Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to the debate on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Debit Card Trial) Bill 2015. A number of senators have made reference to a recommendation which emerged from Mr Andrew Forrest's review of Indigenous jobs and training. What is probably not well known about Mr Andrew Forrest is that he goes a little bit further than giving advice to government. He employs Indigenous workers—13 per cent of his workforce are Indigenous. He contracts over a billion dollars worth of work per annum to Indigenous companies which employ 40 per cent Indigenous workforces. He goes further than just giving advice.

I have visited his employment centre in Roebourne, where he has a very deep connection. I think that was the genesis of his experience, where children were wandering the streets late at night, hungry and sometimes affected by alcohol and drugs. He decided to do something. What he did is quite remarkable and is worth repeating ad infinitum in this chamber. He actually employs Indigenous people. He looks at the barriers to employment, whether they are no licence or lack of literacy or numeracy, and he addresses, identifies and provides training for them. If they pass the vocational education and training course, he gives them a job, I think on $117,000 a year fly-in fly-out from any of his remarkable mines in Western Australia where he is producing 165 million tonnes of iron ore. He is not just giving advice to government or to communities; he is actually walking the walk and doing the things that will make a difference.

When you move through Port Augusta, Port Pirie, Whyalla, Elliston and over to Ceduna, as I did recently, most of the local mayors are quite open about the connection Indigenous communities have with the country and they are well aware in some cases of the awful history, but not too many of them offer employment. There are not too many who are taking the step Andrew Forrest has taken and saying, 'I will have 10 per cent of this council workforce cutting the grass, emptying the garbage and doing whatever who are Indigenous.' In fact, some very wealthy communities over there employ no Indigenous people. I do not know why that is. I just make that observation.

When Mr Forrest gives the Australian community advice, backing up that advice are his actions. He is moving people from welfare dependency into good, well-paying jobs. I met grandmothers who had returned to work in the stores. I met a young Indigenous person who said that their ambition was to buy a house. You need a senator's wage to buy a house in Perth, but he was not frightened of it. He was saving to do that. The reality is that these measures are eminently defendable, but we do need children to get fed and clothed and to go to school. We need a safe environment where they can be kept in a measure of comfort and experience the normality of growing up in Australia, where they can kick a football, go home and have a jam sandwich or a Vegemite sandwich and be looked after. We know that in some of these communities alcoholism, drug addiction, petrol sniffing and glue sniffing, substance abuse has torn all that asunder.

I take particular note of Senator Williams' contribution because I, too, can go back to the late 60s in the Northern Territory, to places where Indigenous people could get a drink but it was usually in a bar separate from the white person. There were plenty of stockmen would have had good jobs

It is probably three or four weeks work now and the rest of the time is drinking. That is the awful reality in some of these outback communities. I no longer stop in Tennant Creek when I am driving through, as it depresses me so much. If you go to the Goldfields Hotel it is amazing how a licensee can actually go to sleep at night with the obvious, almost death in front of you, drink-till-you-drop culture in some of these places. Anyway, I do not want to get too carried away on those issues.

I did visit Ceduna, and I had a very agreeable meeting with the local mayor—who, I might add, had checked with the local member to make sure it was okay to talk to me. Apparently I passed the test and he did speak to me. He said that they had sat down and worked it all out; that they had sat down with a number of groups in the community, and this was a community driven position. I was encouraged by that. I asked who the main opposition was. The main opposition would not be all that hard to find. It is a grand premises adjacent to the beachfront that provides alcohol and gaming for the community. According to the local mayor, there was some stern talking and they had to sit down and really knuckle it out.

They want a community that is attractive to tourists. It is the start of the tourist trail through to Port Lincoln. They were getting a substantial number of tourists but, according to some of the press reports, the behaviour of some people was detrimental to growing that sector. I must stress that the local mayor had a not unusual view in South Australia that the local paper was not reporting things accurately and that the local paper had reported things that were quite ancient and unproven as fact—as if they had happened the day before. When he tried to address that with the Advertiser they basically did a double-up on the story of inaccuracy and virtually canned his community a bit more. So he had a ban on them. He was not going to talk to them anymore. But he was very, very insistent that the community was getting together with a view that they could make things better, and I fully support that.

I do however think that there are risks with all of this. If it is not capped by a genuine attempt to provide employment, a genuine attempt to move people, all we will end up with is some sober people without hope. I am not sure that is what we are trying to achieve here. We do know that there is mineral exploration and drilling going off in the Great Australian Bight, 300 kilometres off the coast. We know that the airport is receiving additional traffic numbers and may well be upgraded. If there is a substantial find in the area, there may well be a boom in Ceduna's economic activity. But it is important that people who live there, and have always lived there, get to share in that. I do not see any connectivity at the moment between the obvious need to have people sober and feeding their children and how we move to the next stage, which is to take advantage of that situation and get them into useful paid employment.

Clearly, there are a number of other issues. I want to go through some correspondence I received from a constituent in the area. I do not want to mention his name, but I think it is fairly insightful that we place on the record that not all of these trials are going to be suitable. This person has a fairly straightforward position. He is 50 years old, of working age, and receives a disability support pension. He has been told that his payments will be part of the mandatory income management package being rolled out. He says:

I was employed and payed taxes for most of my working life. I have a mortgage and 3 children in school. My health gave out a few years ago and I have been on a disability support pension since. I have COPD with possible Sarcoids and suffer severe back pain and nerve damage issues due to arthritis and disc damage from the physically demanding and heavy work I used to do to earn my living. These sicknesses are further complicated by the early stages of Chronic Kidney disease.

This person is on a disability support pension—through no fault of his own, I suppose—and is now in the situation where he is subject to this trial of 20 per cent cash and 80 per cent on goods. The police or social services have never attended his residence due to domestic violence, noise or unruly behaviour. He values his peace and privacy and considers his neighbours and their rights to the same things, and he tries to instil those values in his children. He goes on at length to say that he is managing his disability pension payment well and managing a mortgage and that the kids are in school and the school fees are paid—all of the normal things that a prudent person can manage.

As part of this trial he will have reduced flexibility. He makes a couple of good points. He is a thrifty person and he says he buys his gear at the op shop whenever he can but that op shops do not have EFTPOS facilities. I am not really sure about that, but that is what I am told—op shops do not have EFTPOS facilities. So, if he is prudent and wants to get some second-hand clothes from the Save the Children shop or United Mission or whatever it may be, these businesses do not have EFTPOS facilities; they deal in cash. He also says:

We will no longer be able to take advantage of the sharp practice of many local traders who will give substantial discounts to non credit or eftpos card transactions.

I am not familiar with that either, but these are matters that he has raised with me. This person says that he will no longer be able to purchase foodstuffs direct from growers markets or producers, which will drive up his cost of living. He has a long list of issues.

I hasten to say that, on 20 August, I provided this information to the Hon. Scott Morrison's office, and I am awaiting a reply. The reality is that this particular person is not someone we are out to try to income manage or to quarantine payments for. When we get an answer from the minister's office it may well be that there is a local committee that can look at his particular circumstances and vary his arrangements. However, he for one is not very happy.

So to say it is unanimous in the area is probably a long bow to draw. I think there is some evidence on the public record that some of the Indigenous women leaders in the communities would prefer that the alcoholics and the druggies were managed where the elderly, the vulnerable and children are at risk. They do not appear to support a blanket trial.

It is an awful thing: if you do put 10,000 people on this system and they only have access to 20 per cent of their cash then they are in a position of some vulnerability in some respects. A neighbour of mine actually provides financial counselling, formerly as a volunteer and now with COTA, to a lot of very vulnerable people on Newstart and the like—those sorts of pensions. He tells me that they do not lack the financial knowledge and they do not lack the financial management skill; it is that they make poor decisions when they go to enter into agreements with people. He has lost count of the number of times that people have made decisions on the hire-purchase of a fridge or the renting of a TV—really poor decisions. He provides advice to people all over South Australia. There is one particular well-known national company which does a lot of work with people in this area. Financial counsellors will send people down to that shop and they will do their best deal. Then the financial counsellor will ring up and ask, 'Can you do better?' And sure enough, this particular national company does do the right thing. So I just wonder whether the quarantining of the 80 per cent of the spend will have some unintended consequences. Will it drive up prices in certain areas? We know those are the only places they can get their stuff from. They cannot go elsewhere.

I used to know a pensioner who lived at Elliott, which is halfway between Alice Springs and Darwin. When pension payments and went cashless he used to drive to Tennant Creek to shop because the shopkeeper in Elliott would say, 'Well, pick out what you want and then we will give you the change.' And he would say, 'No, no—you give me the money. You cash my cheque and then I will go and buy what I want.' Anyway, they could not agree so he used to drive 350 kilometres to Tennant Creek to do his shopping and come back. I just wonder whether quarantining that amount of the payment will have some unintended consequences. That may well need to be very carefully monitored.

I am absolutely sure on this one: if you take a person who is dependent on alcohol or gambling and you make it that they cannot spend money on that, they will come up with another way of doing that. There will be a trade somewhere which will allow those people to get access to alcohol. Prohibition has never worked anywhere. So if someone is dependent on alcohol and you have quarantined their money they are going to do something silly, like buy something and trade it for a carton of beer or a bottle of rum or, as I saw in the bottle shop in Ceduna, a five-litre cask and a sixpack of Bundy and Coke.

I do not think we should be kidding ourselves that this will actually solve the problem where people have a genuine addiction to alcohol or gambling. It is not going to solve the problem. It may well increase—we probably need to say this—prostitution and things like that. It just may well do that. There will always be people who will take advantage of people's addictions and there will always be people who can go to a pub and buy grog for people who cannot buy grog. So let's not have our rose-coloured glasses on with any of this stuff.

As I said at the outset, kids have the right to be brought up in a safe home environment—fed, clothed, looked after and cared for with all the love that most families in Australia get. But let's not kid ourselves that this is going to be all roses because we have quarantined the spending. In fact, we might be patting ourselves on the back and saying, 'Oh well, we've stopped those people wasting their money on alcohol and wasting their money on gambling.' Well, I am not sure about that. Time will tell. I am hopeful that this will be a successful trial, if this legislation gets up. But I do not have any confidence, looking back over the last 35 years, that this will be all good. In fact, it is probably going to impact on people who do not need management. We had one case there in evidence, as I spoke about. And we hope to get a response from the minister's office about that.

I think that it is a good initiative. It is a community-led initiative, if the local mayor and the other people who participated are correct. It is a courageous initiative, but it is not one that is guaranteed to succeed. I think what will guarantee success is if we can build on this initiative and give them some hope about involvement in employment. Let's give them some hope—not training jobs just for the sake of it. One of the things that Andrew Forrest has done very well is that if you complete a training course with his outfit you actually get a job. You do not just complete training for the sake of training. I think that these initiatives, if they are to be successful and if they are to work, need to have a component in them where the whole community gets behind employing some of these people—furthering their education and giving them the opportunity. Let's face it, local councils are, in some cases, the biggest employers in these areas. I challenge those local councils to have a look through their workforce and to look at the people who have lived the longest in their communities and see how many people are actually offered employment.

I know all the stories. I know that they do not have a licence and that they will not turn up every day and all that sort of stuff. Well, Andrew Forrest disproved a lot of that. And there are Aboriginal organisations which should be contracting to these local businesses and contractors; taking responsibility and building proper economic opportunities for their people so that they are not dependent on welfare and they are not dependent on having their income managed. I do not think that is too much to ask. I think that the will is there in regional South Australia to have a go at this sort of stuff. I think that they should. It is very clear if you look at some of the operations in the APY lands. One Indigenous construction company hangs out how many visibility vests they need for the next day. Five visibility vests means that five people get a job. You just turn up, put a visibility vest on, do the job and get paid. Those sorts of initiatives are operating in the APY lands and I think that with this, combined with employment opportunities, we may well measure some small progress. Thank you.