How we will Close the Gap in Cape York in One Generation

Yalada yurra, yulumbarril, ngayu wawu wawu

Twenty-five years ago, we launched a radical social attack.

We attacked injustice and inequality, and the passive welfare system that managed disadvantage instead of ending it. We stopped accepting that, in a prosperous country, Aboriginal people live in a Fourth World reality − poverty, ill health, and disadvantage – that would shame any nation.

This hopelessness is not confined to our people. Across Australia, there exists a Bottom Million for whom disadvantage has become permanent. For this underclass, work is scarce, schools fail, and welfare is their only inheritance.

It should never be acceptable that children grow up in a Commonwealth of abundance and yet inherit so little hope.

So we charted a new course. We refused to accept that the best we could hope for was to make poverty more comfortable. Our purpose has been simple: that our children in Cape York can look to the future with the same confidence as other Australian children. To do that, we had to break with the old orthodoxies of both left and right. On the progressive side, there was the belief that disadvantage could be managed through endless programs and goodwill – that compassion and spending alone would yield justice.

But our lived evidence showed otherwise: compassion without reform only brought disempowerment and dependency. On the conservative side, there was a belief that if individuals simply tried harder, they would succeed. Too often, this came with policies that preached responsibility but withheld opportunity: a morality that demanded people stand on their own feet while pulling the ground from under them.

Cape York’s reform agenda reclaimed responsibility from the right, not as blame, but as the source of empowerment. And we reclaimed opportunity from the left, not as sentiment, but as structured support to match responsibilities.

It was not an easy road. Our progressive allies were allergic to our agenda. We declined the path of least resistance.

But it was, and remains, the only road that honours our people’s right to take charge of our own lives, to be the main actors in our own development. In the early years, we drew from the great thinkers of human development. The Indian-American economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen taught us that freedom is not only about choice, it is about having the capabilities to choose lives we have reason to value.

That insight shaped our own formula:
Responsibility + Opportunity = Capability.

From Singapore, we learned through Lee Kuan Yew’s Central Provident Fund that every worker, rich or poor, could accumulate personal savings for housing, education, or retirement. Compulsory savings built self-reliance. Within a generation, Singapore’s poorest families moved from shanties to home ownership.

These ideas became the foundation of our Cape York institutions:

• The Family Responsibilities Commission – that supports families to meet basic responsibilities to their children.
• The Cape York Leaders Program – scholarships and leadership development to support our young people through their education and beyond.
• Our Opportunity Programs – that help poor families save, invest in education, and build assets.
  Each institution was designed to help even the poorest families convert opportunity into capability through responsibility.The Staircase & the True Actors in Development
  We came to understand progress through a staircase metaphor.
• The foundations are social norms, respect, responsibility and the obligations that hold families and communities together.
• The supports are capabilities − health, education, housing, infrastructure − things society must invest in so people can stand on their own feet.
• The climb itself is powered by hope and self-interest: families and individuals taking steps toward a better life.

There is no elevator. No forklift of social justice that can lift whole populations to the top.
Progress happens when parents, children and families climb – step by step.
Governments cannot climb the stairs for us. But governments must provide the stairs. And for decades, crucial steps in the staircase have been missing for our people.

The Opportunity Gap
Cape York families who do the right thing – who send their children to school ready to learn − are failed by poor schools and systems. Children attend, but do not learn. Classrooms exist, but capability does not grow. This is the Opportunity Gap. Missing chances for a good education, decent jobs, homeownership and long lives. The Opportunity Gap traps the Bottom Million across Australia – whether you live in Arnhem Land, in a suburb of Sydney, or a small town anywhere in the country.

In Cape York, if a child stays in their community, their chance of graduating Year 12 is less than one in a hundred. The path from school to employment is, for most, a dead end.
The ultimate price is paid in deaths in despair. Life expectancy in Cape York is on average 30 years less than in Brisbane.

That is why the next phase of reform must do more than promise opportunity. It must guarantee it. Opportunity can no longer depend on political discretion, bureaucratic goodwill, geographic location or funding cycles. It must be guaranteed by law.

Year 12 Completion is the Powerhouse
We know that Year 12 completion is the single most important strategy for Closing the Gap.
When a young person finishes Year 12, the odds flip:
They are more likely to work, keep earning, and raise children who do the same.
Twenty years ago the Cape York Leaders Program began offering secondary school boarding scholarships so our young people could attend quality high schools.
Then we tackled the achievement gap in primary school literacy and numeracy with Direct Instruction through the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy. Those children went on to succeed in high school.

The results are clear:

• Around 70% of our graduates move onto full-time work, earning on average 50,000 dollars more each year than those on welfare.

For nearly two decades, hundreds of young people have completed Year 12 with our support.

Our Young People Have Proven HOW to Close the Gap in ONE Generation.
But of the 340-odd Cape York young people who reach high school age each year, we have resources to support only 20.

We have proven that the staircase works. Now we must build it for every child.

The Six Life-Stage Capabilities
To scale our formula for Closing the Gap we will focus on six linked life-stage capabilities, from conception to adulthood:

1. Healthy, happy brains – good prenatal care, nutrition, and loving paren􀆟ng from conception.
2. Early childhood foundations – quality early learning that builds pre-literacy and pre-numeracy.
3. Primary learning success – every child is literate and numerate by the end of Year 6.
4. Year 12 completion – the essential gateway to further study, training and employment.
5. Further learning and earning – clear pathways into employment, apprenticeships or tertiary education.
6. Home ownership − help young adults into work and disciplined savings so they can buy a home and build intergenerational assets.

When these stages are linked and supported, capabilities compound − and a new generation rises.

From Welfare Reform to Australia’s GI Bill

We have learnt that reforms must provide guarantees: when families take responsibility, they must be met with real opportunity.

So we propose complementary Queensland and Commonwealth legislation:
The Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act − Australia’s G.I. Bill for those whose parents and grandparents the economy left behind.

After the Second World War, American President Franklin Roosevelt understood that the nation owed more than thanks to its veterans. The G.I. Bill guaranteed education and housing support. It rebuilt lives − and rebuilt the nation by growing the American middle class.

PRO Act Architecture
The Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act applies that same principle to our Bottom Million.
When families in Cape York – and across Australia – take responsibility by sending their children to school and meeting basic obligations, the Act will:

• Guarantee quality education and work pathways as legal entitlements, not discretionary programs.
• Link responsibility with opportunity through an expanded Responsibility and Opportunity Commission, which works with each family and child on a case plan.
• Fund community-controlled organisations to deliver supports, with accountability for real outcomes, not just activity.
• Support poor families to save and build assets, including for home ownership, through platforms like our proposed Provident Fund.

This is not about a bigger welfare state. It is about transforming the welfare state into an ‘opportunity economy’. Opportunity is about structural solutions. Responsibility is about personal agency and high expectations from families, neighbours and society.

A Generation-Long Commitment: ‘Real Zero’ Disadvantage by 2050

The Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act is designed for one generation − 21 years − from conception to adulthood.

By the middle of this century, a child born in Cape York will have the same chance of finishing school, getting a job, buying a home, and raising a family in security and pride as other Australian children.

‘Real Zero’ means a society where disadvantage is no longer destiny.
The left will say obligations are cruel.
The right will say obligations are by themselves sufficient.

Both are wrong.
Our experience tells us:

• Responsibility without opportunity is despair.
• Opportunity without responsibility is passivity.

Only together do they build capability.
And only capability gives people real choice – to choose lives they have reason to value.
This is the radical centre of reform in Cape York.

The Human Core

Every young person who finishes Year 12 in Cape York Peninsula stands only one degree of separation from grief − from a family member lost to violence, addiction or despair. Their success is extraordinary − an outlier against the odds.

Our task now is to make sure their children stand two degrees away − and their grandchildren, three. That is how our people will heal.

For the Love of Our People

We have spent twenty-five years answering the “what.” We now know what we must do.
We have also learned the “how,” the “who,” the “when,” and “in what order” of closing the gap.

And most importantly, we know the answer to “why.”

We do this for the love of our people, and for the million across this country who share our struggle and to whom we hope to provide some answers as to their predicament too.

I want to leave you with a gift that carries the heart of this story – our book: For the Love of Our Children − the story of the Cape York Leaders Program.

It tells the stories of hundreds of young people from Cape York who have defied the odds, and the families who said ‘yes’ when it would have been easier to say ‘no’ − and stay home.

It is proof that when opportunity meets responsibility, the gap can close within a single generation.
These young men and women, and their families: they are the evidence of what works – and the reason why we are calling for a Cape York Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act.

This book is an invitation.

An invitation to back our young people in partnership. In hope and commitment.

As we say: “The gap can close −in one generation.”
This is our proof.
This is our promise.
And we do this for the love of our people.

Thank you.