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

I rise to make a contribution on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Debit Card Trial) Bill 2015. It will come as no surprise to anybody that, right up-front, the Greens are opposing this flawed approach to deal with extremely complex, serious issues. This is flawed legislation. It is income management on steroids. We know that income management has not worked. The monitoring and the evaluation processes have clearly showed that. This legislation is being rushed through. The committee was limited in the extent to which we could inquire into this bill because we were forced to meet a very short time line for reporting, to the extent that we could not hear from two of the peak social service organisations in this country: the Australian Council of Social Service and the National Welfare Rights Network. They made very important submissions, bringing up very important issues, and we could not find time to hear from them, because of a technical difficulty on the day. We had to cram them into one session. The phone lines failed so we could not hear from them, and we could not find another time to meet with them. That is appalling, when they are two of the largest organisations in this country that are particularly qualified to talk about this particular issue.

This is a punitive, ideologically driven approach that is not based on evidence. We are in an evidence-free zone here. I will come back to the government's proposed evaluation. A limited amount of information has just been made public, in a letter from Minister Tudge to the ALP. I will come back to the flawed approach that it looks like the government will be undertaking with this so-called trial. This bill is being rushed through. I suspect one of the reasons the government want to rush it through is that, if more communities find out what is going on, they will refuse to take the trial as well. The government hope that, once they get Ceduna up, maybe some other communities will come on board. It is well known around the shops that a number of centres have refused to participate in the trial. I will come back to where we are with East Kimberley later.

I was hoping that, with the change of PM, the new PM would abandon this ideological approach to how we help communities. But no. We have a new PM but the same old policies. The PM, I am sure, must know that this is the 'brainchild' of Andrew Forrest, again based on ideology and not on evidence of what does and does not work. Throughout the committee process, we heard of a number of problems in relation to this bill. These add to the concerns that we already had about income management. The overriding concern here is that these trials are to expand income management. We know that. When the minister was the parliamentary secretary, he made comments about the fact that this would provide further evidence around a possible expansion of income management. So any claims by government that this is not income management are simply not true.

The bill amends the social security legislation to split welfare payments into restricted and unrestricted portions. Basically the trial proposes that 80 per cent of payments received by trial participants will be restricted, with the remaining 20 per cent available to cash. Those of you who know the limited size of the payments of Newstart, for example, will know that that is a very small amount of cash that people are going to be able to receive. The restricted portion will be paid into a specified bank account. At this point, we still do not know who the financial provider of the so-called debit card will be. We are voting on this legislation and we do not know who the financial institution that provides the card will be. I have just read the letter that has been made public, and it does not say it in there. They are in the final stages of negotiation.

This card will not be able to be used to purchase alcohol or gambling products or to withdraw cash. The bank and the government will potentially know what types of purchases you make, because there will be a transfer of information between the bank and the financial institutions. Participants in the trial will be determined by legislative instrument, based on a combination of trial areas, the income support payment an individual is receiving and the class of persons, which we understand may be used to distinguish based on age. At this stage we know that the legislation includes trigger payments for youth allowance, Austudy and carer payments. These are payments to people that are caring for their loved ones, caring for relatives, carrying out important tasks. We are income managing carers—people on disability support payment, parenting payment single, widow pension B and wife pension. The age pension does not trigger this; I am aware of that.

We know there are a number of broad problems with income management. This blanket measure will apply to the trial locations regardless of whether a person struggles with some form of substance abuse—whether it be alcohol or another drug—or gambling. It will not be tailored to meet the differing needs and circumstances of individuals, which we know from all the evidence are absolutely crucial when we are dealing with such things as substance abuse, gambling abuse, and people that are living in difficulty and suffer from disadvantage. We know that individualised approaches are the things that work, not blanket approaches, taking decision making out of their hands or imposing on their dignity. That is one of the things that people have said to me in personal communications—in emails or in talking to me. They have a deep concern about the impact on their dignity that this sort of thing has.

We have strongly opposed income management, I will say right from the start, because we did our due diligence. We looked at the international evidence that showed that income management does not work. You know what? Evaluation after evaluation has in fact shown that to be the case, including the final evaluation of income management. We will continue to oppose this approach, which in fact is punitive and top-down. We spoke about this when the Howard government introduced the Northern Territory intervention in 2007, and we spoke about it in 2010, and we spoke about it in 2011 and 2012, when the Gillard government continued income management.

We do not oppose voluntary income management per se. There is some evidence to suggest that in fact voluntary income management can work, and so we do not oppose voluntary income management. I again point out that Tangentyere Council in Central Australia have been running what they used to call a form of Centrepay, different to Centrelink or Human Services Centrepay, where they had about 2,000 people on their books who, at various times, were in fact doing their own form of money management through Tangentyere Council. That was voluntary.

In the evidence the committee has received from independent researchers, academics and commissioned evaluations, we have had a consistent message, and that is that income management has not been working. A note by the Parliamentary Library said:

The evaluation reports published to date have not provided strong evidence of benefit for those referred under the 'membership of a class' measures—

that is, people who are forced to undertake income management because they are receiving a particular type of income support payment. That is exactly how this trial will apply in the locations it will be rolled out in. In a submission to our inquiry, Eva Cox, adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney, wrote:

… there is no valid evidence that the income management program, in its various form, has improved the alcohol and related problems in the range of communities in the NT where it has been applied.

One of the most important conclusions from a report commissioned by the government—after much prompting, I must add—when they were evaluating income management and the intervention in the Northern Territory was:

…   …   …

The evaluation data does not provide evidence of income management having improved the outcomes that it was intending to have an impact upon.

Through the inquiry process, we have heard from one of the authors of that very extensive evaluation; we understand that it is in fact one of the most in-depth evaluations that we have had on income management yet. That expert confirmed that there was no evidence that income management achieved its goals and that the findings are very relevant to the measure that we are currently debating. That is particularly important because the government has consistently been trying to imply that income management is different to what we are going to do in Ceduna, when quite plainly one of the authors of that evaluation said it is highly relevant to the legislation that we are currently talking about.

This is an issue that we have been campaigning against for a number of years now, and the evidence bears out that income management is an expensive process that hurts the people who actually need help the most. I am deeply concerned that what we are seeing here is an ideologically driven approach that is not based on evidence and that, unfortunately, the other two major parties in this country are supporting income management and this approach without evidence that it works. When this first came in the noughties, maybe they could say there was not any evidence from Australia to show that it would not work, but we do have evidence now. We clearly have evidence now that this does not work.

Let me go to the consultation process for a short time. Mr President, do you want me to keep going and stop at five, or would you like me to finish my speech?