Just Leave Them... Where They Belong: The Cruel Business of the Culture Cult, Service Industry and Welfare Dependency

About This Book

Just Leave Them... Where They Belong is a challenge to the system that has grown up around disadvantaged Aboriginal people living in remote welfare settlements. Milton James argues that generations of welfare dependency, an expanding Aboriginal service industry and a preoccupation with preserving people within place and culture have too often displaced a more fundamental objective: developing the capability to build an independent life. Drawing upon more than three decades of rural and remote social work practice, James asks an uncomfortable question: when there are too few real jobs where people live, why do governments continue spending enormous resources servicing unemployment in place rather than helping people reach the mainstream labour market?

The book makes the case for worker mobility in place of welfare dependency: helping those who are capable and willing to leave remote welfare settlements, enter real employment and progressively assume the responsibilities of working and independent life. But this is also a book about social work itself. James rejects practice that substitutes services for capability, protection for responsibility, and perpetual intervention for independence. Drawing together the lessons of his earlier work on the 1960s Aboriginal Fruit-Picking Scheme and the later Work Placement Scheme, he argues for a social work that ultimately seeks to make itself less necessary—by giving people access to the real economy, expecting something of them, supporting them where support is genuinely required, and restoring what welfare dependency has progressively taken away: the opportunity and responsibility to build a life of their own.