Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry, Senator, I was not trying to draw the direct link between income management and some of those outcomes per se. I was talking about the suite of measures that have been implemented. I am not trying to overstate linkages, but I suppose we would say income management has allowed a sense of settling in the community, with better practices and more security, and that those things will flow on—and are flowing on—into issues such as better nutrition which will feed into the longer term health outcomes. But I do not want to overstate that. We say this is a suite of measures. Some are from the original intervention legislation we have abandoned which we thought to be too harsh and not delivering results. But we think income management is an important part of these measures and, as we have discussed, we are trialling it in other places in Australia, trying to assist in communities where there are really difficult ingrained social issues that income management can assist to address.