Have you heard the one about the tourists driving down the highway towards Alice Springs when they were hailed by an Aboriginal family with a broken-down car?

“Could you give us a tow to town,” was the request. “The car won’t go and the kids can’t stay out here in the sun.” So the nice couple from Sweden or wherever, who’d come to the Territory for an ‘outback experience’, hitch their rental van to the supplied tow rope and off to Alice Springs they all go.

Next day the old bomb is in an Alice Springs service station with the bonnet up when in comes another tourist van.

“You couldn’t give us a tow up the road to our place could you?” asks the driver fella. “Can’t just leave the family stranded here in town.”

Another tourist, another adventure – you get the picture. One version of this story has the car making several trips until it’s discovered by a more savvy ‘rescuer’ that the car in fact has practically no engine!

Until quite recently, the Northern Territory had no speed limit but this allowed people to drive a comfortable speed to suit the conditions and the vehicle without ever feeling you’re going too slowly. Aboriginal community cars, usually Falcon station wagons, cruise along just under 90 kph, the speed I’m willing to bet is the optimum speed in dollars per kilometre.

Sometimes, though thankfully not too often, a car rented and driven by a visiting consultant most likely, would appear briefly in the mirror if you were alert – then woof! –  gone into the distance.

A friend once told of a wild drive with one such high flyer who whipped along at 170 in the rented Camry until his passenger insisted, “I don’t mind the speed so much but not while you’re working your appointment organiser on the steering wheel!”.

The ‘Cannonball Run’, a silly idea to let a bunch of rich hoons race from Darwin to Uluru, zoomed through Tennant Creek in 1994 and sure enough a couple of Japanese dentists driving a Ferrari came to grief. Whistling along at 275 kilometres per hour, on a road carrying the usual mix of two-way traffic, the driver failed to see a control point vehicle and killed himself, his navigator and the two volunteers sitting beside their car.

On the subject of tragedies in the Territory comes the news of the sudden abolishing of all Community Development Employment Projects in the Northern Territory (but not in other states).

Pronounced ‘Seedy-pea’ in the Aboriginal way of skipping the stilted, superfluous bits, CDEP has for many years provided workers with skills, a sense of worth and a regular income.

It isn’t perfect by any means. Participants can work for many years without holiday pay or superannuation. The funded hours are less than a normal week’s work but for all its shortcomings, it provides a real job.

It is not ‘sit-down money’. You have to turn up for work before 8am, in good nick and ready to go. It is not well suited to drinkers or people who stay up all night watching X-rated videos.

CDEP money is not pension or welfare money paid by Centrelink, it is funding from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations to Indigenous organisations who run employment programs to meet local needs.

A stroke of the pen and decades of employment practice is chucked away to be replaced by more words about ‘real’ jobs.

A new fridge magnet to sum up current government policy might well say, “Alarmed but not alert”.