All of the above highlights the fact that the Northern East Kimberley has a serious economic development problem: around one half of its resident adult population, representing the majority of its Aboriginal population, remains overly dependent on welfare, structurally detached from the labour market, and ill-equipped to engage it. More disconcerting, perhaps, is a prognosis that these indicators will worsen as a consequence of rapid population growth if recent trends in the rate of Aboriginal job acquisition continue, even assuming that ADM targets for local employment are met. From a policy perspective, ‘business as usual’ is simply insufficient to meet the expanding needs of the regional population.

Clearly, mines such as ADM can play an important part in regional development by providing a local employment base, by developing local skills, by stimulating local Indigenous business activity, by adding to the stock of regional infrastructure, and more generally by generating regional economic multipliers. However, the net impact of these inputs will be insufficient in themselves to redress the legacy of past neglect and they will not alter regional social indicators. Deficits in labour force status, income share, educational status, housing, and health among Aboriginal people in the region are of a scale that only a partnership approach to regional development involving both industry and government could hope to redress. Furthermore, the need for wider investment in regional human capital is immediate as the impost on government of sustaining the status quo in terms of welfare spending, lost tax revenue, foregone education outcomes, maintaining the criminal justice system (to say nothing of the actual costs of crime), public housing provision, and health care are high, and can only increase given the growing weight of population numbers.