Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak very briefly on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Cashless Debit Card Trial Expansion) Bill 2018. I made a more extensive contribution just a couple of days ago, when the disallowance motions on regulations related to the cashless debit card trial were defeated. I want to make a few points in my contribution. One is that this is a different trial. It's a different trial site and it has a different set of assessment criteria. The persons living in the area will be under 36 years of age, receiving Newstart allowance, youth allowance, jobseeker payment and/or parenting payment single or parenting payment partnered. This is the cadre of people who would be transitioned onto the cashless debit card. This will involve about 6,700 people and will take a different approach to that taken in the current trial sites of Ceduna, East Kimberley and the Goldfields. What the government is trying to do with this new site is look at how the cashless debit card will work with a different cadre—a younger and more urbanised cadre—of people and also one which does not have as high a proportion of Indigenous participants as the existing trial sites. So it is a very different trial. It involves a very different cadre of people.

Just briefly on the consultation issue, I saw personally the level of consultation that occurred within the Goldfields region. There was extensive consultation. We've heard, through the Community Affairs Committee, of the consultation that has occurred in Bundaberg and Hervey Bay. There were 188 meetings between May and September 2017. I'll quote from the minister:

These [meetings] canvassed views from a very broad range of stakeholders, including the community sector, service providers, community members, church groups, the business sector and all levels of government. These meetings demonstrated a clear need for support and intervention in the areas of youth unemployment, young families and intergenerational welfare dependency.

I'll also quote from the Community Affairs Committee report, from Mr Steven Beer of IMPACT Community Services, one of the community service organisations working in the local area. He talked about what the consultation meetings were and the impact they had on people. This is one of the things he said:

Once they've got information about what the card is and is not, what it looks like, how it operates and works et cetera, whilst those younger people came into those sessions with some fairly negative points of view and some great questions, most of them left thinking that it was a fairly good thing to proceed with.

Finally, I will raise the issue of the evaluation. The government has announced a second evaluation of the cashless debit card across all three current trial sites, and that would include the Hervey Bay and Bundaberg trial sites if this legislation is successfully passed. The second evaluation will use research methodologies developed independently by the University of Queensland and will draw on baseline measurements of social conditions in the Goldfields, developed by the University of Adelaide. Their findings of the second evaluation will be published in late 2019.

As I've stated in this place before, nobody believes that the cashless debit card is a silver bullet. Nobody believes that the cashless debit card will work by itself. It needs to be supported by other measures. But the cashless debit card is a way of trying to break some of the negative behaviour, trying to stop a cycle of addiction, dependency and lack of control over peoples' funding. And, yes, whilst it is anecdotal, there have been very significant reports of positive outcomes in the current trial sites. The evaluation is important and necessary, and the evaluation is something that will be legislated if and when, hopefully, we pass this bill.

(Quorum formed)