Three years ago, Fiona Jose told her team at Cape York Partnership to create 300 jobs in three years. She can now count 281.

Key points

• Hope Vale kids wanted to be “on CDP”. Then the banana farm opened.
• The 1966 ruling that gave pastoralists time to replace Aboriginal stockmen
• “How, Fee?” The target that left her team silent

The Executive Co-Chair used the result to call on governments to guarantee work for adults and quality education for children. She told The Alliance Conference 2026 in Magandjin (Brisbane) on Wednesday that governments had spent 50 years treating a development problem as a compliance problem.

"Fifty years of administrative tinkering and managing unemployment must be tipped out," the Kuku Yalanji and Zenadth Kes woman said.

"If we build two foundations, an Education Guarantee for children and a Job Guarantee for adults, the bench gets deeper every day."

Ms Jose, an Alliance board member, said her team went quiet when she set the target.

"My team went silent and asked, 'How, Fee? How are we going to do that?' At the time, I didn't know. But that is leadership. Unless we set ambitious goals, we will never push ourselves."

More than 90 per cent of the group's workforce are local First Nations people.

"When the choice is between sticking with our people or recruiting from the outside to satisfy a short-term government compliance contract, we will choose the development of our people every single day," she said.

Real wages, real pride

Under the Pathways to Real Jobs trial, Cape York Employment redirected funding into 46 jobs in Aurukun, Coen and Lockhart River. The roles span childcare, youth work, language and culture, and disability support, and Ms Jose said they cost less than half the unit cost of government programs.

One job went to Aurukun Elder Phyllis Yunkaporta, who now teaches Wik-Mungkan language and mentors at the Pama Language Centre.

"A person's cultural capability is a smart place to start," Ms Jose said. "That is succession in its oldest form."

An Aurukun man told her that picking up rubbish under work-for-the-dole made him feel like a slave. Employed as a council garbage collector on real wages, he took pride in the same work: "Because it's my job for my community."

A decade ago, most primary school children in Hope Vale said they wanted to be "on CDP" when they grew up. Then the community started a commercial banana farm, and fathers, uncles and brothers went to work every morning.

"Suddenly, kids' aspirations transformed: 'I want to be a banana farmer!'" Ms Jose said.

"Work for adults is developmental infrastructure for children."

"A different institution"

Ms Jose said 58 per cent of working-age people in Cape York communities are out of work, and 85 per cent in Aurukun. A young person who stays in community and attends a local high school has a 1 in 100 chance of finishing Year 12.

Young people from the same communities who attend quality schools through the Cape York Leaders Program finish Year 12 at a rate of 95 per cent, above the national average of 77 per cent.

"Same families. Same children. Same communities. A different institution," she said.

"It is not in our children; it is not in our people. It is in the institutions around them. And institutions can change."

She said First Nations people make up half of the "Bottom Million", the roughly one million Australians locked in entrenched, intergenerational disadvantage, while making up 4 per cent of the population.

"All the talk in Canberra and corporate boardrooms is about national productivity. Yet no one is talking about the Australians trapped at the very bottom."

'Australia did without it'

Ms Jose said reciprocity sits in traditional law and culture: share what you harvest, carry your weight, look after kin and Country.

She said governments had "distorted this into a one-way punitive instrument called 'mutual obligation'". They had built a multi-billion-dollar compliance apparatus "while taking government completely off the hook for making sure real jobs actually exist".

She traced remote unemployment back 150 years. She named the stockmen paid in flour, tea and tobacco while white stockmen beside them were paid in cash, and the Queensland Protection Acts that let the Protector control Aboriginal wages until 1972. In 1966 the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission ruled that Indigenous stockmen should receive equal wages, then delayed the start until December 1968. The Commission said the delay would give pastoralists time "to make arrangements for replacement by white labour if necessary".

"When our labour was cheap, Australia wanted it. When Australia had to pay what it was worth, Australia did without it," Ms Jose said.

Cape York has proposed a Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act. Under it, when people step up and take responsibility, governments must reciprocate with real work.

Three tests

Ms Jose said holding governments to account gave Indigenous organisations "no licence to excuse ourselves". She set three tests.

First, organisations should build capability on the job and stick with workers through setbacks. She said mainstream services "churn people through certificates that lead to no job".

Second, joint ventures on Indigenous land should carry binding contractual commitments to train, mentor and promote local people at every level, including management. She said too many joint ventures use token Indigenous ownership to win tenders, fly an outside workforce in, and leave nothing behind when the contract ends.

Third, Indigenous organisations must hold themselves to account.

"An Indigenous organisation that grows its revenue without growing its local First Nations workforce has missed its core purpose," she said.

Ms Jose said she is herself the product of two decades of deliberate investment through the Cape York Leadership Academy, which included mentoring, sabbaticals and training, before founder Noel Pearson handed her the baton. More than 650 young people and 500 adults have come through the group's leadership programs.

"Then our children will dream of being banana farmers, tradespeople, teachers, nurses, lawyers, doctors and directors," she said. "And one of them will stand at this lectern in 20 years, as I do today, and talk about the people who came after her."