Young Indigenous people from remote communities want for much the same as any other young person. They want for belonging, stimulation, recognition, mobile phone, fashion clothes, car, and anything else our modern society can provide, but in order to obtain most of these things they must first find a job. Only a real job can provide them with the income, identification and recognition they want for. If real jobs are not available in their home community they must move to where they can get jobs.

The Work Placement Scheme helps young Indigenous people from remote northern communities willing and able to leave their home and community for work in southern states. The Scheme provides them with mainstream unsubsidised employment, onsite support and supervision, rental accommodation, and transport to and from their place of employment at cost.

The Work Placement Scheme was established by Milton James in April 2005 after a three month trial which confirmed that young Indigenous people from Cape York Peninsula with little or no experience of living away from home, family and community, with little or no work experience (and thus assessed at high risk for long-term unemployment) or dependent on CDEP can still be successfully assisted to take up mainstream private sector employment far their homes and families.

Today young people join the Scheme for at least seven months with the understanding that there will be no exit from productive work and behaving responsibly. To help them achieve this they are provided with group employment well away from the distractions and negative interference of peers and family members and those organisations that deny them their right to take responsibility and promote dependency and passive welfare.

The Scheme is based upon a clear set of principles and practices that are being articulated in the WPS Developmental Notes.

The Scheme understands the importance of work as the means by which most people play a full and active part in community life. Work is crucial to the psychosocial development of the individual and the link between the lack of work and psychosocial developmental problems has been established long ago. Research has shown that the unemployed read less, loose their sense of time and punctuality, and have less social activity. They experience an increase in anxiety, irritability, self-esteem, depression, suicide, criminality activity and other forms of antisocial behaviour such as petrol sniffing and female prostitution. There is loss in morale and the onset of apathy.

This research resonates very much with Noel Pearson’s thesis on passive welfare dependency. These and other behaviours (including phenomenal levels of violence, outrageous levels of grog addiction and a large and growing drug problem amongst the youth) are like a pandemic sweeping across Aboriginal communities which, according to Pearson, stem largely from people’s detachment from work and the real economy.