Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Cashless Debit Card) Bill 2017. What was the purpose and what is the purpose of the cashless debit card trials? In principle it sounds encouraging: it was designed to assist people to make positive choices in the spending of Centrelink payments and to limit the amount of discretionary spending on alcohol, cigarettes and gambling. It's critical that we acknowledge in this place that not everybody on Centrelink payments spends money on alcohol, tobacco, pokies or gambling, but it's also important to acknowledge that every person in a trial site, even if they are on Newstart or youth allowance, is affected by this trial.

Isolated sites were chosen so that thorough research could be undertaken to determine whether the implementation of the cashless debit card had an overall positive or negative effect on a community. Isolated communities were chosen so that it would be easier to identify the benefits or unintended consequences of the trial.

The great challenge with this legislation is that, at this point in time, we do not know if the cashless welfare card is, indeed, helping the communities where it is currently on trial. We do not have the conclusive evidence. And now before us we have a bill to extend the cashless welfare card at its current sites, and for new sites in the Western Australian Goldfields and for Queensland. I acknowledge that with the Western Australian Goldfields the government already has some legislative power to do that site but this bill would provide for the extension to places such as Queensland.

I think it's important to point out this is an incredibly expensive trial. It is well purported to be so, but I actually have no idea of the cost as this has not been disclosed. Media reports state that the cost of each Indue card used by Centrelink recipients costs approximately $10,000 each to manage. If that is so, if those figures are correct, this is an incredibly expensive trial, although I do acknowledge that the minister has advised me that when it's in large numbers, obviously, the cost goes down.

We do not yet have a clear determination on whether the card actually benefits participants and communities and it is an incredibly expensive experiment to continue, let alone to expand.

On behalf of NXT, I have a number of recommendations that I would like the government to consider. Firstly, that the government should only ever operate the cashless debit credit card trials in communities where there is support—genuine social licence—to instigate those trials as gauged by broad community consultation and not just the support of a few prominent community leaders. This support must also be forthcoming from the people in the community, some of whom would be recipients of the card.

Secondly, all trials must always be properly supported with wraparound services—namely, all of the support programs and services that can augment and leverage any positive outcomes that the trial may possibly produce. The cashless debit card will not change behaviours of participants itself. There must be a network of social services to support the participant to change their behaviour, whether it relates to alcohol addiction, gambling addiction or another damaging behaviour.

Thirdly, and most importantly, before you roll out the card to any new communities beyond those that are currently legislatively available to the government, you must have conclusive evidence that the card is working effectively and these conclusions must come from independent evaluations.

However, I and the Nick Xenophon Team cannot support the cashless debit card that seeks to expand to trial sites beyond the legislative power the government has until we have the conclusive determination that the card is helping people rather than hurting the communities in which it operates. I do not believe we will truly know how successful the trials have been until much more data is collected, especially as the research findings and community response from the trials to date have been so mixed.

In my following comments, I'm thankful to the published work of Dr Janet Hunt of the Australian National University, who I occasionally quote, and the trial evaluation reports from Orima Research. Whilst I note that the evaluation reports indicate the trial has been effective in reducing alcohol consumption and gambling at both trial sites, these findings have been based predominantly on self-reported data for which we can reasonably expect survey respondents would seek to present themselves in the best possible light. In any case, I note that 77 per cent of participants reported no positive impact of the trial, with 43 per cent reporting that they'd had no change in their behaviour since the trial began and 34 per cent reporting that they did not engage in alcohol consumption, illegal drug use or gambling prior to the trial in any case.

The data we have is also plagued with problems of correlation versus causation. In September 2015 Ceduna introduced alcohol restrictions independently of the trial and the East Kimberley region introduced additional takeaway alcohol management from December 2015. Therefore, unless some complex and rigorous regression analysis is undertaken, it is hard to know whether it was the trial or something else entirely that was responsible for any of the purported positive outcomes.

However, there are a few pieces of more conclusive data. For example, in the 12 months after the Ceduna trial started, there was a 12 per cent reduction in poker machine revenue in Ceduna and the surrounding local government areas. Yet, even here, I note that there was no such equivalent data reported, assuming it was even collected, in the East Kimberley region trial site. So, again, it's hard to know whether the trials are responsible for any reduction in poker machine revenue or there was some other factor entirely at play.

Further, I note that there has been no conclusive finding that there has been a reduction in violence or crime at the trial sites. There has been no clear connection established between participants' reports that they have reduced their gambling and alcohol consumption and any purported reduction in violence and crime. I recognise that community perceptions have indicated a decrease in violence and crime, yet again there's no hard data to confirm these perceptions.

I was also concerned to see that the use of methamphetamines, also known as ice, had significantly heightened among stakeholders from the initial condition stage of the research compared to wave 1 of the research, published six months later. I'm beginning to feel like a broken record here, but, yet again, without comprehensive data collection, it's hard to know whether the cashless debit card trial has increased, decreased or had no effect upon methamphetamine use.

Yet the most concerning finding, I believe, was that only 27 per cent of family members said that the trial had made their family lives better, and 37 per cent said it made them worse. Across participants interviewed, 22 per cent said it had made their lives better, but almost half said that it had made their lives worse. These are really disturbing results. It's one thing to have participants dislike the effects of the card upon their life and their financial freedom but another thing entirely for their families to say the card has made the lives of their loved ones and themselves worse.

In summary, the data seeking to track the outcomes of the trial are less than robust, and the data surrounding the secondary social and economic impacts are even less robust. The clear lesson here is that real longitudinal data need to be collected, and more effectively collected, before we can make any final conclusions about the efficacy of the cashless debit card. I strongly urge the government to address these issues if it seeks to continue the existing trials. We also need to look at homelessness. We need to look at education and connection to education. All of this impacts upon a community, and all of this would be impacted upon by the cashless debit card.

I do recognise that 12 months is too short a period for conclusive outcomes and impacts to be fully apparent. It is for that reason that NXT would support the bill to continue, with a limited extension for a 12-month period in its existing trial sites. This is supposed to be a trial, and I want to make it very clear to government that this is not ongoing, indefinite support of the existing sites. We need to get the data, and we need to get this right. However, I reiterate that the Nick Xenophon Team cannot support this bill in its current form until it can be conclusively determined with solid evidence that the cashless debit card is actually effective.

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