All major political parties have endorsed, in general terms, the principle of mutual obligation. However, we are still in the early days of the development of that principle into operational social policy programs. Much of our comment about the forms to be taken by ‘mutual obligation’ must remain speculative. My speculation is that it is unlikely that CDEP will be a general precedent for ‘mutual obligation’ which, in Australia, is likely to become a punitive administration of social security entitlements, a raising of the bar of eligibility testing. According to the DFACS 1998–99 Annual Report, out of 72–96 000 people estimated to fall under the Department’s mutual obligation requirement, 53 000 signed up to mutual obligation (not necessarily in WFTD schemes) and 23 000 were breached (in 1998–99) for not satisfying their mutual obligation requirements (DFACS 1999: 121). Certainly ‘mutual obligation’ provides new grounds for breaching.
If the state were to make CDEP its model for ‘mutual obligation’, it would have to foster the formation of CDEP-like community authorities all over Australia, and then it would have to delegate considerable powers to those entities. There is nothing in the statements made by either side of politics that promises such a transformation of Australian social policy. From the point of view of political elites who favour market solutions to problems of human survival, CDEP is not a model, but an exception—possibly an embarrassing or even dangerous exception. CDEP is an infringement on the privilege of private investors to define the conditions of material wellbeing through the market place. CDEP does more than compensate for the market’s failure to provide jobs where Indigenous people live, it also throws into question the power of the market to define the nature and intensity of work. To illustrate this point, let us look at some recent reviews of CDEP.
I suggest that the term ‘community’ in CDEP can best be understood as a particular industrial relations culture. Participants in CDEPs are not like employees of a normal Australian employer. Earlier I likened CDEP participants to shareholders. Looking at it another way, the relationships within a CDEP are also a bit like the relationships among members of a mutual association. Ultimately, we must try to see each CDEP in its own terms, for a CDEP industrial framework seems nevertheless to be evolving. Spicer’s Monash University industrial relations consultant posed the question: would it be better for CDEP management and participants to formalise their relationship as an Australian Workplace Agreement (AWA) or as a Certified Agreement (CA)?
After surveying a sample of CDEP managers, the consultant concluded that AWAs were inappropriate. For several reasons, it would be neither practical nor consistent with the communal aspirations of CDEPs to govern industrial relations through a series of individual contracts between management and participant. The ‘values and principles’ of AWAs are ‘contrary to CDEP social or community development objectives’ (Spicer 1997: 129). Even if all the individual contracts within a CDEP were written in the same terms, the consultant concluded, there was reason to doubt that CDEP managers had the skills or the inclination to use AWAs. Though CDEP managers did deal with their participants as individuals, they told the consultant that they preferred to keep such individual case-management on a purely informal basis. The managers’ reported reasons for preferring certified agreements—whether negotiated with a union or not—are very interesting, and pertinent to the theme of this paper. The managers told the consultant that they thought it important that all CDEP personnel—managers and participants alike—were bound by an agreed set of rules, in order to discourage favouritism and to establish, in the eyes of all, the fairness and impartiality of the CDEP, and in order to bind managers and participants to the expressed wishes of the host community (Spicer 1997: 134–5).
Thus, the main value in certified agreements for CDEPs appear to lie in potential benefits derived from having a self-determined level of formalisation of rules and regulations governing participation in CDEP. In comparison with AWAs, certified agreements were also seen as far more consistent with self determination and various consultative approaches to CDEP decision-making in operation at CDEP programs (Spicer 1997: 136).
Let me underline two points that emerge from the work of Spicer’s Monash University industrial relations consultant.
The managers conceived of themselves as working according to a community mandate. (This was not the only constraint that they were aware of, of course. They remarked also on the way that conditions of funding set a framework for their supervision.) The notion of a community mandate is clearly important in distinguishing CDEPs from other enterprises with which it might be compared. It serves as another reminder that CDEPs are structures of political authority.
The managers, at least as reported by the Monash consultant, expressed their need for a set of rules that made their authority legitimate in the light of what they see as the participants’ expectations.
These insights into the industrial relations culture of CDEPs are important because they help us to come to an understanding of that otherwise impossibly vague term ‘community development’. The ‘community’ that CDEP constructs can be understood in quite specific terms as a set of negotiated understandings about what counts as work, what counts as effort, and what obligations bind ‘management’ and participants.