There are competing models of mutual obligation. One of them is CDEP; another is WFTD. With such different possible models, ‘mutual obligation’ has the potential to become a key political term whose practical meanings are continually contested. The main issue that would emerge from such a politics of ‘mutual obligation’ would be this: what is the nature of the authority that defines and enforces the obligations of individual welfare recipients? Is that authority a national bureaucracy, seeking to apply the same definitions of recipient compliance all over Australia, with no concessions to cultural or regional difference? Or is that authority a series of local community authorities, each delegated the discretion to define work in locally-relevant terms and each empowered to make its own assessment of the developmental needs of the individuals and communities it serves?

The rise of the Indigenous sector is the most important change in the Australian system of government since World War II. CDEP is one of the most interesting and challenging types of institution within that Indigenous sector. CDEP could be a model for the application of mutual obligation to the entire Australian welfare system, or it might merely continue to be understood as an expedient device for dealing with a temporary ‘Indigenous problem’—helping ‘them’ to catch up with ‘us’. There is a culture of mutual obligation in CDEP, but it is one which Australian governments are unlikely to find attractive. Governments are unlikely to use CDEP as a widely relevant model of mutual obligation because CDEP is also a model of how the demands of the market may be answered by the demands of democracy. For this reason, governments are more likely to try to reduce the autonomy of CDEPs and to regulate their internal culture so that they become more like the ‘work for the dole’ scheme.