Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on the Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Continuation of Cashless Welfare) Bill 2020. I'd like to associate myself with that incredible speech from Senator McCarthy. If there's a speech that's going to convince other senators to vote no to this bill, that's the speech to listen to and refer back to.

Labor will be opposing this bill. The reasons that underpin our opposition to imposing the cashless debit card on communities without their informed consent or adequate consultation have been extensively canvassed in this place through committee reports and contributions to debates, such as those made by Senator McCarthy. Indeed, senators from across the political spectrum have rightly found fault with the approach engendered in this bill and related bills over recent years. In fact, many of the concerns we've been flagging since the coalition government embarked on its rollout of the cashless debit card have regrettably been realised. Further to that, there is now an exhaustive base of evidence which has affirmed our opposition to measures in this bill.

The income management regime the Morrison government is seeking to impose with this legislation, in many cases on some of the most vulnerable and isolated social security recipients and communities in the country, has a number of irredeemable flaws. Put simply, it doesn't work, despite the government's continued but baseless assertions that it does. Thankfully, there are those in the coalition party room that recognise this—and we've heard comments from the member for Bass this week.

More than a decade has now passed since the Howard government's Intervention in the Northern Territory and its accompanying welfare quarantining measures. There is just no evidence that compulsory broad-based income management works. The evidence suggests quite to the contrary. Not only have the cashless debit card and compulsory income management policies more generally been found wanting in their effectiveness but, as Labor members have been highlighting, there is actually evidence of significant harm. It cannot go unsaid—in fact, it must be at the forefront of our consideration of the bill—that this legislation is racially discriminatory. We know that more than two-thirds of the people who would face increasingly severe restrictions and controls under this bill would be First Nations Australians. In fact, half of all welfare recipients impacted by this legislation would be First Nations people in the Northern Territory.

What's abundantly clear with the Morrison government's wholesale and flagrant disregard of the publicly available evidence is that its cashless debit card policy is firmly, if not exclusively, based on ideology. We see that playing out here this week—that this bill is the one that's most important to this government. It's the cashless debit card, on their program this week in the Senate, that is their priority bill. I think that speaks everything about this government. It certainly cannot claim to be supported by the data or the lived experience of Australians who've been subjected to it.

It should be noted, too, that this bill is meaningfully different to others we've had before us. It rushes to make the cashless debit card permanent in the existing trial sites rather than seeking to extend the trial period, as the government had originally sought to do. That key difference betrays another motivation implicit in this bill. The government are determined to proceed with their scarcely concealed plan to roll this card out right across the country, irrespective of the evidence, and, with it, make life harder for millions of social security recipients. Anyone who's in receipt of social security in this country should be worried by this bill. Make no mistake: that's clearly the direction this government is headed, or how else can we account for the Morrison government making the decision to forge ahead with this bill in the way that it has done?

The minister herself admitted at Senate estimates that she had not even read the $2½ million evaluation of the program before deciding to make the cashless debit card permanent. That's an evaluation the government itself commissioned—the very same report senators in this place have not seen, despite being asked to vote on this bill today. Clearly, it is not evidence that's motivating the approach from the Morrison government. If that's not sufficiently telling about the government's true intention, at estimates, we discovered the establishment of the so-called CDC technology working group. That group includes the likes of the ANZ Bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank and Westpac, as well as Coles, Woolworths, Metcash, EFTPOS and Australia Post. It's not difficult to deduce the scale of the government's ambition of a future CDC rollout with groups of that size involved. Why would they be involved unless there were greater plans afoot?

Regrettably, this is also another case of movement and action in lieu of substance and delivery from the Prime Minister. It's a pattern Australians are growing wearily familiar with. The Prime Minister attempts to chalk up a win, grab a headline, that, on the face of it, might suggest meaningful action, and then quickly move on to the next announcement. If it helps shore up support internally by appealing to the ideological biases of the hard-right wing of his party, all the better to do it.