Shared responsibility agreements, in which indigenous people receive extra services or money when they meet certain goals, such as improving their children's school attendance or washing faces, will now be made directly with family groups, the article says.
But the change in the government's indigenous policy has been met with a warning from Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, who has asked Canberra to ensure it does not reinforce dependency.
The government's bureaucratic indigenous welfare industry "resists at every turn any attempt for the intervention to come to an end and for indigenous responsibility to be restored," Mr Pearson told the newspaper.
He said the shared responsibility agreements were not working.
"Providing a community-based incentive for what amounts to an individual and family-derived behaviour is unlikely to be a consistently successful policy," he said.
Mr Pearson has called for the creation of a locally-based Families Commission to protect children's interests in indigenous communities.
Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said he agreed with Mr Pearson and had already started implementing his ideas.