Indigenous land and sea rangers have called on the government to expand what they say is one of the most successful Indigenous jobs programs, caring for the huge swaths of protected land across the country.
The topics ranged from the dairy crisis to the cost of data, the National Broadband Network, equal education access for rural students, Indigenous jobs, bringing immigrants to regional areas, climate change, renewable energy and coal and coal seam gas.
In a joint statement the 37 groups – including Mission Australia, Homelessness Australia, St Vincent de Paul Society, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait lslander Legal Services and several state councils of social service – called on the federal government not to accept the recommendation from Forrest's review into Indigenous jobs and training.
Many conservative politicians and commentators argue Indigenous ranger jobs are not "real jobs".
Rejecting cheap, indigenous fuel for job cuts and international energy markets is seen, naturally enough, as political suicide.
It has also offered indigenous people guaranteed jobs, contracts and joint ventures, as well as help in financing a 10% equity stake.
I think everyone would agree that in the past conservation has often acted in ways that made it seem anti-people, disrespectful of indigenous rights, anti-jobs and anti-economic growth.
It nurtured the pernicious notion that population mobility is a zero-sum game: that those who come to this country are a bunch of freeloaders, depriving indigenous Britons of jobs, school places, housing and healthcare.
In 1928 for example, 80 per cent of Indigenous people with jobs were employed on the stations, including Muckaty, with many living on and travelling across the pastoral leases.
It's not a cause for huge optimism when the only chance you have of earning a living outside of collecting welfare is to be a youth worker who trains indigenous people for jobs as youth workers.
