The Past and Future of CDEP

Abstract

Centres and margins are all about perspective, both in place and time. From particular places and times, certain phenomena can look quite marginal, while from others they can look quite central. In this paper I want to argue that thirty years ago the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme grew out of some rather marginal policy concerns within the Australian social security system about the inclusion of Aboriginal people in unemployment payments. Those concerns were, at the time, unable to be fully accommodated within the social security system and so the CDEP scheme was established within the Commonwealth Aboriginal or Indigenous affairs portfolio. While CDEP began as a somewhat marginal concern within the Indigenous affairs portfolio too, over time it became the largest single program in that portfolio and a policy centre in its own right. Recently, with the demise of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and the ‘mainstreaming’ of its programs, the CDEP scheme has been transferred to the Employment and Workplace Relations portfolio within the Commonwealth government. So I ask in the later pages of this paper, will this new program location and time in Indigenous affairs lead to a new marginalization of the CDEP scheme? My answer to that question is possibly, but not inevitably. Indeed I will conclude with a challenge for the Employment and Workplace Relations portfolio; to allow the CDEP scheme to continue as a policy centre in its own right. Show more