Hola amigos,

Together with then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Twiggy Forrest launched the Australian Employment Covenant.  Twiggy obtained 253 business signatories pledging support of the Covenant.  Twiggy’s ‘Generation One’ undertook to employ 50,000 Aborigines, but as the two-year deadline approached only an estimated 2,800 jobs had been provided.  At the time, in a Dispatch I opined that ‘Generation One’ relegated all preceding Aboriginal leaders and elders to Generation Zero.

An item in Monday’s news informed us that under the Business Council’s ‘Raising the bar initiative…’ some of Australia’s biggest companies have committed to buying $3 billion in supplies from Indigenous companies.

It is in Eduardo Galeano’s ‘Las venas abiertas de America Latina’ – The open veins of Latin America that I first read the term ‘Industrial Infanticide’

Recently the Yuendumu Mining Company which I tried to manage, finally after having survived half a century, had to throw in the towel.  Like countless other Aboriginal owned organisations it fell victim to Industrial Infanticide.

It has me wondering who will benefit from this latest expression of munificence from the captains of industry.  I think ‘raising the bar’ is the last thing these few surviving enterprises need.

Chubby Checker- The Limbo Rock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6U-FBNSc_8

Hasta pronto

Franklin