Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Continuation of Cashless Welfare) Bill 2020, which is purported to be about reducing the rates of alcohol, drug and gambling addiction but is actually a triumph of ideological posturing over evidence based policymaking. The bill will make the cashless debit card permanent in the existing trial sites of Ceduna, the East Kimberley, the Goldfields and Bundaberg-Hervey Bay. It will also permanently replace the BasicsCard with the cashless debit card in the Northern Territory and in Cape York and extend income management in Cape York until 31 December 2021. This is an ill-conceived, racist and un-Australian bill, seeking to implement a poorly thought through policy.

It also contradicts the government's stated approach to Indigenous affairs. First Nations people were told by the Prime Minister in his Closing the Gap speech in February that his government's approach to closing the gap would be one of partnership with First Nations people. He said they would be listening to First Nations people, empowering them and handing back responsibility. Well, those words are completely meaningless if Mr Morrison's government don't practise what they preach, and this bill is a grave example of imposing policy on First Nations people rather than engaging in the promised partnership approach.

The bill also runs counter to evidence. We've had plenty of time to review this evidence. It's been 13 years since the Howard government's so-called Intervention in the Northern Territory. The evidence shows that compulsory broad based income management does not work. Not that the Morrison government is interested in whether the cashless debit card actually works—ever since it was first proposed as a trial, it was always the intention of the Liberals and Nationals to have a broad-scale, permanent rollout of the card, and who knows how far it may extend. After all, the Minister for Social Services, Senator Ruston, told Senator McCarthy in estimates on 29 October that she had not read the Adelaide University report on the Goldfields trial, even though this bill was introduced to parliament on 8 October. Yes, you heard me correctly. The government spent $2.5 million on this study, yet the minister presses ahead with making the cashless debit card permanent without even bothering to read the report. I'm not sure what outrages me more: the fact that there was the wastage of $2.5 million of taxpayer's money on a report that failed to be read by the minister or her decision to press ahead with a change that is going to impact 34,000 Australians without making sure she had all of the facts before her.

The Community Affairs Legislation Committee inquired into this bill, and the inquiry received a lot of interest, attracting 145 submissions in a short period, including 61 from organisations. Labor senators, in their dissenting report, outlined some of the evidence that showed that the cashless debit card, and income management more generally, lacks effectiveness. Professor Tony Dreise, the director of the Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, gave evidence in a private capacity and told the inquiry:

… the evidence supporting the impact of both the cashless debit card and the BasicsCard is flimsy and largely anecdotal, not rigorous and reliable. The evidence does not stack up. It does not show that the cashless debit card has had a positive impact, and a very large amount of evidence shows that, after 13 years of new income management in the Northern Territory, it has had almost no positive impact.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists told the inquiry that there is also no clinical evidence to support the cashless debit card. In its submission, the college wrote:

… we are concerned at the continued pursuit of this policy against the advice of addiction specialists… More than 50 years of psychological research shows that positive reinforcement strategies are more effective than punitive strategies in bringing about behavioural change.

Evidence given to the inquiry about the ineffectiveness of the cashless debit card has been backed up by many studies. An independent analysis of the cashless debit card in Ceduna found:

We have shown the CDC policy to have had no substantive effect on the available measures for the targeted behaviours of gambling or intoxicant abuse.

Commenting in The Guardian in Australia, one of the report's author, Dr Luke Greenacre, said:

From the more quantitative, economic, whole of community perspective, it suggests the card offers very little, if no return on investment.

The Auditor-General also found, in his report on implementation and performance of the cashless debit card trial, that there is no evidence to support the government's claim that the card reduces social harm. Not only is compulsory broad based income management not effective in reducing harm, but, in some ways, it could actually cause significant harm.

During the inquiry's public hearing, Ms Kathryn Wilkes from the lobby group No Cashless Welfare Debit Card Australia detailed some of the harms reported to them by people subject to income management. She said that because Indue, the provider of the card, refused to set up continuous payments, people defaulted on their rent and ended up blacklisted or on the streets. Women escaping family violence who had worked hard to gain financial independence were suddenly finding it stripped from them because they were required to have a cashless debit card simply because of their post code. Ms Wilkes also said she'd been told of multiple stories of money being stolen from Indue accounts through hacking and scams, including a sole parent who had $942 stolen from her account. The general manager of community services for the Salvation Army, Stuart Foster, told the same public hearing that the mandatory participation of people on social security payments in income management was leading to 'negative outcomes, including poor mental health, social isolation and stigma'.