There's a whole strain of academic sociological research that asks why efforts to fix this always fail. I read one of the papers once, it got linked to from somewhere and it was interesting. It described the cultural issues reasonably well but bent over backwards to paint the problems as mere differences, not something they should fix but as things others should just learn to somehow work around (they had no suggestions for how). The possibility that the aboriginals are fine as they are and don't care about getting richer didn't really come up either which was interesting.
The major problem is timekeeping. Apparently you can't say to an aboriginal, "let's meet at 10am" because they might just turn up at 2pm instead and not see anything wrong with that. Or they might go walkabout and you don't see them for days. In turn it means they can't be integrated into any kind of team-based workforce, which in turn means they can't hold down any kind of job (like mining).
Another issue is the cultural fixation with funerals. They're expected to travel back to attend a funeral for almost anyone in their village, at any time, at short notice, and they always do it even if it conflicts with work commitments. They don't care if they lose their job as a consequence.
The sociologists have a neat way to describe this cultural feature - they say aboriginals view time as circular and endless, vs the linear time that everyone else uses. To what extent this is a rationalization of western academics vs something real is a bit of a open question.