Deconstructing Community Development Employment Projects: a "revolution" in indigenous employment policy (1997-2009)

Building on the research of William Sanders (2008; 2010), this thesis argues that a fundamental change in the way the Federal Government approached Indigenous affairs occurred over the period 1997-2009. The systematic way in which the government undermined and then abolished the Community Development Employment Projects scheme (CDEP) supports this contention. The incommensurable nature of the causal stories and problem representations of CDEP that appear in the parliamentary debates of 1977 compared with those from 2007 is used as evidence of an ideological transformation in Indigenous affairs public policy. Although Hall’s (1993) concept of the policy paradigm shift evokes the sense of dramatic change that the Howard years entailed, Streeck and Thelen’s (2005) institutional layering explains the process of change in a more theoretically convincing way. This is demonstrated by the gradual yet revolutionary process in which CDEP was subsumed by Work for the Dole. The original contribution of this thesis is found in its application of theories of the policy process and policy change to the Australian Indigenous affairs context.