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.

Although CDEP needs critiquing, this tendentious article isn't the way to do it. Ms Hudson pinpoints some issues needing exposure, but also provides wrong information &/or misleading implications.

CDEP (originally standing for the CDE Program, not "Projects"), was not "introduced to replace unemployment benefits for Indigenous Australians": it was introduced to replace UB for that small sector of Aboriginal people living in remote communities which had no labour markets.

Nor was it introduced "to provide a transition to real work". It was intended to be a "work program" in places unlikely ever to provide other jobs.

DAA allowed CDEP to be extended (in the mid to late eighties) when it became obvious that other (DEIR, DEET & ADC) strategies were largely failing to improve workforce access for people from most urban and rural Aboriginal communities.

As for the contention that CDEP "pay on top of welfare payments isn't negligible either. Recent reports ... highlighted the fact that women on welfare can receive incomes in excess of $40,000 a year. Add CDEP to the mix and you have annual income levels of about $52,000".

This is hokum. The number of people taking advantage of CDEP in this way is so small as to be almost negligible. Those who do it shouldn't be doing so, but people are not taking advantage of CDEP in this way in most remote CDEP communities .

Similarly, Ms Hudson's assertion that "Even in remote areas, most Indigenous people are within commuting distance of work in retail, tourism, agriculture and mining" is ignorant nonsense. Some are, but definitely not "most". She should be challenged to substantiate this wild and silly claim. There are some (probably hundreds) who are within "commuting distance" of these jobs (and failing to take advantage of these possibilities), but by the same token there are many thousands of people in remote regions who are not living within "commuting distance" of such labour markets.

If the Centre for Independent Studies persists with allowing such uninformed stuff to be published under its moniker, then it should seriously consider renaming itself the Centre for Propaganda Studies.

CDEP is largely criticised by Aboriginal people also. While generalisations are always problematic, in general CDEP has failed to provide either employment or development. Its true that real economies don't exist in some of these places, but that needs a real fix, not trapping people in welfare by any name.

The Rudd Government itself has admitted its a failed program and promised reform - yet reinstated the unreformed program. Its not true there was no replacement, there is Work for the Dole which applies to ALL participants with activity requirements, not just the selct few in CDEP. Problem is, they simultaneously watered down work for the dole. The reform will mean more training, not more work, so they have got themselves in a real policy bind

The real problem is that people miss the principle reason that the previous Government abolished CDEP in the NT communities. While CDEP effectively operates as 'welfare' and sit down money, in legal terms it is wages and therefore cannot be income managed (or quarantined) as other welfare can. Cutting discretionary cash is an important part of cutting down grog and other substance abuse. This was why a number of indigenous people, including the ALP's Alison Anderson, criticised restoration of CDEP and noted that it made more idel money available for grog and the associated dysfunctions.

Keeping a failed program, especially when it feeds some of the substance issues - albeit indirectly - is a sign of very poor governance. They did it for one reason, because they hastily promised to do so when, pre election, they were trying to ingratiate themselves to the Aboriginal lobby. Labor supported income management and the reasons behind it - but the CDEP decision flies in the fase of commitment to the intervention flop.

CDEP is the government's method of getting the indigenous people off the unemployment roll so the unemployment rates are lower. It's the dole by another name and is given out using the same methodology as the dole - the CDEP office is a branch office of Centerlink.

All the so called examples quoted here are fantasy. If you are employed you are not entitled to the dole, similarly with CDEP.

I didn't bother reading the previous posts of this thread, I just saw CDEP & I knew I had to add my two bob worth. My whole working life in the past 30 years has been in indigenous communities & I witnessed the transformation from when everyone was working at something to where hardly anyone is doing anything. CdEP compounded the problem.
CDEP was dreamed up by ignorant academic advisors & endorsed by equally ignorant bureaucrats. I was told it was Bob Katter who first promoted the idea & Labor jumped at it without thinking. We now have a generation of communities who were denied the opportunity to seek & find their way in life. So, now these people have absolutely no sense of direction or worth etc. & they're left at the mercy of more academic & bureaucratic experiments. Compliments of Labor. To cover up the insurmountable stuff-up a selected few indigenous have been put on pedestals for show. Everyone's raving on about the appalling state of health & education etc. Well, where are all those high achievers among the communities ? Labor's solution of offering people a two week TAFE course is an obvious abysmal failure. Indigenous or otherwise, people need a sense of worth & I'm afraid the academic "expert" advisors just don't cut it.

I actually gave some serious thought to writing a response that would utilise hard data such as work force participation, a scan of real economies in remote communities, an audit of (the lack) of government infrastructure, work to welfare transition and of course the overall historical analysis of how and why these remote gulags (everyone calls “ Aboriginal communities”) cam about.

They each have their own unique but fundamentally familiar story. (even the one I was born on).

But then I though why bother Paul, I won't get a response from the author of this article, I'll only have Right Wing Laborites like to you engage with.

YAWN! I'd rather watch paint dry.

So which one are you individual,
1. Missionary
2. Mercenary
3. Misfit

Or perhaps one those people not ideologically inclined but who did well (financially) living off Aboriginal poverty?

Just to correct the impression that CDEP has made Aboriginal people a bunch of layabouts and wife-beaters, we should remember that more than sixty thousand Indigenous people have enrolled in university courses over the past eighteen years, and that more than twenty thousand have graduated, mostly with degrees and about a quarter with post-graduate qualifications. Currently around nine thousand are enrolled, and most of those will graduate. A third will go on to post-graduate study.

The problem may be that there are two populations moving off in different directions: one to disaster, with poor health, addictions, lives of violence and pointlessness, not necessarily in poverty but certainly looking as if they are (squalor more than poverty); while the other population is finding meaningful work, has good health, few addictions, almost no violence, mostly owning or purchasing their own homes, encouraging their kids through school and contributing back to Australian society, of which they are an enthusiastic part.

The question is: how to switch people in remote communities and the outer suburbs on to success, to an education and work ethic which is the foundation of good health and a reasonably happy life ? Or do we wash our hands of them and let them go down the drain ? I'm certainly not saying that their path is easy, but what else ?

Thank you, Sara.

Loudmouth,
Thanks for providing that info about the numbers of aboriginal people getting higher education. Hopefully, that will contiue and many will work in fields associated with aboriginal education, health and become role models for kids.

Just when this news uplifts me, I see a news article today about the NT Government only spending about half of its Federal allocation for aboriginal matters. How can this be? What is going on? I thought they had an aboriginal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Surely the news report is wrong or it is gross incompetence. It is not as though there is nothing to spend the funds on.

So which one are you individual,
1. Missionary
2. Mercenary
3. Misfit
Rainier,
Call me whatever you like but one thing's for sure, you're not writing from experience rather just from what you read. loudmouth says that 60,000 have made it but why do think they don't go back to their communities ?
Do you have any idea at all what goes on in remote communities ? I really don't see any evidence that you do. From corruption by bureaucrats to blatant misuse of public funding. No movie script is that imaginative.

Ah well, as usual all is quiet on the idealists' front.

Hi Banjo,

Those figures can easily be checked on DEEWR's website, and the ABS Census data. Yes, about sixty thousand have commenced study since 1990, and about 118,000 have turned twenty in that time - so the equivalent of just over half of the 20-yr-old population has started university studies. Since 1990 and ever onwards, half of the Indigenous population will at some time go to university.

Here's another bit of good news: Indigenous women make up about 1.66 % of the Australian-born female population of Australia; they also make up 1.62 % of all Australian-born under-graduate female university students commencing study each year. The men are not doing nearly so well, but that's for them to work out.

There was a massive boost to the Indigenous birth-rate from the mid-eighties, and those age-groups are just reaching tertiary age in big numbers. It is likely that total enrolments could double by 2015, and that there could be fifty thousand graduates by 2020.

So why is there any need for CDEP ? Partly because there are two populations: Indigenous uni students very rarely come direct from communities, and these days they tend to be born and raised in urban, mixed-marriage households. I think the days of hoping for Indigenous graduates to 'go back' to communities (that they didn't come from) are well and truly over. it never happened, and it never will.

Meanwhile, people in isolated communities have latched onto CDEP, rather than look for work, or develop enterprises (even vegetable gardens, for God's sake!) at settlements. This raises the question: can people be expected/allowed to stay on unemployment benefits for life ? If so, what hope for their kids ? what need for education ? Isn't this nothing more than Apartheid, with a kind smile and a fortnightly cheque ? We should be ashamed.

Joe

I know I'm crazy but I believe the way to solve the outback community problem is to build bitumen all weather roads to link them back with civilisation. It would also encourage the the rest of us and the grey nomads etc to move out there possibly creating employment and raising the living standards by example.
The kids could get out in all weathers and not be locked up for long periods like they currently are.
Let's open up the outback.

CDEP is a euphenism since it promotes neither community development or employment. Two factors not noted by Hudson and others is that in remote 'communities' under CDEP those Aboriginal people who do not 'work' in some capacity however menial, are payed FAR LESS that the dole. On the other hand some Aboriginal people are skilled and do work a full-time job but are not paid a wage because of CDEP. CDEP has been tolerated and the corruption associated with it's implementation have been hidden or ignored for far too long by governments and academics alike. It is discriminatory, since no other Australians have been subjected to CDEP. The denial of its real consequnces have served to perpetuate the margnialisation of Aboriginal people living in remote areas. So what were the true intentions of CDEP for remote Aboriginl communities? In whose interests does it continue?