Twiggy (26 page)

Forrest didn’t let the critics stop his efforts to help address Aboriginal disadvantage. In fact, by the time he was running Fortescue in 2007, he had decided to
spearhead a movement called GenerationOne, which he boldly predicted would eliminate indigenous disadvantage in Australia in just twenty years. Forrest began talking to his fellow captains of industry about setting up a joint corporate and government pact that would create thousands of guaranteed jobs for indigenous people.

At the core of Forrest’s philanthropic work was his religious faith;
Andrew and Nicola even chose to call the indigenous employment pact a “covenant” because of the word’s strong biblical connotations. Forrest had spearheaded the hiring of indigenous workers on his own mines at Anaconda and Fortescue, but that had also made sound commercial sense. In contrast, his crusade to end the disparity between black and white Australia was inspired by the deeds of Jesus
Christ.

Forrest contacted three leading indigenous figures who had long opposed passive welfare in Aboriginal communities – Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine – and went to work on convincing the newly elected Rudd government to back him.

In August 2008, Forrest huddled with Kevin Rudd and his business adviser, Sir Rod Eddington, on the sidelines of a conference in the Queensland
resort town of Coolum, trying to sketch out the details of the covenant. For Rudd, the attraction of the plan was obvious: Australia’s richest person (at the time) would persuade his corporate mates to create 50,000 jobs and the government could share in the glory of having reduced indigenous unemployment and poverty.

Observers say Forrest and Rudd began talking with the modest, perhaps
sensible, aim of initially creating 5000 jobs for Aborigines, but they quickly started bidding each other up. They decided 5000 jobs just wouldn’t “cut through”, so Forrest suggested starting at 10,000 or perhaps even 15,000. By the end of the chat, they had decided 50,000 jobs in two years would grab people’s imagination. Rudd and Forrest announced the pact at a press conference the next day, alongside
Pearson, Mundine and Eddington. Pearson was thrilled with the initiative but startled by the ambitious target. “It was a complete hit to the solar plexus when Andrew proposed not a few thousand real jobs in a timeframe, but 50,000 guaranteed real jobs,” he said.

Forrest’s initial promise sounded unambiguous: companies that signed on to the covenant would create a total of 50,000 permanent
full-time jobs for Aborigines, and the jobs would all exist within two years. Rudd pledged that the government would fund and provide the training so participants in the scheme were ready for employment. At the end of the press conference, Forrest gathered Rudd, Pearson, Eddington and Mundine into a semi-circle for a photo opportunity and told them to place their hands on top of his. When they did,
he said: “This is the Australian Employment Covenant” (AEC). It was front-page news the next day.

Like all of his hugely ambitious ventures, Forrest had to contend with naysayers. Professor Jon Altman, a leading academic in indigenous policy at the Australian National University, suggested a target of 50,000 jobs was “verging on being slightly dangerous rhetoric” and wondered whether the
details had been properly thought through. Altman pointed out that Australia currently had a total of 50,000 indigenous people in full-time private-sector work, yet Forrest and Rudd were promising to double that number in only two years. He also warned that only 25,800 indigenous Australians were classified as unemployed across the nation. A further 129,700 were outside the labour force, many
of whom lived on traditional lands, had poor levels of education and would be difficult to lure into paid work.

Forrest won support for the covenant from his billionaire mates James Packer, Kerry Stokes, Lindsay Fox and Frank Lowy. But it took him only a few months to start backtracking on his promise. First, he quietly dropped the two-year deadline. Later, the central pledge to create 50,000
new jobs transmogrified into a vision to secure 50,000 job “pledges” from employers.

In 2010, when the original two-year deadline arrived, only 2800 jobs had been filled. However, 20,000 jobs had been “pledged” by employers. Forrest began blaming the Rudd government for failing to uphold its end of the bargain to train people to fill the jobs, claiming Rudd had not followed through on a
promise to “move the bureaucracy” to ensure government agencies trained workers for specific roles.

Forrest had adopted his tried-and-true corporate tactic of achieving the impossible by setting unrealistic targets, but this time it hadn’t worked. Still, he had managed to bring a critical issue to the attention of corporate Australia. In a study into the scheme in 2010, researchers at the
Australian National University found that although Forrest’s claims about the AEC’s progress had been “overstated”, the 20,000 job pledges were still a “significant” achievement and represented a notable shift in the landscape of indigenous employment.

When he appeared on the ABC’s
Q&A
program in 2010, Forrest flatly denied ever promising that the jobs would be filled in two years and he
blamed the government for publicising the figure. But journalists at the Coolum press conference in 2008 all reported him as discussing the two-year target. Forrest also went on radio a day after the announcement of the AEC to say he believed it could be done in two years, although he did warn it was a difficult target. “I’ve shared with the prime minister privately that we would have crack at this
as an internal target within two years,” he said. “But I would say to you, that is a very steep target, and if we did it in longer than that, I’d think the result would be outstanding. We would have changed, as an Australian nation of employers, the course of social history for our indigenous brothers and sisters.”

Despite the missed targets, Forrest has not given up. By 2013, the AEC had
more than 60,000 job pledges from 300 employers and had placed more than 14,000 indigenous people in work since the start of the scheme five years earlier. The AEC also reported a 70 per cent retention rate for participants after six months, compared with the government’s Job Services Australia retention rate of 45 per cent after three months.

These are impressive numbers by any measure,
and Forrest deserves credit for overseeing the AEC’s push to get thousands of indigenous people into work. There is doubtless merit to his argument that red tape has hindered his original, outsized vision. Yet by the middle of 2013, the AEC appeared to be stalling. A scan of the organisation’s website at that time revealed only forty-four available positions – and thirty-nine of them were roles
at James Packer’s Crown Casino.

Warren Mundine, the Aboriginal leader who was involved with the AEC in his role as head of Forrest’s GenerationOne until his resignation in May 2013, believes the biggest flaw in the scheme is the government’s inability to train people to meet the specific needs of employers. “The problem is structural within the Department of Indigenous Affairs – it’s the
way it’s been operating for the last thirty to forty years,” he says.

Mundine is full of praise for Forrest’s activism and the business nous he brings to solving problems. When Mundine took a break in 2012 to have heart surgery, it was Forrest’s enthusiasm for the indigenous cause that motivated him to get back to work as quickly as possible. “I just wanted to drag myself out of bed and do
the job, even when I was in hospital,” Mundine says. “When you have a conversation with him, you get caught up in all that passion and you just want to go out there and rip arms off just to make it successful.” Mundine didn’t enjoy the phone calls from his boss at all hours of the day and night, and the pair clashed on some issues. But he came to be convinced that Forrest genuinely wants to help
Aboriginal people. “A lot of people say all sorts of things about Forrest,” he says. “But he could have been just a Forrest – the Forrests in Western Australia are pretty famous people. He could have been just a billionaire. But he’s taken this passion and put it in this area. My belief is he has a very genuine and strong heart, but with a business brain.”

Both Forrest and Fortescue are
highly sensitive to criticism over their indigenous jobs record. An Aboriginal public servant in Perth, David Collard, who coordinates indigenous engagement in the state’s Natural Resource Management program, was quoted in a newspaper report in 2012 as saying that Forrest’s push for indigenous people to work in the mines was misguided because mining offended the traditional culture of Aboriginal people.
He said Aborigines would prefer to be involved in rehabilitating the land rather than digging it up. Soon after the report appeared, Collard received a phone call from a Fortescue public relations executive who wanted to meet to discuss his views. When he turned up to the meeting at a local café, the executive had brought along three other Fortescue executives to explain to Collard how the
company was benefiting Aboriginal communities. Collard was heavily outnumbered, but says he held his ground. “I was blown away,” he recalls.

After 2008, Forrest began to broaden his philanthropic efforts beyond indigenous disadvantage to include disaster relief. Growing up at Minderoo, where drought, bushfires and cyclones were a way of life, he felt a personal connection to victims of natural
disasters. When Queensland was devastated by floods and cyclones in 2011, the Australian Children’s Trust helped in the rebuilding effort by securing corporate donations, working with local businesses to re-establish themselves and providing financial support for families hit by the disaster.

This was a template Forrest had used in the wake of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria,
which killed 173 people and destroyed thousands of houses. Forrest swung into action within days of the disaster, flying straight to Victoria and later dispatching Mal James, the head of the Australian Children’s Trust, to help break through red tape and get the relief operation moving faster on the ground. The charity spent $100,000 of Forrest’s money erecting a temporary community centre in the
main street of Marysville, a town virtually wiped off the map.

In the weeks that followed, Forrest visited Marysville several times and even managed to bring some razzamatazz to the huge relief operation. He organised a charity golf day with Greg Norman that raised close to $1 million and ended with a surprise concert by American music legends Simon and Garfunkel. On another occasion, Forrest
walked the blackened streets of Marysville with Hollywood actor Cate Blanchett, whom he described as a “mate”.

Forrest said he was encouraged by the amount of money and goodwill pouring into the affected area at a time when the Australian economy was in the doldrums as a result of the global financial crisis. “In a recession, in a smashed economy, you’ve got individuals that turn a blind
eye to where the global market is going and make a commitment to the people,” he said. “That is the most beautiful gift of being an Australian.”

Marysville residents later reported how impressed they were that Forrest devoted such a large amount of his time to the cause and played a major role in reconstruction efforts. It was an extraordinary effort from a man who was also running a major
listed mining company, which at the time was suffering badly amid the global downturn. “Forrest is one of the people who have hung in there,” Marysville community leader Doug Walter said a few years later. “I could give you a catalogue of people who turned up to get their photo in the paper, made extravagant promises and then disappeared, but he’s certainly not one of them. He came in with this
really positive message: that there will be a tomorrow, there is hope and we will be able to rebuild our lives. He captured the hearts and minds of everybody involved. He’s such an enthusiastic man and it’s catching.”

Walter recalled that Forrest arrived on a helicopter in his paddock. “He told us to take a ride in the chopper and have a look at the burn. We left him and his daughter with
this elderly couple in their eighties who had lost everything. And when we got back we found him kneeling on the floor in front of them, holding their hands, crying.” A local plumber, Bruce Ackerman, had a similar tale of Forrest’s empathy: “I had one of Australia’s richest men help carry the groceries into our kitchen a week ago and then sit down and have a coffee and actually listen to what it
is we need to get the place back up on its feet.”

Forrest’s most symbolic act was donating 1000 “dongas”, or small transportable huts, which had been used in his Pilbara mines
,
to serve as temporary accommodation for homeless Marysville residents. The Victorian premier at the time, John Brumby, recalls that Forrest had asked the government what was needed and was told that emergency accommodation
was a priority. The Fortescue dongas were immediately trucked across the Nullarbor by Lindsay Fox’s transport company, Linfox. Brumby says Forrest was a magnificent supporter of the relief effort and one of the few non-Victorians to become closely involved with it. “I couldn’t fault him,” Brumby says. “He wasn’t a Victorian and he wasn’t looking for anything from our government.”

Some of
the people working below Brumby, however, became irritated at Forrest’s apparent skill in stage-managing appearances that ended up on the nightly television news bulletin. And there were people in Marysville who, while not wanting to appear ungrateful, complained that Forrest’s dongas were designed for single men working on mine sites and were too small and dark to inhabit for any length of time.
A prominent Marysville community leader says while Forrest’s generosity was appreciated, many of the 1000 dongas were never used because they were the wrong sort of accommodation for families and did not contain kitchens, although the Anglican Church later provided each one with a microwave oven.

But the real shock to those working on the rebuilding mission came when Forrest sent a bill
for $300,000 to the Victorian government to cover the cost of returning the dongas to the Pilbara. The government had agreed to pay for the transport costs as part of the original contract, which was signed hastily after the disaster, but many working on the reconstruction were unaware of this and had assumed Forrest would pick up the tab. “The Victorian taxpayer was left with a bill for about $300,000
to send them back,” says the Marysville community leader, who has asked not to be named. “They ended up costing taxpayers, and they weren’t even effective.”