An ambitious and innovative plan is being proposed to the Federal Government asking that unemployed Aborigines be offered apprenticeships and jobs building roads, rail and port facilities around the country as an effective way of providing Indigenous Australians with work and opportunity, whilst also battling the skills shortage.
The plan is being pushed by former ALP President and leading Aboriginal figure Warren Mundine and also Rudd's business adviser and head of Infrastructure Australia, Sir Rod Eddington, who will ask the Government to use its $76 billion national infrastructure fund for the scheme.
Mundine told ABC NewsRadio that he believed Aboriginal Australians could be employed in a variety of areas building road, rail and port facilities across the country.
"We'll be looking at apprenticeships, we'll be looking at trades, we'll be looking at the back office people and a wide variety of positions, and this is the outcome that we want," said Mr Mundine.
Mr Mundine raised the issue with Sir Rod during an Australian Industry (Ai) Group conference in Canberra on Monday. Mundine received a sympathetic hearing and pointed to last month's announcement by mining figure, Andrew Forrest, of a program to create 50,000 jobs for Indigenous people in two years.
"Sir Rod has said that he'll take me around, introduce us to the construction companies, all the different infrastructure people," he said. "We'll have conversations with them and if the conversations have been the same as what we're getting out of the mining industry and other people we're been talking to lately we'll have a very big outcome here."
"We want a commitment from the whole of Australia, that's why its called the Australian employment covenant. So far everyone has come on board, everyone's been very enthusiastic. This is going to be a big change, not only for Indigenous people but for the whole of Australia," Mundine put forth.
Mr Mundine likened the scheme to a modern-day "walkabout", saying that Aboriginal workers would be willing to travel around the country for jobs.
"It was Indigenous people, Aboriginal people who invented the word walkabout," he said. "We're the people who, when an area wasn't economically sustainable, we moved on to another area. This is how we travelled for the last 40,000 to 60,000 years. We need now to transform that into a 21st century model."
Mr Mundine rejected a suggestion of quotas for Indigenous jobs and feels that the jobs created should be real and not simply for appearances' sake.
He said real money was going to spent on infrastructure by the Federal Government and that the jobs too should not be superficial or unrealistic.
In his speech to an Ai Group conference in Canberra last night, PM Kevin Rudd stressed the
Government's infrastructure plans, listing highways, ports, broadband, public transport and low carbon power infrastructure as examples of the government's priorities to help drive Australian economic growth in uncertain times.
