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

I can't let that remark about considering the children go past without comment. That's why you brought in the intervention, the Northern Territory intervention. The claim of the government at that time was that this was about the children. Twelve years later, have we seen that situation fixed? No, we haven't. We see an increasing number of kids going into out-of-home care; we see an increasing number of kids interacting with the justice system. Clearly, it is not working.

The final evaluation of the intervention shows it has met none of its objectives. It is not working. The government keep reiterating this because they are ideologically committed to it; they are not genuinely committed to looking at the evidence. You dismiss proper evaluation of the evidence, independent evaluation of the evidence, such as that which was carried out for the Northern Territory intervention. You don't take any of that into account when you're commenting on the children.

There is no evidence that this helps. Twelve years worth of this giant experiment with income management has not worked, because children in the Northern Territory are still going into out-of-home care. We've still got those very same issues. We need to change the way we do things; we need to look at the underlying causes. All this does is entrench dependence on the system, which is what the final evaluation of the Northern Territory intervention suggested—that is, there's evidence to suggest that financial management has gone backwards. And that's also what people are saying to us.

When you say you're consulting with people—the baseline evaluation by the University of Adelaide was not a baseline evaluation; it was a semi-evaluation, the same as what the ORIMA process had done. It was push polling of people. People are on the card, they know they don't want to be on the card, so when somebody being paid by government comes along and says, 'Are you drinking less?' then of course they're going to say yes, because they know that person is being paid by the government.

The Labor government did the same thing—sorry to the opposition; I'm not directly attacking you—and Jenny Macklin came out with a report that showed there had supposedly been improvements in people buying fresh food et cetera in the Northern Territory. AIHW had to come out and say, 'Actually you've interpreted this data wrong.' This was for exactly the same reasons that I've just articulated. When people who are dependent on the system know the person asking them questions has come from the government, then of course they're going to say they're feeding their children more, they're buying more fresh fruit and vegetables. When you're evaluating something, essentially you don't do push polling.

Please, spare us the lecture about looking after the kids. If you're looking after the children, you would not be perpetuating this system.

The CHAIR: The question is that amendment (1) on sheet 8729 as moved by Senator Brown be agreed to.