Discussions about citizenship and indigenous Australians are characterised by two divergent sets of ideas. On the one hand there are ideas about equality, equal rights and sameness. On the other, there are ideas about difference, indigenous rights and uniqueness. Relationships between these two sets of ideas are inevitably rather complex and may also be changing over time. One common way of analysing discussions of recent years, for example, has been to suggest that an emphasis on equality and equal individual rights for indigenous Australians that prevailed from the 1930s to the 1960s began in the early 1970s to give way to an emphasis on difference and group indigenous rights.

Although there is considerable truth in this analysis, the reality of recent discussions about citizenship and indigenous Australians is in fact more complex. Considerations about indigenous group difference, if not quite indigenous group rights, were already being articulated in the 1960s and before, while considerations about equality and equal individual rights continue to be articulated to the present day. What has, perhaps, changed is the relative prominence given to these two sets of ideas and the precise ways in which they are balanced and reconciled with each other.

This chapter examines how these two broad sets of ideas have been implicated in the development of what has become, in dollar terms, the largest single program of the Commonwealth's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs portfolio, the Community Development Employment Projects (cdep) scheme.