Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I have not found making a decision on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Debit Card Trial) Bill 2015 to be easy. The bill deals with inherently difficult issues and seemingly intractable problems—not problems over recent years but problems over many years, over generations. Whether these problems can be tackled, or even go some way to being solved, with this bill remains to be seen.

This bill seeks to have a trial of the healthy welfare card in up to three locations around the nation. But it needs to be made clear at the outset that this bill does not actually set up those locations. They are not specified in the bill as such; they must be set out in regulations. And those regulations can be disallowed by either house of parliament. That is something that I am sure the government will be acutely aware of should this bill pass. Should any of these trials—and I emphasise 'trials'—be established, they will need to be subject to regulations, and those regulations can be disallowed in terms of setting up any trial site. That in itself, I believe, is an additional safeguard in respect of the implementation of these trials. It is an additional safeguard because the Senate can scrutinise, at least within the statutory period, these trials.

I will discuss with the Assistant Minister for Social Services, Alan Tudge—who, with a lot of good faith and with a lot of goodwill, has engaged in enormous amounts of consultation with local communities and indeed with my crossbench colleagues and, I believe, with the opposition on matters raised in this bill—whether we ought to look at having a provision for the period of disallowance to be extended so that, if the trial is established and it appears that there are serious problems with the trial, the regulations setting up the location of that trial can be disallowed. That is something I will have a good-faith discussion with the assistant minister about.

I am acutely aware of the limitations that this bill will place on a person's spending. However, I am equally, if not more, aware of the devastating harm that alcohol and gambling addictions are causing individuals, families and communities as a whole. This bill not only attempts to address these harms; it does more. I believe that if implemented properly—and I emphasise those words: 'if implemented properly'—it can actually create hope. As imperfect as this bill is, my concern is that doing nothing, not at least attempting an alternative approach, would be a worse position. But I am acutely aware of the remarks made by Senator Siewert of the Australian Greens, whom I have enormous regard for, who implacably opposes this bill because the Australian Greens consider there are alternative pathways to deal with these issues. But I think that what is contained in this bill—having a healthy welfare card—could, if implemented properly, actually work.

The history of this is contained in a report prepared by Andrew Forrest, who most people know as a mining magnate but who I believe is someone who cares passionately about Indigenous Australians, about Indigenous Australians having a fair go and about remedying those generations of inequity and disadvantage. This particular approach could actually work. Mr Forrest suggested that a cashless welfare system for vulnerable Australians:

… poses a way of providing stability for families and individuals so they can concentrate on finding employment, providing adequately for their families, and sending their children to school.

Let us make this clear: this healthy welfare card applies across the board. It does not simply apply to one class of Australians. It is going to be done on a location-specific basis as a trial. Because the beautiful town of Ceduna, on the west coast of South Australia, in the Great Australian Bight, is one of the proposed sites, I went there to visit, on Friday, 2 October, with my colleague Senator Jacqui Lambie. I want to take this opportunity to thank the community of Ceduna—both those for and those against the healthy welfare card—for the reception they gave me and Senator Lambie, for the time they spent with us and for the discussions we had, which I thought were incredibly useful.

I thank the District Council of Ceduna, including its mayor, Allan Suter, and its CEO, Geoff Moffatt. I thank the communities that I met at Ceduna Council Chambers: the Ceduna Aboriginal Corporation, with Mick Haines, their CEO; and Wayne Miller, their Indigenous Community Engagement and Governance Officer; the Koonibba Aboriginal Community Council, with Corey McLennan; the Scotdesco community, with Robert Larking; and the Yalata community, with Greg Franks, who dialled into that meeting. The Oak Valley and Maralinga Tjarutja communities, with Peter Clark and Keith Peters, were also part of this process. I also heard from members of the community at the Ceduna Community Hotel, where there were about 20 or 30 people. One of the local organisers recorded the whole meeting, so apparently you can get on YouTube to see Senator Lambie and I being asked questions and responding to very legitimate concerns in relation to this proposal.

For those who have not visited Ceduna, it is a beautiful coastal town located on the west coast of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. It is famous for its annual Oysterfest, which coincidentally was held over the weekend that Senator Lambie and I visited, although I hasten to add that we left before the festivities. We were there just for the day. Clearly there was a certain buzz about the community because of the number of people coming into Ceduna for its annual Oysterfest.

Sadly, though, it is not Ceduna's beauty and natural assets that make it famous; rather, it is the town's struggle with drug and alcohol abuse that has led to some adverse publicity in relation to the community. The local council has tried time and time again to curb the damage caused by alcohol addiction. A dry zone encompassing Ceduna and the nearby township of Thevenard—the port—has been in place since 1988. There are restrictions on the sale of certain types of alcohol. It is also a requirement to produce ID when buying alcohol so that a purchaser's name can be checked against the list of persons who are barred from buying alcohol. The question of whether that is being enforced or followed through is another matter altogether. But these measures are simply not enough.

In 2011, the South Australian deputy coroner handed down his findings in the inquest into the deaths of six Indigenous Australians in Ceduna. The findings were damning. The deputy coroner had serious concerns with the health of Indigenous Australians with an alcohol problem located in the region around Ceduna. He identified numerous satellite Indigenous communities within a 300-kilometre radius of Ceduna. Of particular concern to him were the Yalata and Oak Valley communities. The deputy coroner found there was overwhelming evidence that members of these communities often travelled out of Ceduna to acquire large volumes of alcohol, thus circumventing the dry zones. While the dry zones in Ceduna and these communities were found to have been effective, it was clear to the deputy coroner that determined people often used areas just outside Ceduna to consume the alcohol they had purchased. The deputy coroner heard evidence that authorities very frequently reported breath alcohol analysis that exceeded a staggering 0.25 per cent. The inquest found that many in those communities around Ceduna also suffer from chronic ill health and self-neglect. An extract from the report explains just how entrenched the problem of alcohol abuse is in the area. The deputy coroner said:

It would be wrong to stereotype the entire indigenous population in this region as having drinking problems, but the evidence adduced before the Court establishes that there is without a doubt a severe and intractable culture of excessive alcohol consumption among the transient Aboriginal population in Ceduna and that this culture is having a negative impact on the wellbeing and functionality of those people.

The deputy coroner concluded that there would remain an ongoing need to reduce the availability of alcohol to affected communities. The government says that it hopes that restricting access to cash through the trial of this debit card will restrict the accessibility of alcohol. But the point here is: will this work in isolation? I do not think it will. You actually need to have a number of measures and to have a holistic approach to dealing with these issues.

The figures from Ceduna's Sobering Up Centre, which is a very important facility, indicated that there were over 4,500 admissions to the Sobering Up Centre in a population of about 4,000 people. These are devastating figures. They are not just statistics. They are families—mothers and fathers, and children and young people in some cases—who are gripped by addiction. There is a question of the informed choices that a person can make in the grip of an addiction, particularly with respect to substance abuse.

Some of the key Indigenous communities—not all, but a number of them: Ceduna Aboriginal Corporation and Koonibba Aboriginal Community Council, for instance—are strongly in favour of a trial of the healthy welfare card, and they have extracted concessions from the government in terms of additional support for the communities: drug and alcohol services and additional services to provide that support. The question is whether the healthy welfare card in itself will be useful in dealing with these issues.

Some concerns were expressed to me by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and it was quite pointed. One person who approached me at the meeting said that they had never, ever been on welfare, they had paid their taxes all their life, and they resented the fact that they would be subject to this card, because it would cause them difficulty in their own financial commitments and the like, and going to a panel seemed to them to be inherently unfair. By the way, effectively that was put to me by an Indigenous and a non-Indigenous Australian who had jobs, who had worked for many years and who found themselves on hard times needing support from the community through our welfare system. Two of the volunteers at the local op shop were concerned about the fact that they do not have EFTPOS facilities there and that restricting access to cash could have a very devastating effect on the op shop or, indeed, be a great inconvenience to some of the volunteers, stalwarts of the community in their 80s—senior citizens—who say, 'Do I have to be trained in how to use an EFTPOS or payWave facility in the context of a healthy welfare card?'

So they are some of the issues. This will not be easy. I think that any trial needs to be strictly monitored for the purpose of seeing whether it works or not. The undertaking that I gave to the community that I spoke to at the Ceduna Community Hotel was that there ought not to be any trial commencing and that, before we go any further, there needs to be further community consultation. I acknowledge that Assistant Minister Tudge has dealt extensively with key stakeholders in the local community, but it appears that there has not been a robust public meeting where those who are concerned about the health welfare card can ask questions and those questions can be answered fully. There needs to be that level of consultation so that matters can be taken on board before any place is designated for this healthy welfare card trial. That is an undertaking that Mr Tudge has given to me. I hope to be able to travel with him to Ceduna—and Senator Lambie may be coming to that meeting as well—so that we can genuinely hear from the community—those in favour but particularly those against the healthy welfare card. That is something that I think is essential.

I think another safeguard, if a particular place is chosen as a trial site, would be that there is the opportunity for the regulations to be disallowed for that particular area. I think that is a very critical safeguard in relation to this. There must be a robust evaluation process, and I think that, should this bill pass its second reading stage, there must be some very clear undertakings, guidelines and parameters as to how the evaluation will take place and some of the matters that have been raised—I think very legitimately—by Senator Siewert on behalf of the Australian Greens as to how this would actually work in particular cases. If you are in a restaurant and you are having a meal, you can use the healthy welfare card for that, but if you decide to have beer or a glass of wine then that can cause problems. I think that is a very good point made by Senator Siewert, as to how that would be dealt with in the context of this card and the issue of people feeling stigmatised in relation to that.

A particular interest I have had is about the impact on the local community of gambling. The feedback that I have had is that poker machines have had a devastating impact on the local community in Ceduna. The Productivity Commission says that something like 40 per cent of gambling losses come from problem gamers, and I dare say that figure could be even higher in the Ceduna community. I think that having a healthy welfare card restricting that access to gambling would be a good thing. We also need to be aware that online gambling, presumably on both illegal and legal sites, is also very problematic. It has been a growing problem, particularly in those remote parts of the west coast where access to poker machines is not so easy. People can go online and lose a lot of money very quickly on their credit card, and that in itself is very problematic. The question I will be asking in respect of the healthy welfare card in the committee stages of this bill—should it get through the second reading stage—is: you can work out the legal sports betting operations, the online gambling operations, because they would have certain merchant numbers and they would no doubt cooperate with such a trial, but in terms of those illegal gambling sites based in places like the Caribbean and Gibraltar, where they have innocuous names that do not appear to be linked to the merchant name, how will that work? That is a huge and growing problem for the Australian community generally.

I note that there has been correspondence between the shadow Minister for Families and Payments, the Hon. Jenny Macklin, and the Hon. Shane Neumann, the shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs, and Assistant Minister Tudge in relation to this issue. I think it is fair to say that Minister Tudge has attempted to fairly comprehensively address a number of the concerns raised. The level of engagement and the detail in that letter indicates at least a willingness to engage in the concerns that have been raised by the opposition in relation to this particular proposal.

I note that the opposition considers that the bill should not be progressed further until there is, in their view: sufficient consultation; an agreed comprehensive package of supports; further consideration and consultations; details of the operation of the bill—including possible community involvement in quarantine decisions—made public; and a fulsome evaluation framework for all possible participating communities established, in place and made public. I think for the Senate to do its job, we need to rigorously, forensically, deal with these issues. It has never been my position to support a gag on a substantive debate such as this, so I think it is very important that those questions be answered.

These are difficult issues, but the questions raised by the opposition and by the Australian Greens must be answered in the context of this debate. It is important that we go into committee. I will support the second reading stages of this bill, but I think it is important that the questions raised by those who have concerns, or who have outright opposition to this bill, need to be addressed in the context of this debate. I want this trial, should it go ahead, to be effective, to work, but there needs to be further consultation. I am pleased that Assistant Minister Tudge said that should this bill get through the second reading stage, there will be further consultation and extensive consultation with the people of Ceduna, which is proposed to be one of trial sites. Having said that, I look forward to further debate on this issue. This issue will not go away. I think all sides of this debate have legitimate concerns that need to be respected. I hope that the Senate can robustly but fairly deal with concerns in respect of this bill.

Debate adjourned.