Jawun: 2017 Learnings and Insights

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4.1 Holistic, community-wide reform in Cape York
The most established and well-known recent reform
in Indigenous Australia is Cape York’s welfare reform,
a change movement with many parts working
together to leverage social transformation.
Cape York leader Noel Pearson’s 2000 publication
Our right to take responsibility was a call to arms to
Indigenous and non-Indigenous society Profound
change was necessary to break intergenerational
welfare dependency cycles threatening Indigenous
Australian society. The Cape York Agenda was
born in 2000 as Jawun (then Indigenous Enterprise
Partnerships) came into being.
In 2002, Jawun began sending secondees to help
the Cape York Agenda promote people’s capability
to choose ‘a life they have reason to value’—in the
words of Noel Pearson, acknowledging economist
Amartya Sen From founding corporate partners
including Westpac, BCG and KPMG, support grew
until well over 100 secondees had lent skills and
expertise to the reform efforts. In July 2004, the
Cape York Institute (CYI) was established as an
organisation dedicated to welfare reform through
policy reform and leadership support.
Through secondees, particularly long-term
secondees from BCG, Jawun supported the concept,
positioning, funding and launch of CYI (see vignette
on page 33). KPMG describes how the institute’s
operating structures, processes and the capacity
of its management and leadership, was built and
strengthened:
Secondments were structured in the following way:
with approximately 70 per cent of time focused
on discrete projects, 25 per cent of time dedicated
to developing the corporate capability of the
organisation; and 5 per cent of the time spent
directly transferring skills to CYI employees
The next stage, from 2005 to 2007, applied more
targeted secondee support to specific policies and
programs designed to implement reform based on
family responsibility:
Jawun secondees helped formalise and present the
leadership’s reform ideas as implementable policies,
and through their commercial and consultative
approach gave them greater confidence in the
efficacy of the reform process and the likelihood of
gaining government support. Whereas Cape York’s
leaders had been able to lobby government before,
with Jawun’s support they had the capability to
construct clear business cases, with a level of
evidence and rigour that has given greater clarity
to their arguments and helped strengthen
government connections
The approach exemplifies what Jawun refers to as
its enabling role, and what Cape York Indigenous
leaders attribute to successfully using external skills
to drive a truly local agenda:
In the beginning, Jawun was a significant
lever. It wasn’t about money, it was about
having the best of the best thinkers
working with us to fast track our agenda.
Through that, our reforms have been
accelerated, Indigenous employment
has increased, local people are running
their own agendas—and that is true
empowerment.
If we’d been left to do it ourselves we might
be five years behind where we are today
—FIONA JOSE, EXECUTIVE GENERAL MANAGER FOR
CAPE YORK PARTNERSHIPS, AND FORMER CEO OF
CAPE YORK INSTITUTE
CYI now has strong internal capability and highly
skilled staff of its own. An enduring example of an
Indigenous-led approach to complex social change, it
has for years influenced government policy through its
welfare reform agenda, including a major trial project
in four Cape York communities. Different components
of individual, family and community development are
addressed in Hope Vale, Mossman Gorge, Coen and
Aurukun, to transition individuals and families from
welfare dependency to responsibility and self-reliance.
Fiona Jose, former CEO of CYI, said, ‘We knew that
without trying to change behaviour and social norms,
nothing would change’.
Soon after the formation of CYI, Cape York Indigenous
leaders resolved to find a solution to chronically low
rates of educational attendance and achievement.
In 2009, Cape York Partnerships published a
position paper titled ‘The most important reform’
It described a new model for early childhood and
primary education focusing on attendance, teaching
quality and results.
Jawun secondees helped bring together the
elements of education reform. Many were from
Westpac, including highly skilled members of a BT
Financial Group leadership development program,
the David Williams Fellowship. They looked at
global best practice and supported the creation
of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy
that would reform primary education in Cape York
4. ENABLING INDIGENOUS-LED REFORM 49