Jobs For Our Mob

While most australians are sleeping, Dick Estens is plotting. Between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., when truck drivers, factory hands and bakers are in a skirmish with their circadian rhythms, the 56-year-old cotton farmer from Moree, in northern New South Wales, is in bed whirling his mind through a problem. Estens might be crafting a game plan to outwit a Canberra bureaucrat or thinking of a way to motivate a juvenile criminal offender; he might be trying to understand the power structure in a small town or finessing a schmooze assault on a CEO target. This social entrepreneur finds the wee, small hours a bountiful period for clarifying ideas about his self-appointed mission: to get Aboriginal people into jobs, and to keep them there. If you offer ironbark-sized Estens your hand, he'll gently squeeze it; if you lend this salesman an ear, he'll bash it; if the irrigator gets his fingers on your money, he'll channel it straight into a community's grass roots. And if you're crazy enough to stand in the way of a human road train, Estens will drive on - over, under, around or right through you.

So far, Estens and his team have had success in Moree (pop. 10,250), a place known for its artesian baths and, since the 1950s, its festering racial tensions, crime, poverty and social dysfunction. Forty years ago, Moree was one of the key stops on the Freedom Ride, led by Charles Perkins and other students, to draw attention to discrimination against blacks. In 1997, Estens started the Aboriginal Employment Strategy (AES), a not-for-profit company that tries to find work for indigenous people through corporate partnerships; going beyond the standard approaches of employment agencies, the AES is staffed solely by indigenous people, who provide mentoring support for the 300 or so workers they place each year. "There's a third of Aborigines who'll just never work. Welfare can handle them," says Estens. "The top third, educated and with good work experience, will always be okay. The AES is here for that middle third. We want to build a big middle class and to stretch a community as far as it can go." Or, as he tells employers in his most provocative pitch: "Why not employ a middle-class black instead of white trash?"

Indigenous Australians, particularly those living in remote areas, are a long way behind their countrymen on all indicators of wellbeing. In an age of material wealth and job growth, with the nation's unemployment rate at 5%, the indigenous jobless rate is 20%. The broader economic game continues to move against Aboriginal people. A recent Australian National University study suggests that if work-for-the-dole participants are categorized as jobless, Aboriginal unemployment could be as high as 50% by 2011. After decades of ineffectual programs, Prime Minister John Howard's government has shifted gears on Aboriginal policy. Treating totems such as land rights and self-government as dead ends, it has been pursuing what it calls "practical reconciliation." At the heart of it are policies to improve Aboriginal employment and reduce welfare dependency. "A steady job remains the best means of overcoming disadvantage in our society," Howard said in describing his welfare reform proposals earlier this year.

The times have brought to the fore a pragmatic indigenous leadership, which in turn has inspired a broader range of people and institutions - from banks to think tanks - to support Aboriginal initiatives. Leaders, such as Noel Pearson from Cape York, now speak of ownership, responsibility and individuality; urging indigenous people to be mainstream, mobile, acquisitive and ambitious, and to reject the so-called "sit-down money" of welfare. The Moree jobs model, with its ethos of pride, self-reliance and social mobility, fits the new thinking, and is now on the move. In the past few years, the AES has opened offices in the N.S.W. regional centers of Tamworth and Dubbo; in recent weeks new AES shop fronts have appeared in inner-Sydney's Glebe, Blacktown in the city's western suburbs and Maitland in the Hunter Valley. The offices are decorated in brash reds and yellows, and are located amid the bustle of the main street, so people know "we're here and we belong. It lifts the spirits of Aboriginal people," says Estens. About 100 towns have requested the AES, which is itself still being fitted out and road-tested, to set up camp. As Farmer Estens has learnt, sustainable progress needs the right soil and climate, clever management and a little luck.

How does a whitefella end up inspiring an Aboriginal social movement? Born in Gilgandra, in central N.S.W., Estens can trace his bloodlines back several centuries to both the Protestant Huguenots and the father of English empiricism, John Locke. Estens' Dreaming is the Enlightenment and the rich earth of the Moree plains - liberty and equality, with a dash of Aussie bush can-do and toil. He started the AES with the idea of providing skilled labor for the cotton industry; that modest venture seemed to lift the town and as the institutions surrounding job placement changed under the Howard government, the innovator started to work the system. As supportive elders held off the "radical and ratbag elements," Estens turned the AES into a crusade. Perhaps a non-indigenous person is the only one who can prevail in places that have competing Aboriginal tribes and a redneck underbelly. "I advised Dick not to go into it," says friend and legal counsel Roger Butler about the personal financial liabilities Estens has had to endure ever since. "It's fortunate that this mission was undertaken when his farms could stand on their own feet."

With a well-thumbed contact book, an overflowing diary and sheer bloody-mindedness, Estens is traveling around the state in his six-seat Cessna on a new assignment: lifting his troops for the next phase of expansion, and marketing the organization to corporate leaders. Although the federal government has given the AES funding for the next four years, the contract allocates too much money for training and not enough to cover the new management structure of a larger agency. Estens also expects AES managers to be creative and productive in earning revenue - through job placements, traineeships, security work and sponsorships. But they won't be offering prospective employers the carrot of a wage subsidy, as many agencies do. ("It kills the self-esteem of workers who are treated differently by their colleagues," says Estens). Often, the AES will find a job for an unemployed Aborigine but will receive no fee because the person was registered with another Job Network provider.

At the AES Dubbo office, Estens is speaking to four men from the local council about a proposal to increase night-time security around a troubled housing estate and areas vulnerable to vandalism during school holidays. The Estens road train starts its engine; the AES chairman settles into his pitch, which always comes with dramatic hand gestures. "It's about stretching communities." "We want people to lift themselves up." "Those on welfare are a pull-down on others." "I'm interested in that middle third." If the money can be found, Estens would like to employ a manager for the security service, to ease some of the workload of local AES boss Mike Nolan. While some in the AES worry about a change in direction in the security service - away from events and supermarkets to quasi-policing in no-go estates - Estens believes the work is important in restoring male status. "The idea of the warrior and the place of men in Aboriginal families has been eroded," he says. "Security work builds male self-esteem in these towns."