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To encourage engagement in agriculture and agribusiness that offers positive social, cultural, and economic opportunities for Indigenous community members. Management of Tropical North Queensland’s land and sea resources reflects the rights, values and aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
The Sustainable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Enterprise Program will deliver on this through three key activities.
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Each program has several activities or themes that various projects will be delivered through.
Innovation in Community Resilience Queensland’s 17 discrete Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities face important economic, social and environmental resilience challenges. These challenges are significantly exacerbated by drought, particularly in regard to water, food, infrastructure and digital security. There has previously been no regionalised approach to supporting individual councils to identify and address these issues and find innovative solutions.This activity will support, facilitate and promote regional approaches to planning, peer-to-peer learning and developing products, services and tools to address regionally identified gaps.
Traditional Owners (TO) across the TNQ region are now entering the post-native title determination period with “whole of country” opportunities (including new and emerging water rights, access to land and ecosystem services) only just beginning to be identified and mobilised to contribute to drought resilience. Diversified business and income opportunities will help build resilience.This activity seeks to support regional collectives of TOs and individual TO institutions (e.g. Ranger Programs and Aboriginal Corporations) to access business opportunities through adopting innovative approaches to mobilising water, agricultural lands, natural resources and traditional knowledge.
Indigenous Australians have lower rates of self-employment and entrepreneurship than non-Indigenous Australians. The greatest disparity occurs in very remote areas with Indigenous people being nine times less likely to be self-employed. The TNQ region has a large Indigenous population in very remote areas.Indigenous business opportunities for growth exist in agriculture, especially through accessing water, land and other opportunities. Supply Nation have identified through their research that many large companies are wanting to invest into Indigenous supply chains and business to help create a new generation of entrepreneurs, to grow business knowledge and help remove barriers to employment for future generations.This activity seeks to accelerate new business opportunities and build resilience by supporting improvement in Indigenous business structures, processes, technologies and innovation through collaboration and learning across networks.
Program Lead
Jim Turnour is a Principal Strategic Regional Planner at The Cairns Institute, James Cook University where he works with regional and First Nations communities supporting place-based approaches to local challenges.
Prior to this he spent a decade working as a Chief Executive Officer and General Manager for Aboriginal Corporations in Cape York Peninsula. He is a Director of Cape York NRM and Committee Member of the Cairns and District Chinese Association.
Jim was the Member for Leichhardt in the Australian Parliament between 2007 and 2010 representing communities including Cairns, the Douglas Shire, Cape York and the Torres Strait in the Rudd and Gillard Governments. He served on the House Economics, Indigenous Affairs and National Capital and Territories Parliamentary Committees and was Chair of the Labor Caucus Infrastructure Committee. He started his career as an agronomist and extension officer working predominantly for the Queensland Department of Primary Industries in Central and Far North Queensland.
Jim has a PhD (Economics) from James Cook University and degrees in Agriculture Science and Economics from the University of Queensland
