There are two simple ideas flagged in the title to this paper. The first is that the first 20 years of the CDEP scheme, from 1977 to 1997, were very clearly good years. From its tentative beginnings in just a few communities, the CDEP scheme proved enormously popular both with Indigenous communities and with governments. Over the years the scheme grew accordingly; indeed, it became the largest single program in the Commonwealth Indigenous affairs budget.

The second idea is that the CDEP scheme has always been a fairly delicate balancing act. It arose out of the extension of social security rights to Indigenous Australians and it has, ever since, tried to balance those rights with other policy imperatives—such as the desire to encourage employment, enterprise and community development.

In current debates about the Indigenous welfare economy, and how it might be improved or even surpassed, I do not think the CDEP scheme has been given enough attention. The scheme shows us what is possible in improving the Indigenous welfare economy and it also shows us some of the complex and delicate balances that have to be struck in order to realise these possibilities.

In this paper, I focus on some of those complex and delicate balances and how they continue to require adjustment, even after 20 good years for the CDEP scheme. Ultimately I want to argue that the reforms of the last two or three years have been moving the CDEP scheme in two quite different directions at once—towards the social security system on the one hand and towards greater employment outcomes on the other. I do not have a strong sense yet of whether this is, overall, a good or bad thing. My main objective, at this stage, is simply to try to understand why and how it is occurring. I will set the scene with a little bit of policy history, from the 1970s to the early 1990s.