Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Dobell for her very informed contribution to this debate, for exposing us to her experience working in the health field around the community in which she lives and for her perspectives that she was able to outline to us. In 2007, the then Department of Human Services developed what came to be known as the BasicsCard in the Northern Territory. This was the forerunner to the cashless debit card. It was introduced across the Territory to a whole population of people who were welfare recipients or receiving other government payments. It was not targeted. It was ham-fisted. It did not achieve the outcomes that it was purported to achieve. It stigmatised people and, in my view, had a very negative impact on many, many people. I must say that there were some who thought it had some positive elements to it, particularly in terms of allowing older people to control their incomes and not have cash in their hand and be exposed to 'humbugging', which means they would lose that money.

But the universal application of this measure, in my view, has had a detrimental impact on the broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community—or, in this case, the Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. We see people lining up in a store with a BasicsCard and being stigmatised by that very thing. Many of these people were quite capable of managing their own incomes. They had been using the Centrepay system in the Department of Social Security to manage payments. There were some, of course, who require their income to be managed because of the way they deal with alcohol and other drugs or other substances and because of the need to protect their family and make sure there was sufficient food on the table. But that's a small minority of people. We are here debating the cashless debit card. In my view it suffers largely from the same things. In terms of its universal application, I recall very vividly discussions about whether the communities of Ceduna and Kununurra were supportive of this trial. I made the point that whilst significant organisational leadership might be in support of a particular trial, that did not mean their broader membership or, indeed, community members would be so supportive. What has come to pass and has now been exposed, certainly in the case of Kununurra, is that large sections of the community were not supportive of the trial, and it remains without support in their community.

Now I think I understand the objective of this measure. Its purpose is to provide to people who are, as we say, in difficult circumstances the capacity to be able to manage their lives and look after their families. Many do that anyway. Of course, the key issue around much of this is to do with the abuse of alcohol and other substances and the failure of adults in their responsibility to ensure that the people in their care are properly looked after, have a safe place to live and have food on the table. I understand totally that in those examples there could be a need, and perhaps there is a need in many cases, for people to have their income managed in a way which safeguards the interests of their families—but not for a whole population. If this were a targeted scheme, it would have greater merit. I have no objection in principle to the idea of a debit card—none at all—if it provides people with the capacity to manage their own income. But to say to people they can have, say, only $30 cash out of every $100 provides an enormous limitation on their capacity and ability to make choices about their own lives. It is not something which the broader community would tolerate, and I don't think we should expect Aboriginal people in these communities to tolerate it.

This proposal to extend the debit card to other locations is based on the false premise that this debit card has achieved the objectives for which it was developed. We now know that is not the case. We know that there was an evaluation done by ORIMA. That evaluation was itself flawed and was seen to be flawed by others who have far more experience in these matters than I. They made it very clear that the process of this review was very dramatically flawed. I refer to the Library's wonderful piece of work on this in the Bills Digest. On the next to last page, it refers to comments by Janet Hunt of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at ANU in which she explains scepticism about claims that the trials had been a success, citing the Prime Minister's claim that there has been a massive reduction in drug and alcohol abuse and violence. Dr Hunt writes:

Someone needs to tell them [Minister Tudge and the Prime Minister] that the report does not say that. Indeed, the authors qualify a number of their apparently positive findings with various caveats, but, at the same time, the evaluation itself has serious flaws, so even these findings are contestable.

And indeed they are. It would be wrong to believe that the research itself was not contestable and that there were no major concerns about it. There were major concerns, for example, around the lack of baseline information and assessment prior to the establishment of this trial. There was no survey of potential CDC participants—the debit card recipients—to assess their usage of alcohol and drugs or the extent of their gambling. This did not occur until some months after participants had been on the card. There was never, in the later analysis, a breakdown of the income support payment categories among people interviewed, so no-one has any idea whether the card is good for some groups of recipients and not for others.

This is a significant shortcoming of the evaluation. This is not the fault of ORIMA, the researchers, but is, of course, the fault of the government, who didn't actually bother to commission an evaluation of the trial prior to the trial commencing, to allow it to develop the baseline data that would be required to make a successful evaluation of whether the trial was in fact successful.

The most significant findings of the evaluation produced by ORIMA were that, amongst families, 27 per cent said the trial had made their family better while, conversely, 30 per cent said it had made their families worse off. Across participants interviewed, 22 per cent said it had made their lives better and 49 per cent said it had made their lives worse. These changes were fairly consistent across the two trial sites. This is according to ORIMA.

Alternatively, if you reinterpret the data, Dr Hunt's evidence concludes that for just 77 per cent of participants the trial had been of no positive impact. The indefinite extension of the cashless debit card in the East Kimberley and Ceduna was, as Dr Hunt provides, a very premature decision and could be a mistake that may lead to poor public policy and bad public expenditure.

We won't be supporting the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Cashless Debit Card) Bill 2017 in this chamber. What we've done is respond now to the 172 submissions that were received during the Senate inquiry process, which concurred that the experience of community members and services in the trial region was mostly negative, that the quantitative data contained within the ORIMA evaluation lacked rigour and about the government's unwillingness to appropriately assess and invest in alternatives—and that's clear. The government's got in its mind's eye that this is the only possible thing it can do.

I won't go through all those people in the Aboriginal communities who have expressed their opposition, but I will refer to just a couple. The Ceduna Koonibba Aboriginal Health Service Aboriginal Corporation and the Tullawon Aboriginal Health Service have made clear their concerns, particularly around the lack of resourcing for wraparound services to deal with people who have alcohol and other drug dependency issues and the opportunities that need to be gained by those communities. The Aboriginal Health Council of Western Australia report that they have concerns about it. One of the really key points here is that they say:

We heard that at the time of the Card's proposed introduction in 2016, consultation was targeted to a select few in the community. Most of those impacted by the Card only became aware of their participation through the media once it was announced. This is despite the Government promoting at the time, that it had engaged in widespread consultation.

As I said earlier, that's a view I expressed at the time, and I think now it's been demonstrated that I was absolutely correct. I won't go through the other criticisms because there are too many of them. If people have an interest, I encourage them to refer to the submissions made to the Senate inquiry.

I want to just emphasise that it seems to me that this is a poor way of making public policy, without doing the appropriate consultation and providing the capacity for the proper research to be done at the time of the development of the program. But, more importantly, in many parts this is largely around issues to do with harm reduction and family violence. We know that there is a real issue around those questions. But, in one of the submissions made by the Aboriginal Health Council of Western Australia, they said:

… we have heard more recent reports of concerning flow-on effects since the Card has been introduced. These include, but are not limited to: increases in elder abuse; reports of child prostitution; and, non-cash services (such as Taxi's) charging increased fees in return for cash. It is clear that there are many ways around the Card, and these are being exploited to the detriment of those most vulnerable.

The other area that I briefly want to touch upon is the measures being adopted, not universally, around alcohol and other harm reduction. It seems to me that the principal issue, and the cause of most of this strife, is access to alcohol and gambling. What we don't have is a uniform approach to restricting alcohol access in many communities or a capacity for there to be, for example, changes to the taxation treatment of alcohol to make it less attractive for people. That can be done. There's plenty of work which has been done by preventive health agencies across this country advocating changes to the tax regime on alcohol. We don't need the plethora of outlets that are available in most remote communities across Australia, and we do need to limit access to alcohol to many people—that's clear. It's not hard to do; it's just a matter of will. It needs cooperation across jurisdictions so that there are common approaches to the way in which we deal with these issues. That, to me, is far more important in the first instance than handing out a cashless debit card. There might be some merit in it in the context of particular groups of people, but not as it has so far been universally applied. I've got particular concerns, as I've expressed. I come from the experience of the introduction of the BasicsCard in the Northern Territory. I've seen the negative outcomes of this, and now I have seen the negative outcomes of the cashless debit card.

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