Yes Sara, there are basically only two reasons why start up enterprises fail, lack of adequate management skills and undercapitalization.

There's simply no point throwing good venture capital after bad if everyone is in charge, or all heading in different directions or refuse to take sound advice?

The best model, I believe, for indigenous enterprise, is the cooperative, always provided any and all dissension is limited to a suggestion box; and or, properly conducted and civil monthly (shareholder's) management meetings, where the (fully informed) majority must prevail.

They will need to a generic man become color blind and just accept their advice from the best available source, which may well be Aunty and traditional knowledge?. That said, every desk should be topped with a sign that says, there's not a white way or a black way, just a right way.
Alan B.

Alan, form my experience and observation, the only way is no way. Too much effort and money has been wasted in this area already.

David

To succeed in ventures, ingenious businesses have several hurdles to overcome before the issue of funding is even addressed.
One major problem is nepotism within the indigenous community, a practise that is rampant in all areas of current endeavour, from remote communities to urban organisations.
Another problem is good work ethics. Most indigenous organisations employ more people than a comparative white organisation simply to provide the same service, because indigenous people take far more time off work.
Then there is the problem of employing people who don't have adequate qualifications especially those who have gained certificates from indigenous only programs where the entry level and outcomes are at a far lesser standard than equivalent white organisations like TAFE.
For any business to succeed, they need to be competitive and this means performing at the same, or better level than the competition

Big Nana, that is telling it like it is, no BS, no excuses. The powers that be won't listen to you though.

David

Big Nana, if the stereotyping evident in your post is true? All that means is more mentoring?
Alan B.

Hi Big Nana,

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I have little confidence in pretty much any proposal concerning the entire welfare-oriented population - apart from Noel Pearsons's proposal, born out of sheer desperation, one suspects, that as many young people should be sent away from 'communities' as possible, either to boarding schools or to distant work.

'Self-determination' and 'community' have been frauds. With some exceptions, people who can't avoid having to stay (usually women with kids), I suggest that the vast majority of Aboriginal people at settlements and at the few out-stations still being used, are not interested in either education or work, and by example are turning yet another generation of kids into yet another useless population. Given the genius of Aboriginal people in those settings to turn every promising initiative into yet another welfare scam, I think that, on the whole, Noel Pearson is right on this score.

I suspect that even a proposal such as a bauxite mine on the Cape is seen as little more than a lucrative 'silver bullet', as a means to derive income, hopefully plenty of it, with as little actual effort as possible, perhaps through some corporate shares or royalties scheme. As ever, I hope I'm wrong.

Meanwhile, working Indigenous people are on track to produce fifty thousand university graduates in total by 2020.

Keep up the good fight :)

Love,

Joe

Alan B, all the mentoring in the world won't help if it is so infused with political correctness that no one can speak honestly.
I worked in Health for over thirty years and towards the end, became totally disillusioned by the workplace attitude that indigenous employees can't be reprimanded for work place bad habits that saw anyone else pulled into a supervisors office and given warnings. Things like punctuality, days off, poor attitude, the habit of looking for racism in every comment or action by their work mates.
If aboriginal people are going to achieve equality, they have to be treated equally

Joe, one of my adult granddaughters, who is fairly dark skinned, is almost halfway through a government traineeship in Finance. She has spent a lot of time in my house and as such, is well aware of my expected work ethics amongst my indigenous grandchildren.
In her case it has really paid off. The Department is so impressed with her attitude and work ethics she's already being advised to apply for permanent jobs, even before her traineeship is half way through.
But what I am most proud of is the response she gave to her indigenous support worker who told her to always be on the look out for racism from her co workers.
In essence she said that she never looked for racism, she rarely had experienced racism in her life and she wasn't about to cause problems with the co workers who have been treating her so well.
It seems that even those who start with the right attitude are in danger of being sabotaged by their own support crew.

Hi Big Nana,

I wish your granddaughter all the very best, with all my heart. I don't know how organisations might get rid of the dead wood, the supernumeries that they feel they have to carry, who do little or no work, who often seem to have no duties at all, but get to go to the overseas conferences, the education workers who don't believe in education, the health workers who don't believe in germ theory, the legal workers (provide with car, etc.) who spend their time visiting relatives.

When my wife took over the management of student support at an unnamed university, she found one bloke who didn't seem to have done any work at all for a couple of years, except on his own post-graduate studies - that was all that was on his computer. She did a deal to get him out, paying a full year's salary to another department.

I'm told of an education worker who told the kids, "This is all bullsh!t - look at me, I didn't even finish primary school and I've had this job now for twenty years." How inspiring would that be for the kids ? He had that job for another fifteen years.

Or health workers - usually grossly obese - who are amongst the drug pushers to a 'community'.

So much of Indigenous society is based on a rentier economy - in which people are on pretty secure salaries, not for what they do but for what they are. I recall a ranger, very 'Aboriginal-looking', whose job seemed to be to stand or smoke or sit outside the regional headquarters 'looking Aboriginal.'

My wife once gave a very inspiring speech to a group of unqualified Aboriginal rangers about the successes of Aboriginal people in the Conservation Management course, they all sat, arms folded, sitting back, glowering. Not one took up the opportunity. Well, why would you, if you already get a full salary AND a Toyota to get around in ? Sweet.

{TBC]

[continued]

Perhaps with good intentions (and maybe not), government organisations have padded their Indigenous employment with unqualified people who will NEVER go on to attempt proper qualifications, in field after field. Okay, that's what people choose. They can take the consequences of their choices. And, unfortunately, so will their kids.

Other Indigenous people, mainly n the cities, will just get on with seizing genuine opportunities, for genuine jobs, where they can find them. And it usually isn't in public organisations: they already have their blackfellas quota, we're terribly sorry.

So who benefits from racism ?

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Joe and Big Nana,
Do you think any of this will change after they get Reconciliation or a Treaty or whatever. I would dearly love to be wrong but I suspect not. It seems to me that this whole disadvantage business is just a myth and I have come to that conclusion from my own observation without any input from you two.

Fortunately, there are also a lot who have managed to do all right for themselves. Back in the sixties I worked with a young part aboriginal and his sister who both fitted in with the rest of the crew. No one cared about who they were.

David

Hi David,

Will "any of this .... change after they get Reconciliation or a Treaty or whatever" ?

No of course not, such fripperies might make many white professionals - who wouldn't know a Blackfella if they fell over her - and the Aboriginal elites, as well as those no-work semi-professional Indigenous skivers feel better, put them on more committees and allow them to attend more international conferences. But, if anything, it will entrench the Gap and Widen it.

As Jeremy Sammut writes, the Indigenous people whose women and kids are suffering most have been exposed to 'colonialism' least: long-term contact with whites has had inversely proportional effects on Indigenous well-being, i.e. the less of it, the more disastrous is current life amongst Indigenous welfare-oriented populations. Isn't this so ?

It's not all sweetness and roses for Indigenous people even in the cities, and even with good education: new forms of racism have been in play, with the connivance of Indigenous elites. For example, the difficulties that Indigenous graduates may have if they have graduated in mainstream fields - which these days is 97 %. The old naïve notion that Indigenous students SHOULD study only in 'Black' courses, and not in White' courses, is still alive and festering away.

In that sense, I would suggest that the political level of many in the Indigenous elite are somewhere far below that of Africans in South Africa before the setting-up of the ANC in 1912. The elite seem to be totally unaware that most Indigenous people live in urban environments (perhaps because they don't want to know) - like themselves, actually.

Very few in the elite have ever spent much time in 'communities', certainly not over, say, pension day and its aftermath. And if self-determination has anything to do with economic development (as I always assumed, more fool me), then they are also totally ignorant of any of its requirements and problems. Everything, after all, drops out of the sky.

So the elites, so out of touch, are forever ignoring (or are oblivious to) the real issues.

Cheers,

Joe

There is a brilliant article today across the middle pages of The Australian's Review, by Nicolas Rothwell - it's a review and commentary on a book of papers which in turn comment on the long-term work of Jon Altman, especially on his optimistic notion of an Indigenous 'hybrid economy'. I'll be reading that review many times over.

There have been so many promising initiatives, what must have seemed sure-fire ideas, well-funded and -equipped, and yet - poof ! Nothing. The CDEP scheme for instance: paid work, on top of funding for equipment and Indigenous management - in other words, communities being paid to build up their economic bases. In my late wife's community, of 12,000 acres of good country and unlimited water licence, her brother struggled to maintain the farm (almost AGAINST the 'community'), with a new dairy and a couple of thousand acres under grain, plus some beef cattle. He got so little help from the community that I commented bitterly one time to her, that if you brought a thousand Vietnamese down here, they would have the entire 12,000 acres under something, ducks, fish farms, vegetables, etc., etc, in twelve months. That got her riled up. Both gone now, alas.

And if eventually nothing worked at that community, then what hope was there anywhere ? And why ? Why ? Why do great schemes go down the drain, again and again ? Why are they corrupted into yet more welfare schemes ? And ultimately, why should anyone else bother ? To what extent have people brought it all on themselves, and what are the underlying principles, the 'deep culture', which guides that corruption ?

Joe

Joe, you might also read http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/experiments-in-selfdetermination-serious-whitefella-stuff/news-story/1605d3a5dfc7d9c80ef159ee361f73ef.
I would be interested in your take on his writings. I am inclined to think he is close to the mark.

David

Hi David,

Yes, Nicolas Rothwell writes with deep passion and wonderful perception. His articles should be compulsory reading in Ab. Studies courses, but that's probably not going to happen.

Working through the journal of the missionary George Taplin, who set up and built one particular place, over twenty years, what is striking is the experience of a handful of Aboriginal men who tried to set up farms or otherwise make an honest living. They were almost all what were called 'half-castes', usually foundlings or abandoned children, and educated in Taplin's school; some came over from Kangaroo Island as young men; one went to the Armfield's Aboriginal School in Albany.

They all necessarily developed a strong work ethic (it was that or starve) and were the most steady workers on the mission well into their old age. And what is very interesting is that almost every university graduate who can trace their ancestry back to that mission, traces it back to one or more of those workers.

For example, my wife's great-grandfather, born somewhere on the lower Coorong in about 1848, was the first Aboriginal bloke in the area to take out a farming lease. He worked like buggery to get a crop in and pasture a small flock of sheep. When he reaped his crop and sold it, he suddenly found many new relatives. They cleaned him out in a day. He went crying to the missionary, poor bloke, but still gave it another year, then threw it up. Quite a few other blokes took out leases, but wisely well away from the mission and main camps.

So there have been those two ethics from the earliest:

[TBC]

[continued]

a work ethic, and a starve-then-gorge ethic. Somebody wrote recently that hunter-gatherer societies are necessarily not at all productive, but distributive - and one could add, reactive, not proactive. Traditional society would have been boom and bust, gorge and starve, with little perception of effort (although of course it would have been massively expended, especially by the women): magic is why things worked, no effort, and it was the old blokes who knew the magic. And, mediated by technological change, those underlying ways of seeing the world would have been passed on to each new generation.

Welfare programs fit beautifully into that mind-set: perhaps 'self-determination' has meant, for very many people, 'We decide what to ask the white fellas to give us from their Canberra money tree, and whatever we ask for, we get'. And accompanying that is the assumption that 'Well, white fellas get everything free, don't they, so why shouldn't we ?' Something is lost in translation.

Cheers,

Joe

Perhaps the solution to the problem is staring us in the face and we don't realise it. The white fella should just stop giving.

David

Hi David,

Aboriginal people are entitled to receive welfare payments. One day, when we all pay all our bills by debit or credit card, how people spend their welfare privileges, Black or White, may well be controlled through their debit card. So what you are suggesting may need to be qualified.

Again and again, it hasn't been a matter of what COULD work, but of what Aboriginal people have made to work to their own satisfaction. Hence CDEP, a valuable means for building up the economic bases of communities, was converted into a phony 'work' program, people being paid to mow their own lawns, or on 'home duties'. Maybe this was a consequence of people in power not having a clue what to do - I'll buy that - rather than any deliberate attempt to corrupt yet another program. Or a bit of both.

Some problems don't have solutions, if only because the people who are supposed to be the movers and shakers of those solutions don't want to, or are far too unskilled or clueless to know what to do. Economic planning needs plenty of diverse skills, and the co-ordination of those skills, as well as the anticipation of problems and means to resolve them. That never even gets off the ground if people simply don't want to actually do anything.

So it will spiral downwards. The only way is out.

Joe

I didn't mean we should cut off welfare so much as all the other add ons that seem to proliferate. One could be excused for thinking that the "disadvantaged aboriginal" is a myth when on looks at all the additional services that are being provided in some areas.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-06/indigenous-organisations-investigated-allegations-fraud/7476570

Joe,
I think we need to watch the 4 Corners program tonight. The ABC generally shows some bias toward aboriginal matters, so I expect it to be a reasonably accurate production.

I think the genie was let out of the bottle in 1967. We might have got rid of the Major trough feeders when we closed down ATSIC, but a whole lot of new ones have sprung up to take their place. Some time in the future, all this must surely stop, but thee is a while raft of people, black, white and brindle out there fighting tooth and nail to keep it going.