Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Grey for his question. As he notes, this issue is of great importance to his electorate because the proposed trial site is to be centred on Ceduna. The member asked about the progress of the healthy welfare card, or the healthy debit card as it has become known. I will answer his question in two parts. First, I note the organisational processes that have brought us to this point—the point at which the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Debit Card Trial) Bill is presently in the Senate. Second, I will look at the procedural projects that we have before the Senate in terms of that debit card trial bill. What has got us to this point of progress? It is the recognition of a huge problem—an entrenched problem, particularly in Indigenous communities—and of the intense need to do something and try a new approach, combined with the incredible efforts of the assistant minister, the federal member for Aston. The last two years of the federal member for Aston's life have been devoted to getting this bill into the Senate. Perhaps the starting point for that process was the Forrest review. The Forrest review said simply this: we needed to develop a healthy welfare card and to program the card to block the issue of cash and the purchase of alcohol.

The statistical evidence that something new needs to be done, that a new approach needs to be trialled, is absolutely overwhelming. There have been 3,000 deaths in Australia from alcohol related incidents and 65,000 hospitalisations each year. The Indigenous community suffers these problems particularly acutely. Those hospitalisation rates are four times greater for Indigenous communities. All of us here have witnessed these types of problems in various parts of Australia. As a crown prosecutor I saw them—I saw unfathomable misery caused by welfare payments being excessively used for the purchase of alcohol. The member for Aston, the assistant minister, has taken a simple recommendation and developed a very sophisticated system—a simple card, which you will all see soon, and an arrangement under which 80 per cent of an individual's welfare payments will be directed to that card. Cash withdrawals from that 80 per cent will be prohibited. The card will work anywhere, any time, for the purchase of anything except at liquor stores and gambling outlets.

The second part of the question asked where we are at. We have a bill before the Senate. A committee has essentially recommended the passage of the bill. In this parliament's wake we have decades of failure to address this problem. So we have something new before the Senate and an assistant minister who has given two years of his life to this issue—and we only have one group in this parliament immutably opposed, and that is the Australian Greens. The Ceduna community groups came here to talk to us but the Greens refused to meet with them—they absolutely refused to meet with them. They came here to tell us that they needed something new, and they were met with a refusal by the Greens to meet with them. (Time expired)

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