Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

When we left off this just before question time, I was expressing my deep concern that this particular bill is continuing and extending income management, making it much harder for those who are going to get caught up under the vulnerable persons mechanism. This particular piece of legislation also takes away the matched saving provision and also the voluntary income management incentive payment, saying that those payments no longer needed. I very strongly suspect that those people who are receiving the payments—because there are more people who have received the voluntary income management incentive payment—had they been consulted, would not agree with the government that the payments were no longer needed. A number of people have received those payments. As I was saying, not many people have received matched savings payments, because it is so hard to save money when you are on income support. Earlier, I did not want to stop halfway through the evidence that I was going to address on the evaluation of income management. The government should take on board the findings of this evaluation—and this applies to not only this particular issue but also the matter of the healthy welfare card, which will be debated sometime in the near future in this place.

I would like to draw the Senate's attention to the report Evaluating new income management in the Northern Territory: final evaluation report 2014. The findings in this report, while specific to the Northern Territory, can be used to look at other areas where income management is used. This evaluation report says:

Remember that this follows our expansion of income management and is not just about the original 73 communities. It estimates that 1.3 per cent of non-Indigenous people and 34 per cent of Indigenous people aged 15 years and over living in the Northern Territory during the period of this report were subject to income management. The report says:

Most people are on income management for extended periods with many, at the end of 2013, having been income managed for more than six years.

Remember when the Howard government first rolled this out and then when the Rudd government expanded it, income management was about teaching people how to manage their money. They would be put on that for a while and then they would be moved off it. I will come back to that issue again because it gets pointed out in this evaluation quite significantly. The report goes on to say:

Over 60 per cent of Indigenous people currently being income managed were on income management introduced as part of the Northern Territory Emergency Response.

When the process was rolled out, particularly when it was expanded, people could apply for exemptions from income management. The report says:

Few exemptions have been granted and most exemptions have been granted to non-Indigenous people—

surprise, surprise!—

who have an exemption rate of 36.3 per cent compared with 4.9 per cent for Indigenous people.

Indigenous people have both a low rate of application for exemptions and a high rejection rate for those who do apply. Almost all exemptions have been granted for people with dependent children and 0.6 per cent of those without children had gained an exemption.

The program elements designed to build financial capabilities have not been successful. This is from the evaluation of the Northern Territory new income management process. Despite over 29,400 people having been on compulsory measures, only 1,139 people—that is, 3.9 per cent—have completed an approved money management course. That is an old figure. We were given a new figure in Senate estimates earlier in the year. Substantial groups of people subject to income management felt that income management is unfair, embarrassing and discriminatory. The evaluation could not find any substantive evidence of the program having made significant changes relative to its key policy objectives, including changing people's behaviour. The evaluation found that, rather than building capacity and independence, for many the program has acted to make people more dependent on welfare. This is the income management program that is supposed to help people change their lives!

Chapter 9 of the evaluation said that, across a wide range of child health indicators, there is no evidence of any consistent positive change. No evidence! No evidence of any consistent positive change. When the data is taken as a whole it not only suggests that there has been very little progress in addressing many of the substantial disadvantages faced by many people in the Northern Territory. It also suggests that there is no evidence of changes in aggregate outcomes that could plausibly be linked to income management. Are you getting the message here? I am talking to both the government and the opposition here. Both the government and the opposition have facilitated and put in place income management. Where is your evidence base for saying this works?

The conclusion chapter, chapter 15, explains that the aims of income management are to improve the wellbeing of people receiving income support payments and to improve outcomes for themselves, their families, the communities they live in and the Northern Territory as a whole. Whether it achieves these aims is the basis upon which it should primarily be assessed. A wide range of measures related to consumption, financial capability, financial harassment, alcohol and related behaviours, child health, child neglect, development outcomes and school attendance have been considered as part of this evaluation. Some of these are at the individual level and others are more widely across the population. Despite the magnitude of the program, the evaluation does not find any consistent evidence of income management having a successful systematic positive impact. It goes on to talk about how many people have been in the program.

At the household level across a wide range of measures there has been no aggregate improvement in financial wellbeing, although some groups report an improvement in the level of financial harassment they experience. They also report more frequently having to ask others for money and that there has been no reported reduction in harassment at the community level. Again, the evaluation report that the government paid for and which was done by the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales has found that income management has not produced the results. Not long after this report came out, I heard one of the members of the government say: 'That's because we weren't income managing enough. It's because we were only income managing 50 per cent.' Please read the report!

The report also looked at the vulnerable income management provisions targeting vulnerable income management in the Northern Territory. It identified a group of 150 highly vulnerable individuals at the time of the evaluation. In this group, some positive outcomes from income management had been reported. It says:

… the evidence we have collected suggests, that while income management is one of the tools that can assist in harm minimisation for this groups, they also need other supports.

This is the critical bit here:

Furthermore, it is unlikely that income management can effectively build the capabilities of this group, but rather they will need this intervention on an ongoing basis.

They need a whole lot of services for this vulnerable group. Again, for this group, I would argue that you need those wraparound services and you need to be providing and building the other services needed by this group of people. It says that it is unlikely to effectively build the capabilities.

As Senator Moore pointed out, when the Labor Party brought in these measures they were particularly keen to ensure that the support given to people and the assessment of the use of this was done on a case-by-case basis. We spent a long time in estimates and in the committee process detailing how that would work and making sure that people were not arbitrarily put on this particular measure in order to put them on income management, and we were assured that that would happen. The explanatory memorandum for this particular bill now says:

Exemptions from being a vulnerable welfare payment recipient are streamlined to refer solely to a person's rate of welfare payment, rather than also to require subjective assessment of a person's circumstances.

So we are moving completely away from a case-by-case basis, and we are not looking at people's personal circumstances. Then, to make matters worse, the government say, 'This is simply administration.' So a person's case-by-case assessment, a person's personal circumstances, are disregarded in order to simplify administration. This measure will be used to put classes of people who the government considers vulnerable onto income management. As I said in my opening remarks, this is about putting more people on income management, by changing the vulnerable income management measure.

As you can tell, I am very concerned about this bill. I am very concerned about these measures, about income management, about the flawed approach that is being taken to help people and about the fact that this is now going to be extended into the so-called healthy welfare card process with no evidence base. This is the final report. There were reports in the lead-up to this that showed similar sorts of results—that income management was not addressing people's circumstances, and that it was not improving the circumstances of the people that it was targeted at.

This bill also addresses some aged care issues, and I will briefly touch on those. I have contacted some stakeholders in relation to the reduction of the grant payment at the beginning of when people are going into aged care. I have heard that people are concerned and providers in particular are concerned, particularly because this is yet another stress on their budget line items. They have budgeted for a number of days of service and staff provision. The sector are saying that they have real concerns about not being granted seven days for a recipient entering care. Those seven days give providers, residents and their families time to organise the significant move into residential aged care. We heard in the inquiry into the aged care reforms Living Longer Living Better that there is often a little bit of time before people can take up their particular place when they are moving into residential aged care, and it is a huge change for people.

Without the ability to fund this time—either through continuation of the subsidy or through the ability to recoup costs from the recipient—there will be unnecessary pressure on people to push their entry into care. It will also have a compounding effect on the provider's bottom line. They are very concerned about it. The concerns are that it prejudices the resident's ability to access entry to a facility if the resident is not ready to move into the facility immediately when called. Most residents and families need at least four days to a week—sometimes more—to organise their affairs and get ready for this very major step. Providers do not reduce staffing or costs when they are waiting for a new resident and when there is a room or a bed potentially empty. So, when new residents are entering the facility, those staffing and other costs are still there. They are very deeply concerned about the impact of this legislation. Indeed, they think it may in fact lead to giving priority to those residents who are ready to move in promptly, because of the added costs when residents do not. It will make it difficult for residents and families who may need more time to settle affairs and to take this step. We do have concerns about that particular provision.

As I said earlier, we are not so concerned about the other measure—the Aged Care Planning Advisory Committees. I understand that those committees have not met for some time. Because there is so much wrong with this bill, we will be opposing it. We are opposing the income management provisions, and we are opposing the aged care schedule.