CDEP schemes make up an important component of the Indigenous sector. In this paper I want to highlight CDEP as a program of political development. Any CDEP scheme can be considered as an instance of Indigenous political authority. It is easy to ‘forget’ that CDEPs are political institutions whose aims include perpetuating and increasing their own empowerment. The ‘labour market’ focus of so much of the government effort to improve Indigenous welfare invites us to consider the outcomes of CDEP as either ‘employment outcomes’ or ‘non-labour market outcomes’ (ATSIC Office of Evaluation and Audit (ATSICOEA) 1997: i). Another policy publication lists the outcomes of CDEP under the headings ‘Indigenous employment situation’ and ‘community development, social and cultural outcomes’ (Spicer 1997: contents page). I suggest that the so-called ‘non-labour market outcomes’ and ‘community development, social and cultural outcomes’ of CDEP include the ‘political’ empowerment of Indigenous participants in CDEPs, and that this should be explicitly stated.

A CDEP scheme embodies a form of Indigenous authority, in three ways. First, CDEP schemes derive authority from the fact that the Commonwealth government endows them with money, and delegates to each scheme a great deal of discretion about how that money is to be spent. That discretion is not unlimited. The Commonwealth’s grant of money is conditional on each CDEP scheme addressing certain policy objectives. However, these objectives are multiple, and it would be rather difficult to demonstrate that a CDEP scheme is not addressing any of the stated objectives of Commonwealth government policy. Thus although CDEP schemes derive their authority from the government giving them money, they have a high degree of autonomy. One of the most important expressions of that autonomy is that CDEPs can define ‘work’. When ATSIC’s Office of Evaluation and Audit (OEA) examined the range of definitions of ‘work’ used in urban CDEPs, it found that about three out of every five CDEPs in their survey paid people for ‘home duties’. Across 53 CDEP schemes, 7 per cent of participants had their home duties recognised, and paid, as ‘work’ (ATSICOEA 1997: 17).

Second, the CDEP scheme exercises authority over the work-time of its participants. However, a CDEP scheme is unusual when compared with other ‘bosses’ who have authority over ‘workers’; CDEP workers are, in some respects, like shareholders in the CDEP. Because CDEPs are community-based organisations, their managers are not only bosses over the participants, they are also, to some degree, the employees or servants of the scheme’s participants.

Let me illustrate my first two points with some research findings. In 1997 ATSIC’s OEA surveyed 53 coordinators of urban CDEPs. The OEA asked coordinators what aspects of CDEP were most in need of improvement. Interestingly, they ranked ‘participant motivation’ well behind ‘project funding’, ‘training’, ‘paper work/redtape’, and ‘planning’ (ATSICOEA 1997: 20). In other words, the coordinators were finding more difficulties in managing their relationship with ATSIC and other agencies than their relationship with participants. When the OEA asked about the problem of ‘participant motivation’, the coordinators offered a range of suggestions:

This list of motivational strategies draws attention to two features of the political authority of CDEPs: the importance of sufficient autonomy, so that CDEPs can define work in a way that takes seriously participants’ interests and needs, and the ‘industrial democracy’ factor—the wisdom, as managers see it, of involving participants in decision making.

The third and final way in which I see CDEP schemes as a form of Indigenous political authority, is that by being able to direct the collective working capacity of participants towards certain ends, the CDEP scheme becomes an effective player in the local political scene. That is, a CDEP scheme forms relationships with other organisations, whether they be other Indigenous organisations in the region, or the local shire or municipal council, or State or Territory and Commonwealth agencies that have responsibilities in the area. Sometimes these relationships take the form of contracts for the CDEP scheme to deliver a service. However, not all the significant relationships between CDEP schemes and other regional players are contracts of service. Sometimes CDEPs are effectively powerful simply because they deliver a service that no government agency has provided. (Although this is often seen as an unfair imposition on over-stretched CDEPs—see Bartlett, Ch. 20 and Kean, Ch. 21 of this volume— it is also a source of their bargaining power—see Nicholas, Ch.25, this volume.) Another reason a CDEP scheme may be a political player is because its leaders—its governing Board or Council and its senior managers—include some of the most experienced and hard-working Indigenous leaders in that region (see Lewis, Ch. 30, this volume). A CDEP scheme may be part of a power base for the emergence of a regional Indigenous leadership.

In making these three points about CDEPs as structures of Indigenous political authority, I am not saying anything new. However, it is important to make these political dimensions of CDEP explicit, because in the CDEP policy literature this political dimension tends to be taken for granted. For example, the Spicer Review (1997) remarked that CDEP ‘can be described as an employment program, a community development program, and enterprise development program, a diversionary program, a skills development and work preparation program and/or a cultural maintenance program’ (Spicer 1997: 24). I would like to add ‘political development program’ to that list of possibilities. Spicer might concur, because his very next sentence implies ‘political development’ without actually using that phrase: ‘As CDEPs have the ability to determine their own objectives, and the manner in which they are achieved, features of all these programs can exist in any one community’ (Spicer 1997: 24, emphasis added).

Spicer’s phrase ‘community development’ might be interpreted to include ‘political development’. However, the phrase ‘community development’ can mean so many different things to different people; any positive change in people’s lives, such as a fall in alcohol consumption, can be counted as ‘community development’. I want to promote ‘political development’ as an essential part of the vocabulary with which we discuss CDEP so that we can appreciate CDEP as one of the most significant steps ever taken in this country towards Indigenous self determination. I will later suggest a way to understand ‘community development’ in the context of CDEP.