Opinion & Commentary
CDEP is no substitute for local government services
From 1 July 2008, eight new ‘supershires’ have taken over local government in the Northern Territory. Excluded from this arrangement are about twenty remote communities whose homelands associations have vested interests in retaining the status quo. These homeland or outstation communities have relied on the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) program, essentially a form of disguised welfare for Indigenous Australians in remote communities, to provide essential services.
Local governments have supported the continuation of CDEP because it provides a pool of free labour and equipment. But if Indigenous people are doing real work, they should be paid real wages, which bring with them the expectation to deliver real results.
As part of the Intervention, the Northern Territory Government signed a memorandum of understanding with the previous government to deliver municipal and infrastructure services across the Northern Territory. Many CDEP positions supporting government service delivery were to be converted into real full-time positions.
The Rudd Government has admitted that one problem with CDEP is that it has masked the costs of delivering essential services across three levels of government. Although the federal government has reinstated CDEP in the Northern Territory, the process of converting CDEP positions into real jobs is expected to continue. But having homeland communities excluded from the new supershires undermines the reform process and is likely to leave essential service delivery in the hands of CDEP workers.
CDEP has been used to fund administrative positions in local government offices; construction and maintenance of roads, parks, and gardens; rubbish collection; and the operation of water treatment and sewerage plants. Teachers’ aides, health workers, child care and aged-care workers, and carers in women’s and children’s shelters and in drug and alcohol abuse rehabilitation centres, have also been employed on CDEP funding. Yet many of these positions were only notional as the safe houses and aged-care and respite facilities were not provided
Night patrols staffed by CDEP participants are said to lead to lower incarceration rates in remote communities, but this is really another form of cost shifting, reducing the need for policing. Full employment is much more effective in reducing Indigenous crime rates than CDEP. During the last five years, only 8.41% of employed Indigenous men and women had been arrested by police, compared to 24.8% of Indigenous men and women on CDEP.
The Rudd government’s move to place assistant teachers on the Northern Territory Education Department’s payroll was a good move. Jobs in government or local councils should be properly funded and paid for by the relevant government departments or agencies.
But transferring CDEP workers to government payrolls will have to be accompanied by intensive training to be effective. Some 10,000 young men and women in the Northern Territory are functionally illiterate because of the appalling lack of education they have suffered during the past twenty years.
CDEP has hidden this crisis in education, because ‘work’ in most projects does not require participants to know how to read and write, and the training component is almost non-existent. Teachers’ aides on CDEP, for example, are often not fully literate. Even after years of being on CDEP, most participants have not been trained to the skill levels that would allow them to move to mainstream work or have non-Indigenous administrators hand over control of the projects that ‘employ’ them.
This is because instead of fostering skills and developing enterprises, most organisations responsible for CDEP have been primarily interested in perpetuating and increasing their own power. Community factions tend to gain control of CDEP funding and exclude other members of the community from access to it. The program has politicised the awarding of places and wasted considerable taxpayer funds.
CDEP has done nothing to change the fact that most Indigenous settlements do not resemble non-Indigenous townships of a similar size, because they lack the amenities those of us living in mainstream society take for granted. People in homeland or remote communities should have the same access to essential services like power, sewage and rubbish collections as those in urban areas.
CDEP is no substitute for real work, and relying on CDEP to provide basic local government services will continue to relegate these communities to third world conditions.
Sara Hudson is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies, her paper CDEP:Help or Hindrance? was released by CIS this week
