The Australian Children's Trust is thrilled to have announced a major new initiative designed to lead and encourage the evident, strong and enthusiastic will of corporate Australia to finally break the vicious welfare cycle of Aboriginal people.
Wherever the board and management of the ACT has gone across the length and breadth of rural and metropolitan Australia, they have come across Australian after Australian, employers of all types, small business leaders and big business leaders, farmers, service providers and manufacturers – in short, all Australian employers who have expressed great frustration with our seeming inability to arrest the welfare-driven slide of Aboriginal people of our country.
However, working together, and with Government coming powerfully in with its contribution, we can stop this slide, we can turn it around in our generation. We can arrest and resolve the greatest social challenge Australia has ever faced.
We as employers of Australia can do this with the strongest weapon we have, our ability to provide jobs and have our people, our workforce volunteers, step up and provide the freshly-trained Aboriginal employees with on-the-job mentoring.
As Noel Pearson so aptly put recently to the Prime Minister, "this is the missing link" in all the not-for-profit and Government sectors’ initiatives over the decades. This is our ability, as every employer in Australia, to give those Aboriginal people who have successfully passed short intensive courses a job with a mentor nominated to the new employee.
These workplace mentor heroes are who Aboriginal people will have to rely on to keep and sustain their jobs, once they win them after the successful completion of the training courses.
These new Aboriginal recruits will have passed the relevant and industry-specific courses that act as the ladder to a full-time meaningful career, where their training continues with workplace mentoring.
This will provide the direct, immediate and predictable ladder that has been lacking for Aboriginal people to pull themselves out of welfare and into full-time employment.
This missing link, our most powerful weapon to help Aboriginal people off the downward social, poverty and welfare driven spiral, is jobs – jobs matched to people who want to mentor the Aboriginal employees, so that they grow to love their place of work and determine their own lives.
The initiative is called the Australian Employment Covenant (AEC) and was announced on 3 August 2008 by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Australian Children's Trust founder Andrew Forrest, with Aboriginal leaders Noel Pearson, Warren Mundine and business leader Sir Rod Eddington.
Mr Rudd described the initiative as ground breaking, imaginative and ambitious.
Essentially, the Australian Workplace Covenant will involve employers throughout Australia committing to offer work opportunities to Aboriginal people who participate in industry specific, targeted training programs across the country.
A target has been set of getting 50,000 Aboriginal people through training and on-the-job mentoring and into full-time employment within two years.
Aboriginal leaders Noel Pearson and Warren Mundine are key supporters of the initiative and will play important roles in the steering committee that will shape the Australian Employment Covenant.
Other members of the steering committee are Rod Eddington, Sue Gordon, Professor Marcia Langton and Andrew Forrest.
The initiative is seen as ambitious but vitally important in the fight to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Australian employers across the nation are being invited to make a covenant that will see them offer jobs to Aboriginal people who have passed a short but intensive training course followed by a unique on-the-job mentoring program designed to make them prepared and suitable for full-time employment.
The initiative is corporate Australia’s single best opportunity to contribute to solving the biggest social issue facing the nation. An issue which left unsolved will dramatically worsen within a generation.
The Federal Government will be appealing to all Government across Australia to provide the industry-specific short-course training.
Utilising the education and training facilities that currently exist across our nation, existing and new education and training providers will be asked to tailor their existing programs to meet the specific industry objectives of the Australian Employer.
Across Australia there are 18 separate major and powerful employment sectors of the Australian nation. Each one of the Industry groups will work with the AEC to determine and then communicate to the Government the specific requirements of training for their industries. The Australian Government training and education sector will then covenant with the Aboriginal people of our nation to provide that training.
Once the Aboriginal trainee passes the industry specific training, then all employers across Australia who wish to change the course of Aboriginal social history, will covenant with the Aboriginal graduate to employ them on a normal full-time basis, and most critically, encourage their existing employees to act as personnel mentor to each successful, job-winning Aboriginal graduate.
The Australian Employment Covenant is quite unlike anything that has been attempted before on a national level, where responsibility for initiatives such as this has fallen to the Government.
With the Australian Employment Covenant, the intent is to have businesses drive the scheme, with the Government providing the training component.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said of the Covenant: "What I've indicated and what I'm indictaing today is that the Government will and will do so in a practical way by providing the necessary training places to support those Indigenous Australians to make them training ready to go into those companies which Andrew Forrest will help us bring about.
"It's a practical program, it's a big plan on his part, it's a big initiative on his part, very tough goals he's set for himself, but we're prepared to support his enterprise by assisting with these training places."