4. Long Term Employment Strategies
As outlined above, we know of a number of successful youth development models that have operated in the region, some of which have employment outcomes. The Mt Theo model, which is a classic community development approach, has seen a process that, over 12 years, saw a generation of youth go through inhalant addiction to employment. The full story is on their website, but in essence it worked like this: the youth who were addicted to inhalant abuse were sent to Mt Theo outstation by their families and in some cases through court orders. After a month at Mt Theo, they were allowed to return to Yuendumu and participate in the youth program that the Mt Theo program operated there in parallel to the outstation : a carrot and stick approach. If an individual started sniffing petrol again, they were sent back to Mt Theo for another month, giving an immediate consequence to their behaviour. The youths came to accept these boundaries imposed by their community and participated fully in the rec program, eventually running aspects of it for the younger members of the community. In taking on these extra responsibilities, the youth realised they needed more numeracy and literacy skills, and so in partnership with the youth program, they instigated a night school to meet these educational needs. From the night school, 43 went on to full-time employment, 75 into part-time employment in Yuendumu. As can be seen, the process took a considerable amount of time, required the input of the youth and Yuendumu community, but eventually delivered an outstanding outcome.
As such, we propose that youth development programs outlined in our “Youth Program Needs in the CAYLUS Service Area” costing for the Central Australian region have the best chance of creating the environment in which education and training can be implemented over realistic timeframes. This extended timeframe is in part to allow the community to be involved, and to develop capacity to support the employment of their youth.
It should be remembered that culturally, the hunter/gatherer society is geared up for individuals to work for only a few hours per week. It has been estimated it took men in this region about 4 hours per week to hunt enough game to feed their extended families, and women about 8 hours per week to gather the other parts of their diet. Thus, the cultural capacity to support work is limited and must be developed over time. It should be noted that it took many generations for our ancestors to stop being hunter/gatherers and become farmers, and that we now have the value system of a culture that has undertaken 10,000 years of farming, much to the environmental detriment of the planet. It then took another few generations for western culture to adapt to the industrial age, with people having to fit into the work cycle required to tend to the machines. Can we really expect that Indigenous people can jump 10,000 years in a generation? And to some degree, how attractive and sustainable is the western lifestyle? Are we encouraging them to climb a long and difficult ladder to get aboard our sinking ship of state?