Recent figures released by the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) demonstrate that Indigenous engagement with the forest sector tends to be constructed in terms of employment in mainstream timber production forestry. The Commonwealth Government’s National Indigenous Forestry Strategy is currently going down this path, with a focus on areas of employment and business development in production of timber and fibre.

There can be no doubt that Noel Pearson is not only a national leader in policy development, he is also a controversial figure who manages to split the interested public, academia, journalists and politicians into candid supporters or staunch critics. To research such a polarising personality's work and personal background is particularly challenging.

In the Yolngu-matha languages of north-east Arnhem land, the character trait rendered in English as 'self-centered' or 'selfish' is translated by gurrutu-miriw, literally 'kin-lacking' - acting as if one had no kin. Kin-based obligations structure the Yolngu moral order: everyone is classified as kin, and how one ought to behave to others is framed in terms of one's kin relationship to them.

Since the 1970s the federal political response to conditions in many Aboriginal communities has escalated from one of concern to today's rhetoric of 'national emergency'. In the intervening decades, policy had been repeatedly reoriented, from self-determination to mainstreaming, and from reconciliation to intervention. The result has been successive and unambiguous policy failures.

Climate change will increasingly be impacting thousands of Indigenous Australians across northern Australia. But how much do we know about their exposure, sensitivity and capacity to adapt to these changes? This talk aims to tease out these questions and begin to identify what we do know about these issues, and importantly, what information we don’t yet have but which is vital to understand in order to strengthen resilience for these remote communities.

We conduct a large-scale audit discrimination study in Australia, sending 5000 fake resumes to employers in response to online job advertisements. To denote ethnicity, we randomly changed names on the resumes, using them to denote Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Indigenous ethnicity. In all cases, we applied for entry-level jobs, and submitted a CV that showed that the candidate had attended high school in Australia.

In this seminar I present some initial findings from a project entitled, 'The Social Context of Indigenous Poverty'. The research involved a series of interviews with Aboriginal people in urban and rural SE Australia on issues of poverty, social capital and social exclusion. In the paper I draw together Aboriginal perspectives on the meaning of poverty to reflect on the relevance of social capital concepts for understanding Aboriginal economic disadvantage.

Please note: This seminar is available in both Streaming Audio and MP3 formats.

This paper is a part of a larger ARC Linkage project, with the Telstra Foundation, that examines the immediate and longer-term impacts of selected Indigenous festivals on community wellbeing. In recent years wellbeing is a concept that has gained salience and urgency, indeed it has become standard currency in economic and political models of welfare and development. Concerns have been expressed about the indicators of wellbeing and the lack of recongnition that notions of health and wellbeing and socio-economic inclusion and exclusion are culturally constructed.

The intervention is the most expensive attempt to change the relationship between remote Aboriginal Australia and the white nation, launched with a budget of $1.5 billion dollars. The Commonwealth government sought to restructure community economies, undertake health check programs for children, increase school attendance, restrict alcohol sales and quarantine income. At the same time the Northern Territory government terminated community councils and began implementing shires, resulting in an absence of community governance.

The Canadian territory of Nunavut ('Our land' in Inuktitut) was created on April 1, 1999, after the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA) resulted in the division of the Northwest Territories and the creation of a 13th jurisdiction at the provincial/territorial level. 85 per cent of Nunavut's population of 30,000 are Inuit, making Nunavut an example of 'effective self-government through public government.' While the population may be small, Nunavut makes up 20% of Canada - an area the size of Western Europe.