This submission was prepared in response to the Northern Territory Government's Review of Community Development Employment Program discussion paper. The submission, focusing mainly on CAEPR research findings produced since 1990, provides evidence-based research findings that the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) scheme is an important and beneficial program for Northern Territory Aboriginal communities and individuals.

It begins with examples from debates over the inclusion of Aboriginal people in the income security system in the 1960s and 1970s, and then explores Noel Pearson's contributions on this topic in the early 2000s, with his advocacy of a less 'passive' and responsibility-based welfare system. It notes ultimately how Pearson’s contributions revisit difference arguments...

Through more contemporary demographic analysis, and some minor spatial analysis, the paper also explores the different relationships of these three types of local governments to Indigenous interests. Two important pieces of background information are that roughly one-quarter of the Northern Territory’s population of 200,000 is Aboriginal and that outside the major urban areas this proportion...

The Northern Territory has three categories of local government: municipal, community government and association councils. Will Sanders explores the historical development of these three categories, as well as their different relationships to Indigenous interests. The financial positions of the three types of local government are examined in relation to the very different service roles they...

In late 2005 Bill Gray and Will Sanders interviewed eleven members of the Commonwealth government’s Secretaries Group on Indigenous Affairs about their experiences of the new arrangements in Indigenous affairs since July 2004. This paper reports their findings on issues ranging from the Ministerial Taskforce and the National Indigenous Council to Indigenous Coordination Centres and...