Job Spectrum

"Living to sixty five : it is something we all expect, but if you are native, you do not. That is the bottom line, " Mr Forrest claim a breakfast gathering of tradeleaders yesterday to help launch Generation One, his public awareness campaign to lift indigenous living standards thru work.If it is a last line that resonates with the Fortescue Metals chief, it's not only because of his very own advancing years. As a boy in remote Western Australia, Mr Forrest's pals were blackfellas. Now all those chums are dead.

18 months back, the multimillionaire attended the funeral for the last of them, Ian Black. "I know we are able to stop that, " Mr Forrest, forty eight, recounted. "I'm sure that Aboriginal folk have each bit the capability any of us in this room have. And I know for certain they work as hard, and when they come on board and join your company they'll add price to your business.

"The Generation One campaign was launched yesterday evening by Kevin Rudd in a function at Sydney's Circular Harbour , with the likes of Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe joining about four hundred business front-runners in attendance.

Secretly bankrolled by Mr Forrest, James Packer and 7 Network chief Kerry Stokes -- supported by other company heavyweights including David Gyngell, Steven Lowy, Andrew Fox and John Hartigan of Reports Limited, publisher of The Weekend Australian -- the campaign will include Television ads, an interactive internet site and a nationwide roadshow. It is designed to run in association with Mr Forrest's Australian Work Covenant, an initiative he set up 2 years back with the government in an attempt to provide fifty thousand native roles. So far, nearly twenty thousand roles have been promised.

Such job opportunities shouldn't be thought of as charity, Mr Forrest counselled yesterday. "This is not about charity. If you go out and employ a blackfella, wonderful. But if you should happen to feel charity in your heart when you do it, you have lost it, " he revealed.

"You employ Aboriginal folks because they add price to your business, because they are as smart as paint and they can be trained like any of us. "Mr Packer, who attended the breakfast alongside better half Erica Baxter and ma Ros, said to the function he had always known he could do more to help end native downside, though not the easy way to deliver that help. "For me, what hasn't ever been reachable -- touchable -- is the way to do it, " the gaming magnate expounded.

"I am just extraordinarily thankful that Andrew Forrest has pulled this all together and has, with his team, developed a way people can make a genuine difference -- one individual at a time, one job at a time, one life at a time. " Consolidated Media had so far employed sixty native people, with another fifty positions to be filled in coming months, MrPacker recounted.