The Voice - ask a sailor

We hung in for four years as partners with the Palm Island Community, until their own freight contract tender came up, and to our total surprise and disappointment, they gave it to an outside barge company because "they gave us footy jumpers" the week before the tender. Go figure!

We immediately went to CDC in Canberra and surrendered our interest in the venture. We may have been kind, but certainly not crazy.

Shortly afterwards, yet another new peak body in Aboriginal affairs, recognised that the English gentlemen CEO of CDC was in fact, not black and he was ushered out the door despite an impeccable twenty-five-year track record, and CDC was renamed IBA (Indigenous Business Australia).

We tried several times to get the State and Federal governments to provide a proper ropax (car and passenger) ferry service through the Outer Torres Strait as there are four to five deaths by tinnie in the region annually, as well as Australia's largest border incursions. It is Australia's only region of island communities that doesn't have a commuter service and the lack of a ferry service is an indictment on the last three decades of governments.

We also tried several times with incumbent leaders in Cape York to assist them in acquiring marina facilities, as there is not one between Port Douglas and Darwin, yet there is a huge market potential for domestic cruising vessels including me and my boat. The indigenous youth are naturals with boats and fishing, so such a strategy creates a great training ground for regional indigenous communities.

My visit to Doomadgee two years ago was a telling story. A Christian group established the community in the 1930's and built schools, dormitories and a hospital. The community had their own market garden, their own concrete batching plant etc. The youth were housed in separate dormitories and the boys were sent off at 14 to be trained as stockmen, whilst the girls went into nursing. There was full employment until the 1980's when "self-determination' was passed and the Mission administration was closed. The unemployment rate, according to my aboriginal host, is now well over 60% and not as ABSTATS report. Certainly, the Court house looked very busy that day and youth opportunities looked bleak.

Alas, my coal face history with indigenous groups and my personal campaigns, including many proposals (confirmed in numerous columns) have been marred, stalled, obstructed by inter-tribal offences, local personality disputes and opposing indigenous grant programs, of which there are reportedly over 42. To a simple sailor like me, the "Aboriginal Industry", is a huge multi-pronged bureaucracy based in the capital cities well away from communities, which has hundreds, possibly thousands of snouts in the trough, continues to be less than optimum, and is in need of urgent fixing.

To even suggest we form yet another layer of bureaucrats under a grand title of The Voice and embed it into the Constitution is the collective and dangerous thought-bubble of madmen.

For anyone considering the YES vote, come away from your coffee club in Tewantin, Ultimo or wherever and spend at least three months in and around a variety of aboriginal communities and get their opinion of what they need. You'll find it's certainly not more bureaucrats.