Focus on Indigenous jobs with Goolagong Road development

The resealing project at Goolagong Road is being run by Wamarra, an Indigenous construction company based in Melbourne, but now looking to expand into NSW.

Wamarra's managing director Hayden Heta said that they currently had 95 staff, with 55 of those coming from Indigenous backgrounds.

Mr Heta emphasised their goals of creating a pipeline to long-term and permanent work as the company expanded into NSW.

"The idea of bringing this business back on country and providing opportunity for my community is very important to me," he said.

"We really want to try and build a pipeline to sustain full-time employment ... once we land another project off the back of this one, we will be looking at engaging a full-time workforce here in NSW."

The project comes from the NSW state government's Roads to Home initiative, which has additional focus on providing local training and employment outcomes through a partnership with TAFE NSW and Yarpa NSW Indigenous Business and Employment hub.

Griffith Local Aboriginal Land Council chairman Stephen Young said that working with TAFE NSW had been a major boost to being able to provide employment opportunities for Indigenous people.

"It wasn't an easy task but we really pushed hard to create these employment opportunities, we were able to offer courses in Skidsteer, Roller and Introduction to Construction and Concreting," he said.

"We had good participation on that, we had eight to 15 people attend those training opportunities, as well as the traffic control course and a few community members have gotten casual work out of that."