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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is a fascinating and very important document. These are supposed to be, we're told, the cashless welfare card trials—they're supposed to be trials—where they are supposed to test the concept. If you look at the conclusions of the report—and I'll come back to the rest of them shortly—one of them is, at the end:

Aspects of the proposed wider roll-out of the CDC were informed by learnings from the trial—

That's what's supposed to be happening—

but the trial was not designed to test the scalability of the CDC and there was no plan in place to undertake further evaluation.

I hate to say it, but the conclusions of the report around the cashless welfare card actually confirm what we, the Greens, have been saying in this place ever since the government came up with this foolish scheme: that it would hurt the people that were put on the card. And in fact that is the case. But the government was so ideologically driven on that that when they set up the evaluation process they did not even look at whether the card would have a detrimental impact on the participants in the trials.

The conclusions start with:

The Department of Social Services largely established appropriate arrangements to implement the Cashless Debit Card Trial, however, its approach to monitoring and evaluation was inadequate. As a consequence, it is difficult to conclude whether there had been a reduction in social harm and whether the card was a lower cost welfare quarantining approach.

It also talks about how the department:

…did not actively monitor risks identified in risk plans and there were deficiencies in elements of the procurement processes. Arrangements to monitor and evaluate the trial were in place although key activities were not undertaken or fully effective, and the level of unrestricted cash available in the community was not effectively monitored.

It goes on to say:

Social Services established relevant and mostly reliable key performance indicators, but they did not cover some operational aspects of the trial such as efficiency, including cost. There was a lack of robustness in data collection and the department's evaluation did not make use of all available administrative data to measure the impact of the trial including any change in social harm.

In other words, the government never set out to measure what impact the trial had or to effectively evaluate this trial and look at any social harm. We know from talking to people up there that there was social harm. We know from the limited evaluation that academic after academic has pointed out the flaws in their evaluation process and methodology, the whole process; yet the government goes blindly on. It has extended the cashless welfare card to Kalgoorlie and still plans to and thinks it's very shortly going to roll out the next trial in the Hinkler region in Queensland. This is based purely on ideology, because the Auditor-General's report shows very clearly that there is not the data there.

The evaluation does not support the further rollout of the card. In fact it was never set up, if you recall what I've just said around scalability of the CDC, and there was no plan in place to undertake further evaluation. The government's approach was not to further evaluate the ongoing trials. However, they have now, subsequently, put in some further evaluation process. But they never put in place the process to actually enable proper evaluation of the cashless welfare card, because they just think taking the punitive top-down approach will lead to better outcomes. What it is really about is income management—that's very clear. The cashless welfare card is further income management, and they have an ideological belief that income management will work. They've now had over 11 years worth of 'trialling' that in the Northern Territory, but of course the evaluation of that showed that it met none of its objectives. The ANAO report has further highlighted the flawed approach this government's taking. The minister representing the Minister for Social Services was in here lauding their approach to welfare today.