The second half of the 1960s was a boom time for minerals exploration and investment in northern Australia. Some of the prospective and mineralised land was within the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve. In pursuing a policy of modernisation and development in the Northern Territory, the Department of Territories (renamed Interior in 1969) had a ready made and simple definition of the reserve inhabitants' interest: commercial resource-based industries should be encouraged, so that Aboriginal people would get jobs, an essential step in their assimilation.

The CAA was not opposed to advancing Aborigines' welfare by involving them in economic development. Coombs' February 1968 proposal for a statement of Commonwealth policy urged Prime Minister John Gorton to declare that, initially, the Commonwealth's one distinct contribution to national policy reform would be to emphasise the economic advancement of Aboriginal people. Gorton should tell the States that he was ‘satisfied that the most immediate aspirations of the Aboriginal peoples are towards jobs, homes and incomes at higher levels than they have now, or have ever had.’ Aboriginal people, Gorton should say, wished to break the ‘vicious circle’ of ‘pauperism, dependence and paternalism, which has become self-reinforcing and self-renewing.’

To stimulate indigenous entrepreneurs the Commonwealth would set up a capital fund with a technical advisory service. The Aboriginal Benefits Trust Fund – established by Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck in 1952 to receive royalties from mining on Aboriginal reserves – would be combined with other public money to purchase equity in enterprises on Aboriginal reserves.