The rising fortunes of Aboriginal Australia

In Australia, we have seen many rags to riches stories over the generations, but we have never experienced a transforming event anything like what is happening to our Aboriginal community.

Because of the royalty deals they have already done with mineral companies and those that are ahead, large segments of the Aboriginal community will move from the poorest people in the country to being among the richest. They will control tens of billions of dollars.

When I sat down to interview Warren Mundine, chairman of the Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce, and former ALP President, I was expecting to talk about Aboriginal poverty. Instead, we discussed the problems of managing enormous wealth acquired suddenly. Large segments of the Aboriginal community are going to move from welfare to major taxpayers and they are already in deep conversations with tax lawyers and accountants.

I do not believe many Australians understand this dramatic change. I recommend the Mundine interview to you because it will open your eyes as it did mine.

Because the Mundine interview covers such a wide area, my commentary will not do justice to what is now taking place in the Aboriginal community. Mundine is very frank about the social disaster that occurred when millions of dollars were distributed to Aborigines as a result of some of the 1970s and 1980s mineral deals. The current generation of Aboriginal leaders is going to try and learn the lesson. But this time we are talking in billions, not millions, and there is money available to transform education and possibly set up Aboriginal banking and other institutions.

Mundine says that in some places in Western Australia, Aboriginal employment can go from 18 to 25 per cent of the mines and Aboriginal people provide about one third of contracting. Mundine believes that's going to spread to the coal industry in New South Wales and Queensland, when we start "hitting those areas”.

The Aboriginal community was potentially going to be badly affected by the government's cattle export bans. Aboriginal people are major players in the cattle industry.

The transformation of Aboriginal Australia from poverty to enormous wealth will not only create management and educational problems of some magnitude within the community but it will also create social pressures in the non-Aboriginal community.

This wealth, plus the mining ventures, will spawn prosperous cities the size of Newcastle and Geelong that will be totally different from cities in eastern Australia. The public servants and others who currently are part of the Aboriginal welfare trap will need to move into other markets. And the Greens may discover that the Aboriginal community is pro-mining because they stand to be the big winners.

Before long we may see Aboriginal people represented on the BRW Rich List in proportions well above their representation in the Australian population.