It is certainly tempting to understand CDEP as Australia’s earliest experiment in ‘mutual obligation’. I have tried to understand CDEP in such terms, but now I have my doubts. If there is a precedent for mutual obligation in Australian social policy it is not CDEP, but the (more recent) WFTD program introduced by the Howard government in October 1997. CDEP is not the Indigenous equivalent of WFTD.
Why is it misleading to liken CDEP to WFTD? The Spicer Review gave one answer to that question in 1997—an answer from the point of the view of the individual participants:
WFTD participants retain their NSA (New Start Allowance) entitlement and are also paid a $20 per fortnight ‘Community Work Supplement’ to cover work related costs such as transport. They also retain all the ‘extras’ attached to NSA that are at present denied to CDEP participants (e.g. Rent Assistance, taxation rebates, access to advance payments). They are also able to access free child-care whereas this is not an automatic entitlement for CDEP participants (Spicer 1997: 46).
Governments have generally tried to calibrate the entitlements of CDEP and WFTD participants, to give them more equal ‘baskets’ of benefits, in order to oblige the principle of equity of entitlement among citizens. Indeed Spicer advocated such equalisations. However, we do not have to restrict our comparison of WFTD and CDEP to the viewpoint of the individual participants. While the baskets of entitlements may become more equal, there remain some important structural distinctions between WFTD and CDEP.
The essential difference between them, as I understand it, is that WFTD does not require the formation of an ongoing community-based political authority. In a WFTD scheme, the participants’ primary relationship is with DFACS. They continue to receive NSA from the Department (including Centrelink). The host of the WFTD scheme is a relatively unimportant go-between in the relationship between NSA beneficiary and state authority. Although the WFTD host supervises and certifies each individual’s performance of some work, that host’s powers are less than those delegated to the managers of a CDEP scheme. CDEP schemes have more ongoing discretion about what is to be defined as ‘work’, for example.
Those in the WFTD schemes continue to be counted as unemployed. In CDEP, the relationship between participants and management is an employer—employee relationship. That is why the author of the Spicer Review thought it necessary to devote its longest chapter to discussing how best to apply the Workplace Relations Act to CDEPs. There is no employer—employee relationship in the WFTD scheme, and so there is no possibility for industrial relations law and culture to shape the social context in which people ‘work for the dole’.
Both WFTD and CDEP schemes get administrative and capital grants, but the CDEP scheme also gets all the money equivalent to the Jobsearch Allowance and NSA that their participants would receive, and they have some discretion to draw on this money in funding their various expenditures on administration and capital items. This greater financial latitude that is afforded to CDEP structures would be magnified were a government to take up Spicer’s recommendation that CDEP schemes be funded triennially. (It is clear from the contributions to the ‘Community perspectives’ section of this volume that CDEP managers aspire to more authority over the use of their diverse incomes than they have been allowed recently.)
In many places where there is a CDEP scheme—particularly in remote Australia, and more particularly on outstations—CDEP is one of the few administrative structures for that place, and in some cases the only administrative structure. As Spicer put it, ‘in some localities, CDEP often represents the community itself. Without it, some remote communities would simply not exist’ (1997: 1).
To sum up, in WFTD schemes DFACS—Centrelink has delegated far less authority to the host of the scheme than ATSIC has delegated to CDEP organisations. This difference is consistent with a marked cultural difference between the two presiding agencies. Compared with ATSIC, the administrative culture of DFACS is highly centralised; its senior officers are nervous about the possibility of the downward delegation of authority, lest that detract from the Department’s well-deserved reputation for policing the fiscal delinquency of the poor. ATSIC, by contrast, seems to have weathered the storms of fiscal accountability and has secured a government mandate to delegate a great deal of authority to Regional Councils and to such clients of the Regional Councils as CDEP schemes.