Although CDEP is not perfect, to be fair, it does perform vital work in Aboriginal communities. I have seen CDEP fencing crews and rubbish collection crews as well as crews of Aboriginal people doing housing maintenance and plumbing work at the school in the NT community where I worked. I have also noticed that since the Interventin stopped CDEP, there was a big build up of rubbish in some of the Alice Springs town camp.Obviously CDEP does perform vital work and talk of people being paid to mow their own lawns is the exeption rather than the rule.

Badly researched, full of the usual white moral panic sound bites, no real analysis on how CDEP is being used purposefully and productively on many Indig communities - and more importantly - devoid of acknowledgement of the history of how these communities came about in the first instance.("ahistorical communities")

I often wonder where the Centre for Independence Studies is recruiting these young wet behind the ears writers.

I doubt she even knows that her empathy is dressed up in Right Wing economic rhetoric /culture of poverty clap trap.

It should be renamed the "Centre for Studies Independent of Real Scholarship"

From my experience, Sara is right on the button. In one community where I did some voluntary work, CDEP was paying people, young, able-bodied people, to do home duties, look after their own house. Some of these CDEP recipients were also getting full-time ABSTUDY, study grants, for no-study TAFE study, i.e. everyone doing the same essay word-for-word as their only assignment for the semester. For example, one couple were pulling in $ 760 per week, with $ 50 rent per week, for no-work CDEP and no-study TAFE. The CDEP bookkeeper calculated their take-home pay by first deducting rent, electricity and other costs from their pre-tax entitlements and then giving them the rest. I was planting trees around the dairy there and when the manager couldn't get any young guys to get up and do the milking, we did it together, two middle-aged graduates for Christ's sake, while the young guys were still - as they say down there - eyes shut and arse open. If I had known forty years ago how work-shy people were going to be, I would have given Aboriginal concerns away then and there.

This is always the governments rightwing line to cut social benefits and destroy the social infrastructure. The same political crew who create the horrible conditions in the first place. This is the same rightwing politics behind 200 years of aboriginal genocide and mistreatment in order to wipe out any future claims on land including stealing their children. The same politics sprouted by Labor and Liberal whereby nothing is too much trouble for the financial and ruling elite they serve. But they are having trouble covering up their long record of creating the most odious and atrocious conditions against aboriginals in general health care, public hospitals including access to specialists and operations, schools and universities in the Northern Territory. One has to rub ones eyes in utter disbelief that the governments are defending the "sacred children". Rudd and his cohorts want to steal their land in the N.T. for their cronies in mining, then serve up the aboriginals to the mineowners and cattle stations as cheap slave labour, like they were used in the 1950's and 60's. Let us not forget the nuclear tests carried out on aboriginal families at Maralinga as well as used on Australian troops. Who were not guinea pigs but sacrificial lambs. An infamous 1956 letter by Alan Butement, an original member of the Australian Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee, summed up the government policy toward the victims, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike. Denouncing an Australian native patrol officer for raising concerns about the exposure of Aboriginal people to radioactivity, Butement accused him of “a lamentable lack of balance” in “apparently placing the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations”. These same trials have left almost 24 kilos of plutonium, with a half-life of 24,000 years, scattered around a huge area. And still catch the unwary including aboriginal families. The British tests were conducted between 1952 and 1963, first at the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia and then at Emu Field and Maralinga in the South Australian desert. At Maralinga, Britain secretly moved from atomic explosions to detonating thermonuclear devices.

Typical Rainier whineging,

Why don't you take issue with her arguments Rainier?

One of my best mates, whom I have no intention of naming, supplemented his income by using funds supposedly put aside to help indigenous students pass their Uni studies. He's part aboriginal so of course he's entitled in that respect, but the money wasn't going where it's supposed to. So don't pretend that a little more accountability would be amiss.

Abnd that is the complaint at the heart of this article by Sara Hudson.

If some CDEP employees are doing valuable work like rubbish collection then this should be instituted as real work and paid as such.

Make work or training should be a step to REAL employment and not another welfare rort.

Passive welfarism has too many victims, black and white alike, We need to get rid of it.

Very accurate rendition Sarah! I unlike most Australians, have lived in aboriginal communities all over Australia for almost six years. CDEP was, is and always will be ‘sit down money’, money for no work. My husband and I were so amused when after the intervention, all these people suddenly appeared in the mornings to work for their CDEP money! It took the CDEP organisers quit off guard as they had nothing organised for them to do! Well after years and years of money for nothing, why would they have anything organised for them to do. Unfortunately CDEP buys grog and idle time for belting wives and raping children. That has been my and any honest remote Area Nurse’s experience.