Our radical plan to end welfare dependency requires guarantee of quality education
This hopelessness is not confined to our people. Across Australia there exists a bottom million for whom disadvantage has become permanent. For this underclass work is scarce, schools fail and welfare is their only inheritance. It should never be acceptable that children grow up in a commonwealth of abundance and yet inherit so little hope.
So we charted a new course. Our purpose has been simple: that our children in Cape York can look to the future with the same confidence as other Australian children.
To do that, we had to break with the old orthodoxies. On the progressive side, there was the belief disadvantage could be managed through endless programs and goodwill – that compassion and spending alone would yield justice. But our lived evidence showed otherwise: compassion without reform brought only disempowerment and dependency.
On the conservative side, there was a belief that if individuals simply tried harder, they would succeed. Too often this came with policies that preached responsibility but withheld opportunity.
Cape York’s reform agenda reclaimed responsibility from the right, not as blame but as the source of empowerment.
And we reclaimed opportunity from the left, not as sentiment but as structured support to match responsibilities.
It was not the easy road. Our progressive allies were allergic to our agenda. We declined the path of least resistance.
But it was, and remains, the only road that honours our people’s right to take charge of our own lives, to be the main actors in our own development.
Cape York families who do the right thing – who send their children to school ready to learn – are failed by poor schools and systems.
Children attend but do not learn. Classrooms exist but capability does not grow. This is the opportunity gap, missing chances for a good education, decent jobs, home ownership and long lives.
The opportunity gap traps the bottom million across Australia, whether you live in Arnhem Land, in a suburb of Sydney or a small town anywhere in the country.
In Cape York, if a child stays in their community, their chance of graduating year 12 is less than one in 100. The path from school to employment is, for most, a dead end. The ultimate price is paid in deaths in despair. Life expectancy in Cape York is on average 30 years less than in Brisbane.
That is why the next phase of reform must do more than promise opportunity. It must guarantee it. Opportunity can no longer depend on political discretion, bureaucratic goodwill, geographic location or funding cycles. It must be guaranteed by law.
We know that year 12 completion is the single most important strategy for closing the gap. When a young person finishes year 12, the odds flip: they are more likely to work, keep earning and raise children who do the same.
Twenty years ago the Cape York Leaders Program began offering secondary school boarding scholarships so our young people could attend quality high schools.
Then we tackled the achievement gap in primary school literacy and numeracy with Direct Instruction through the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy. The results are clear: Around 70 per cent of our graduates move on to full-time work, earning on average $50,000 more each year than those on welfare.
For nearly two decades, hundreds of young people have completed year 12 with our support. Our young people have proven how to close the gap in one generation. But of the 340-odd Cape York young people who reach high school age each year, we have resources to support only 20.
We have learnt that reforms must provide guarantees: when families take responsibility, they must be met with real opportunity.
So we propose complementary Queensland and commonwealth legislation: the personal responsibility and opportunity act – Australia’s GI Bill for those whose parents and grandparents the economy left behind.
Franklin Roosevelt understood that his nation would owe more than thanks to its veterans after World War II. The GI Bill guaranteed education and housing support. It rebuilt lives and rebuilt the nation by growing the American middle class.
The personal responsibility and opportunity act applies that same principle to our bottom million. When families in Cape York – and across Australia – take responsibility by sending their children to school and meeting basic obligations, the act will:
• Guarantee quality education and work pathways as legal entitlements, not discretionary programs.
• Link responsibility with opportunity through an expanded responsibility and opportunity commission, which works with each family and child on a case plan.
• Fund community-controlled organisations to deliver supports, with accountability for real outcomes, not just activity.
• Support poor families to save and build assets, including for home ownership, through platforms such as our proposed Provident Fund.
This is not about a bigger welfare state. It is about transforming the welfare state into an opportunity economy.
The personal responsibility and opportunity act is designed for one generation – 21 years – from conception to adulthood. By the middle of this century, a child born in Cape York will have the same chance of finishing school, getting a job, buying a home and raising a family in security and pride as other Australian children.
The left will say obligations are cruel. The right will say obligations are by themselves sufficient. Both are wrong. Our experience tells us responsibility without opportunity is despair and opportunity without responsibility is passivity.
Only together do they build capability. This is the radical centre of reform in Cape York.
Every young person who finishes year 12 in Cape York Peninsula stands only one degree of separation from grief – from a family member lost to violence, addiction or despair. Their success is extraordinary, an outlier against the odds.
Our task now is to make sure their children stand two degrees away – and their grandchildren, three. That is how our people will heal.
Fiona Jose is chief executive of Cape York Partnership. This is an edited version of a speech she delivered in Sydney on Tuesday evening, marking 20 years since the founding of the Cape York Leaders Program.
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Twenty-five years ago, the Cape York Partnership launched a radical social attack. We attacked injustice and inequality, and the passive welfare system that managed disadvantage instead of ending it. We stopped accepting that, in a prosperous country, Aboriginal people live in a Fourth World reality – poverty, ill health and disadvantage – that would shame any nation.