Jobs Guarantees rely on settler understanding of work and get mixed together with other social welfare programs in violent and colonialist ways.

Indigenous development in the East Kimberley Employment and getting First Nations people into ‘real jobs’ has been a key rationality underpinning government attempts of First Nations development. Targeted, are people without formal employment whose behaviour are seen as key sites of improvement. Yet, whilst government logic is about how getting people into formal employment will lead to development, they overlook structural limits in the remote labour market. The Kimberley Development Commission finds that the key cause of unemployment in the East Kimberley is not an issue of behavioural deficiency, but because of the absence of formal jobs. Footnote49 Still, this absence of formal jobs for First Nations peoples provides employment for largely non-First Nations people where services for the poor and unemployed are a major industry in Kununurra. Underpinning these job creation initiatives, are specific norms and rationalities as to how work is defined. While many First Nations people, in and around Kununurra engage in productive work ‘on country’ undertaking customary work for livelihoods, most of this work, unless it can derive a market value such in the case with the ranger programme, is not valued by the state. Such productive work activities outside the market economy have endured over a decade of critique by politicians, business leaders, policy-makers and some Indigenous elite, terming this work as being outside the ‘real economy’, and promoting narratives about Aboriginal passivity, dysfunction and non-participation in work. Footnote50 Also not valued through such discourse is how First Nations people engage in other productive activities such as unpaid care work – according to the 2016 census data, 38% of Indigenous respondents in the East Kimberley provide unpaid childcare, where only 29% of non-Indigenous people did the same. Instead, these types of work are often overlooked and bodies and communities are now passed off as unproductive and unemployed, subsequently forced onto punitive social security and community development policies. Government policies and legislation are important technologies of the Indigenous development assemblage in the East Kimberley. I initially started my research through examining the Cashless Debit Card trial, yet quickly realised how this policy was contingent on other policies operating in the area; the Community Development Program – a punitive work-for-the-dole programme, transitional housing – conditional housing support, and Regional Reform – a WA government initiative redirecting funding away from economically unproductive remote communities. Whilst each is presented, implemented and evaluated by government as discrete polices, what is of interest is how are part of an assemblage with each other as well as interlinking with other actors, discourse and processes to not only territorialise capabilities and possibilities for First Nations people, but also attempt to foreclose others. These different technologies target ‘behaviours’ as sites of improvement in order for development to occur. They are targeted at a cohort of people living in the region often passed off as deficient because they don’t have formal employment. These policy technologies are all situated on the contested Miriuwung Gajerrong landscape, which itself provides a constant reminder of ongoing settler colonialism, but also the continued resistance of people who resist and refuse settler colonial attempts.