new thinking that is being shared and generated among community members and community leaders, is critical. This leadership must be encouraged and re-developed at the family level because that leadership did exist in earlier times – it is just that it has broken down as our problems have overwhelmed us.

Where does our new thinking come from? Fundamentally, we looked to what our older people were saying. Those people who had lived in the real economy of traditional society or the old rural economy before the coming of passive welfare. They spoke with alarm about the breakdown of responsibility and respect in our society, and in despair about the increasing velocity of the epidemics of grog and then drug addiction that have taken hold.

A fundamental belief underlying what we are trying to do in Cape York is that we will not prevail over our social problems until and unless we confront our economic passivity. No amount of resources and government and non-government service delivery will solve our social problems as long as our people are economically passive.

This means work. Vigorous lives are underwritten by vigorous engagement in life through some form of work – production, creativity, self-reliance and personal responsibility. For a people to remain in a perpetual state of non-work is to consign such people to a self-perpetuating state of social dysfunction. This is no radically new insight. It is a universal human truth.

But how are we going to turn our analysis into practical changes?

Cape York Partnerships

Cape York Partnerships is an undertaking founded on the belief that we need to move towards a more entrepreneurial approach to our social needs. This means we need to leave behind the failed social-service delivery methods of the past – with its focus on needs and problems and on bureaucratic service delivery and management of passive (and hopeless) people – to an opportunity-oriented approach. It is an enterprise in which we are seeking community, government and business partnerships.

We think there is a great potential for innovation outside the corporate world. Indeed, we think there are great tasks lying ahead of us that can only be tackled by a new kind of entrepreneur – one that cuts across the traditional boundaries between the public, private and voluntary sectors of our society.

The social entrepreneur is somebody who manages to mobilise the under-utilised common resources in order to achieve lasting change. But the main assets the social entrepreneur are creating and working with are relationships. Unexpected relationships between members of the local communities, staff of government structures, at all levels, business people, politicians, anybody who has an interest in social development where it was thought not to be possible.

There are people who want to take on this role, and there are people in the communities who will be inspired by them. These things are beginning to happen in many countries, where the public sector faces the same challenges as in our country.

The main quality of such social entrepreneurs will be their belief in the capacity of our people. There must be absolutely no hesitation on this. They have to know our potential as a people such that they will never presume that our future lies in other people "saving" or "serving" us.

To avoid creating relationships of dependency and passivity, the social entrepreneur will have strong thinking to guide his or her role. They will face situations where they will be under pressure to do things in the ‘traditional’ way – through ‘service delivery’, rather than maximum self-service. Many social and ideological pressures will be brought to bear, but the social entrepreneur will resist returning to the old ‘saviour/servant’ model of leadership.

How are communities going to find such social entrepreneurs?

This is where partnership with the business community is essential. The business community harbours entrepreneurs who, if they turned their talents, experience and networks to social enterprise, could help to transform it from a problems management service into an opportunity-seizing business.

We need a recruitment facility to find good resource people to work in community development in Cape York. The difficulties in recruiting people to remote locations mean that the pool upon which communities can draw is extremely shallow.

Such a facility would form links with overseas aid organisations and the business sector and would network with them to recruit high-quality people to work in our communities. The recruitment agency will work with Cape York organisations to actively promote Cape York as a region where we actually have a genuine conviction that our problems can be overcome and our opportunities can be seized.

As well as the recruitment of external resource people to work in the communities, the proposed recruitment facility should also aim to provide job search support to Cape York people who wish to find employment outside of the Cape. If Cape York people wish to move to urban centres like Cairns, for reasons of undertaking training or studies, for supporting students attending educational institutions, or for health reasons, or because they want to participate in sporting competitions or they simply want to live away from their community for a while – then they should be assisted in finding employment.

Social entrepreneurialism and social order

I have previously spoken about the primary importance of our people in Cape York confronting our overwhelming grog and drug problem, and the inextricably related problem of the breakdown in social order. I have argued that there is an urgent need to restore social order in our communities and these problems of addiction and violence will not be overcome if we simply believe that they are just "symptoms" of underlying issues. These dysfunctional behaviours must be confronted as problems of behaviour.

The requirement of social order is not inconsistent with social entrepreneurship and greater freedom and devolution of responsibility for families and individuals in our communities. We are in fact advocating greater devolution of responsibility and resources to families away from community and official governing structures – so that families can take initiative and seize opportunities. But the community and government have a responsibility to ensure there is social order. The grandmothers and other sober and responsible people need to be supported in their desire to have peace and freedom from threats and abuse.

Many of our social problems will be overcome as a by-product of our people taking up positive opportunities. However, there are some problems that will need to be addressed as problems of behaviour. Grog and drug problems will not just be solved by making positive opportunities available to people. It will require the establishment and enforcement of standards of social order.

When I say "social order", I mean what progressive people might also understand to be ‘Aboriginal law’. While progressive people might instinctively recoil from talk of ‘social order’, they would no doubt support the recognition of Aboriginal law. What I mean is that the Aboriginal values and relationships which constitute Aboriginal law must be enforced so that social order is re-established in our society.

We are also developing a trial of Family Income Management in three communities in Cape York. Contrary to assumptions that have been made about our proposals, Family Income Management is not a community welfare pooling or voucher system but rather, it is about family-budget management – something that mainstream families do because they have the facilities and support services to do it.

It is about allowing local families to voluntarily pool and manage their income as a household, nuclear family or extended family (it's up to them to define the "family"). The system aims to address three basic facilities that remote people in Cape York currently do not have:

• proper banking facilities to save money and pay accounts through automatic deductions and payments.
• loan facilities: we propose to establish access to joint loan facilities, where families take out joint loans, rather than just individual loans.
• access to goods and services:.we are looking at on-line catalogues and establishing purchase facilities with suppliers and brokers.

The responsibility therefore falls to families to manage and make decisions about their pooled funds. They may decide to manage 50% of their income, and leave the remainder to individual members as discretionary income. But the system will ensure that those family members who are currently spending all of their money in a discretionary way while other family members are paying the bills and buying the food make a contribution. Families will have financial advisors available to them to provide advice on budgeting and planning.

The Family Income Management system we propose does not therefore take responsibility away – it is aimed at building responsibility at the family level, reinforcing family responsibility and encouraging personal income management. And it can be done on a completely voluntary basis.

The role of the business community in welfare reform

In the era of welfare reform there is a lot of talk of "community/business partnerships", "social coalitions" and "business philanthropy". Business has been cajoled into more philanthropy, and unfavorable comparisons have been made between the levels of corporate contributions in Australia versus the USA and elsewhere.

We need to be clear about what role the business community will play in welfare reform. There are three kinds of contribution that business could make:

1. disinterested financial support;
2. contacts/networks/opportunities/mentorships/expertise/advice to support people to get out of welfare dependency; and
3. interested financial investment in enterprises that will provide opportunities for welfare recipients to get out of dependency.

We should not pretend that the corporate sector will provide the charitable capital necessary to support welfare-dependent people and to help them to get out of dependency. We should be very clear that governments must provide the capital investment for welfare reform. It is through the taxation system that the corporate sector contributes to government investment to disadvantaged people in disadvantaged areas.

The business community’s financial contribution will always be marginal compared to the needs of those dependent upon government social investment. Rather, the business community can make strategic contributions to encourage innovation and the development of social entrepreneurial approaches to welfare reform. Business working in partnership with the community sector can lead welfare reform by developing new approaches that risk- and innovation-averse governments are too slow or reluctant to adopt.

From my experience with business partnerships and from what business people say themselves, while businesses are not willing to provide financial contributions in the form of charity, they are prepared to provide non-financial contributions – which are very valuable in themselves. This is where mentoring, employment and training opportunities, advice, networks, contacts, support and other kinds of valuable leverage – become extremely valuable resources for people who currently have no networks, no experience and no opportunities.

And of course the third form of contribution is another vitally important area for partnership, where businesses are encouraged to enter into relationships with welfare-dependent people and locations, to invest in mutually beneficial business opportunities. In these cases businesses generate opportunities for disadvantaged people and locations in their own interest. Governments should be developing strategies that encourage and support this form of business partnership with Indigenous communities.