Whether they will work or not (and my firm guess is that they won't) will be hard to demonstrate. It is of the essence of Year Zero plans that so much changes in the bureaucratic record that it becomes impossible to compare inputs or outputs, or outcomes, with those of another period.

This involves more than fiddling with, and re-labelling old programs, but tossing them up in the air, ridding oneself of old knowledge or expertise, if any, and starting again with different systems, methods of record keeping, and lines of bureaucratic control.

And fresh, confident and ignorant, white faces earnestly explaining why all of the old systems were completely misconceived and doomed to fail and why their insights, or the minister's, or the minister's friends and cronies', are so much better and certain to succeed.

Whether anything positive happens to the objects of all of the love is something else, never put in the accounts.

In the middle of this week, the Abbott government issued a report on the operations of the National Partnership Agreement on remote service delivery. Not to put too fine a point on it, it concluded that six years of intensive co-operation, and major extra funding, in the billions, between Commonwealth, state and territory governments to better co-ordinate and focus services to Aborigines had had, at the best, only indifferent results in materially improving the lives of remote Aboriginal Australians. It was not, strictly, a report card on the Intervention Mark I (under Brough) or II (under Macklin) but the overlap is so great that it may as well have been.

There was some slight progress on a few of the Closing the Gap targets, and, in a few places, subjective feelings (as often as not by providers rather than recipients of the love) that things were now marginally better than they had been before. But what does it mean if 30 per cent think things are better?

Any argument, anyway, that this was a result of all of the extra effort, the extra money, extra activity by extra public servants, or extra leadership from politicians and bureaucrats was undermined by the discovery that similar mild improvements had been found in communities and townships which had not been the recipients of all of the extra attention. The bang for the billions was nothing. Nil. Zero. A complete waste of time and space.

Indeed, one of the perverse consequences of the study was that the more co-ordination there was, the less co-ordination of activities that tended to be seen. This was even before the presence of specially appointed co-ordinators-general at each Commonwealth, state and territory level, which created such fresh logjams and inefficiencies that, several years ago, I suggested that we needed a co-ordinator-general of co-ordinators-general.

The review should be regarded as a report card on the policies and approaches of Jenny Macklin. If released under the Abbott government, it was not a political document, or bill of indictment, but a review commissioned under the last government, and largely completed before it lost the confidence of the electorate. But there will be no political accountability. Macklin's influence on the party's policy councils is stronger than ever.

Indeed, like a good many studies prepared under Macklin's control of Aboriginal affairs, the review tends to bear some of the hallmarks of research commissioned, designed and intended to come to different conclusions. Intended to be used to endorse any proposition whatever, or, particularly in terms of the selected Northern Territory intervention communities, to be more likely than average to agree with the minister's maternalist agenda.

But perhaps those who were writing the conclusions did not have the benefit – such as it was – of having their "draft" findings critically scrutinised and "edited" (in some cases out) in the minister's office before publication: the fate of a number of originally critical reviews under Macklin.

The best that can be said of the past six years is that there was awfully little progress for an awful amount of public money, energy and talk, particularly by whitefellas. And that the number of whitefellas ordering Aborigines around came close to doubling under Macklin's regime, possibly (once one adds them up) to more than one whitefella per blackfella family. And that, as usual, it is likely that blackfellas will get the blame, and suffer the consequences, of whitefella failures.

Some might think, indeed, that these consequences are on the horizon.

At the end of the week, Twiggy Forrest, a man who, if anyone does, claims to knows what's good for blackfellas because he's known some all of his life, was issuing a report on improving Aboriginal employment outcomes. It has a number of good, if hardly novel, suggestions, but they were overwhelmed by his central thesis, which is, apparently, that a return to a nineteenth century English parish workhouse model, plus a re-introduction of frugally organised "susso" bags on the 1930s Depression model would get all lazy and indigent Australians, including those of them who were indigenous, off their backsides and made able to be useful economic units of society.

Even the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, ever a sucker for slogans and instant solutions in Aboriginal affairs, was less than effusive, describing Forrest's plans, as leaked to the government's bulletin board, The Australian, as "bold, ambitious and brave" but "ahead of public opinion''.

It's a little hard to see the lack of enthusiasm given the zeal with which some of his ministers had been, in a non-Aboriginal context, promoting the idea of making life for the poor half of the population more miserable and subject to more bureaucratic regulation and discretion than before, as the counter-thrust to its other plan to reduce to next to nothing the burden of regulation on our lifters and contributors.

It has yet to be established whether Andrew Forrest would be making a greater contribution to Australian government and society if he, and his companies, were paying taxes at a rate commensurate with his vast wealth. He prefers voluntary donations to causes in which he believes, with a vast amount of accompanying publicity as to his philanthropy and sense of citizenship.

He certainly cares about Aboriginal advancement and dignity, and has devoted a good deal of his time to promoting various schemes for improving employment outcomes. But caring, or sincerity, is not enough. Otherwise the policies of successive governments and umpteen well-meaning but entirely ineffectual ministers, bureaucrats and charismatic Aboriginal leaders without constituencies over the past 50 years would have achieved rather more.

There are times, indeed, when the cynic is entitled to wonder whether the messiahs, appointed or self-chosen, are the biggest menaces of all to actual change.

For one thing, Aborigines are not waiting for Moses to lead them to a promised land, least of all a land filled with Yankee-like provident small businessmen, farmers and country clubs. For another, most of the saviours tend to be very impatient about the one thing which is critical to any sort of corporate or communal change – the consent, understanding and support of the people whose lives one is planning to change. That's quite apart from the fact that a good many of the shortcomings in practical life in many Aboriginal communities owe a good deal more to the shortcomings of the vast bureaucratic systems of outsiders – and their incapacity to adapt to their customers – than to the hopelessness, apathy and fecklessness of Aborigines themselves, a matter that the reformers tend to dismiss as a distraction from the main game.

Without directly saying so Forrest identifies Aboriginal disadvantage with the general disadvantage of an Australian underclass, amounting perhaps to 8 or 9 per cent of the general population. There are many Aboriginal families not in this underclass, but the indigenous proportion of it is probably about 30 to 40 per cent, which, almost by itself, tends to explain why Aborigines are so disproportionately over-represented in our jails and institutions, and our statistics of poor education, health, employment and housing outcomes.

Like the government, Forrest tends to think that the evils of welfare, and the risks of welfare dependence in the population are as though every recipient of an allowance, a pension or a government benefit were a member of this underclass, constantly subjected to the temptation to live in squalor on the "cash barbecue'' that taxes, if not much from Forrest, pay for.

In fact, of course, the overwhelming number of welfare recipients, even among the young, the unemployed and the sick, are not demographically or temperamentally members of such an underclass, and deeply resent the underlying implication of hostile talk about "the age of entitlement" that comes so often from the government.

Indeed the very problem of having too many people feeling entitled is not the group at the bottom of the heap, always likely to be the most needy, but those members of the middle class who have come to think (and who have been encouraged by politicians to think) that government ought to contribute to their cost of living.

But attacking "bludgers" and "parasites," like attacking boat people, sounds well in an electorate increasingly conditioned in the politics of resentment, envy and the fear that someone else might be enjoying themselves.

Forrest thinks there should be a national welfare card for all, except pensioners, one which, like the prototype already imposed in many Aboriginal communities, allows only the purchase of life's essentials, not including, of course, alcohol, cigarettes or illegal drugs, or gambling. In this apparently cash-free paradise, recipients would be docked money if they failed to send their children to school or otherwise conform to expectations, including strenuous job-seeking. It would be part of a "holistic" approach by all levels of government to remake the welfare state, end the cash barbecue said to be built into the system, and to address dependencies at different stages of life.

There would, of course, be cash handouts, tax concessions, preferred supplier status and other advantages for the entrepreneurial class to take on workers, particularly disadvantaged ones. The cynic will immediate note how the poor need punishment; the rich incentives.

The ragbag of ideas contains a few sensible ones, almost certainly bound to be swept away with the loopy ones. Thus Forrest, who used to argue that employment was the key for Aboriginal advancement, now thinks that education is the key, and, like missionaries of old, wants to focus on the very young. We should "prioritise investment in early childhood, from conception (?) to age three''. We should co-locate health and support services in schools and community hubs.

That last idea is hardly novel, though the main obstacle to its achievement is not Aboriginal agreement or desire, but the fact that bureaucratic responsibility for baby care, child care, infant health care, child welfare, pre-school, and schools is located in a host of different agencies at different levels of government, whose capacity to co-ordinate activity even in middle-class communities, let alone remote Aboriginal ones, is very poor. It's not merely a problem of "silos" either. Authority in different agencies varies to such an extent that one agency can agree to something locally, the other only regionally and another only from a capital city.

It was only a short while ago – about 37 years ago to be precise – when I was trying to progress a submission for such a co-location plan in Alice Springs for the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress.

This had four elements additional to the Forrest plan: it would also co-locate aged care with the rest, giving older people in the community a continuing active role in the business of looking after and caring for children, as well as a continuing engagement with their families and wider communities. It would provide refuge-like "safe space" and alcohol-free space, for women. It would provide continuous training – we hoped eventually to tertiary level – for Aboriginal women, and not only in childcare, infant health care, pre-school education and the like, but also, earlier, in adult literacy. And it would be itself a source of employment within the community. In Australia generally, more than 30 per cent of the working population is one way or another engaged in the provision of such services, but, in Aboriginal Australia, the proportion is a lot lower.

I never met a politician or senior bureaucrat who was not immediately enthusiastic for the idea, which had come up from the constituencies. Nor one who did not instruct minions to help progress it. But progress there was not, if only because one could never get more than two organisations in a room together. The situation is no better today – indeed it is a gloomy conclusion of the remote service delivery report that practical co-ordination of agencies has actually become more difficult with so many engaged in such work.

(Cyril) Parkinson would understand, but it is a concept beyond satire, the Council of Australian Governments, the Prime Minister's Department, or the latest lot of know-alls with the ear of the minister and prime minister.