Cape York’s plan to close the gap in one generation based on outcomes

Noel Pearson has re-entered the post-voice debate where he started more than two decades ago: focused on outcomes, opposed to passive welfare and determined to build a ladder of opportunity that extends from healthy families and a good education to home ownership and enduring personal and generational wealth. The results are in from the Cape York Partnership founded by Mr Pearson, and they hold the promise that it is possible to close the gap in a single generation. There is a lot to celebrate in Mr Pearson’s return to his philosophical roots that sees an end to passive welfare and sit-down money as an essential first step in breaking the cycle of poverty and disadvantage that can become an intergenerational trap.

The new approach shares the ideological motivation of a love of people that powered Mr Pearson in his advocacy for the voice. But for many Australians it will be easier to digest because it is practical in nature and targets poverty and disadvantage rather than race.

Long-time Cape York Partnership chief executive Fiona Jose has outlined a bold vision to expand the Cape York blueprint, which boasts that around 70 per cent of graduates move into full-time work, earning on average $50,000 more each year than those on welfare. The radical new agenda is to scale up the ladder of opportunity from the 20 people the Cape York organisation is able to help and deliver it to one million marginalised young Australians wherever they are. Ms Jose says hopelessness is not confined to Aboriginal people. Across Australia there exists a bottom million for whom disadvantage has become permanent. Ms Jose’s is an inspirational message of a radical centre of reform that will support poor families to save and build assets, including for home ownership.

She says the aim is not a bigger welfare state but about transforming the welfare state into an opportunity economy. The challenge will be to hold bureaucracy true to the high demands that have been expected of participants in the Cape York program.

Ms Jose is expecting a challenge from all political directions. She says for the left, obligations will be seen as cruel, and the right will say obligations are by themselves sufficient. Ms Jose says both are wrong and the Cape York Partnership experience is that responsibility without opportunity is despair, and opportunity without responsibility is passivity. “Only together do they build capability,” she says. “And only capability gives people real choice – to choose lives they have reason to value.”

To implement its plan, the Cape York Partnership established three institutions: a family responsibilities commission to support families to meet basic responsibilities to their children; the Cape York Leaders Program to provide scholarships and leadership development; and an opportunity program to help poor families save, invest in education and build assets. Ms Jose says each institution was designed to help even the poorest families convert opportunity into capability through responsibility.

The Cape York Partnership has proposed complementary Queensland and federal legislation to expand the radical centre, to be called the Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act. If individuals take responsibility, the state will guarantee opportunity. Ms Jose says opportunity is about structural solutions; responsibility is about personal agency and high expectations from families, neighbours and society. The responsibilities agenda deserves support and demands accountability from public sector institutions that have built empires catering to Indigenous disadvantage and, unlike the Cape York program, have precious little to show for it in terms of results.