This article first appeared in The Australian Financial Review, 7 August 2007

Don't Cry for the Passing of CDEP

Hon. Gary Johns

The Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) is dead. Thank goodness. It will be progressively replaced in the Northern Territory from September. It has already been abolished in most other places. Any lament at its passing is misplaced. Just think about it, if the only thing that propped up your community was a work for the dole scheme, would you stay?

Many CDEPs operate services and businesses like garbage removal, womens' refuges, health services and commercial aquaculture enterprises. It is said that some of these business ventures may eventually become self-sustaining.

In the real economy, services like garbage removal are paid for by rates, not by work-for-the-dole. Residents in Aboriginal communities do not pay rates. Aboriginal health services are well funded in many communities (tiny remote communities cannot sustain a medical centre), but they are short of skilled health workers. The reason for a shortage is that few want to live in remote Aboriginal communities. CDEP recipients are not sufficiently skilled to be a substitute for health workers. A women's refuge is a very rare service in a normal community, the fact that they are commonplace in remote Aboriginal communities proves that these places are hell holes. By the way, 'community run' refuges are prone to the same sort of inter-family prejudice and humbug as any other Aboriginal controlled service. They do not guarantee a good service.

As for the argument that commercial business ventures depend on CDEP, clearly it has been forgotten that for 30 years Aboriginal businesses have failed. Businesses are not Aboriginal, they are businesses. Apart from artistic endeavours, businesses stand or fall on their merits not on their cultural difference. There are many examples of successful businesses run by Aborigines, and they do not employ CDEP workers.

CDEP has masked a cruel truth. Unless there is a readily exploitable resource, and a willingness to work it, Aboriginal people cannot survive on their own country without considerable subsidy. The subsidy is provided in a form that would not be tolerated for non-Aborigines. Aborigines have their noses pressed against the window pane of our world, the majority of them desperately want to join us (despite what the gatekeepers would have you believe), and so we must stop funding programs that keep them apart from mainstream society.

To suggest that Aboriginal people want to partake in mainstream society is not to suggest that they wish to abandon their cultural heritage---it just means that they recognise the value of living in an interdependent society, as neighbours not as outcasts.

The transition will be tough, it is akin to a refugee crisis on our doorstep, but refugees can be integrated, indeed it is the express purpose of refugee policy to integrate people into the host society. Sitting in a hell hole on a discrete Aboriginal community guarantees a short life. CDEP was the rope that shortened life.