About six years ago, a director of public health in far-north Queensland had the foresight and tenacity to initiate a partnership with the University of Sydney to encourage and support Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers to complete a degree in health promotion.

He was determined to build a workforce that had the knowledge, skills and experience to work side by side with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across northern Queensland and the Torres Strait to tackle health issues before they became critical.

In other words: to develop and implement primary prevention and secondary intervention programs that would address health issues identified as priorities, such as type 2 diabetes, ear disease, substance use, risky s-xual practices, physical inactivity and family violence.

Funding for scholarships was provided by Queensland Health and its affiliates and only those who met strict eligibility criteria were selected to enrol in the course: the graduate diploma in indigenous health promotion at the University of Sydney.

As one of the lecturers and now the course co-ordinator, I was always impressed with the standard of students who came from Queensland — they were savvy, motivated and committed to making a difference.

And I would happily describe Queensland’s progressive workforce development policies to other state and territory colleagues and sing the praises of the quality graduates who went back to their communities to implement what they had learnt.

Can anyone who hasn’t grown up as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person really understand what it takes to haul yourself off to a university in a different state when you have significant family, work and community responsibilities and you haven’t studied since you were a kid?

I was often astounded at the resilience and optimism of our students, many of who experienced major life challenges during their year of study. The investment in their own social and economic uplift and that of their families and communities was huge.

In Queensland under the Anna Bligh government their effort was recognised and rewarded with opportunities to apply for health promotion positions that paid them what they were worth and provided them with a satisfying sense of their own professional abilities and identity.

Sadly, as a result of Campbell Newman’s “quick and dirty” tactics, many of the Queensland graduates of this course have now lost their jobs and others are in a distressing limbo.

The Newman government has supported Noel Pearson’s fight against the Wild Rivers legislation, which would have severely curtailed the rights of Aboriginal people in Cape York to access their own land and waterways for economic growth. And in my opinion it was the right thing to do.

Yet Newman appears to have no compunction in taking away the jobs of our graduates — the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were already on that trajectory to social and economic prosperity.

This isn’t about preserving our course or my job. We attract Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from all over the country, so for us it’s business as usual (although we’ll certainly miss our cohort from Queensland).