Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Repeal of Cashless Debit Card and Other Measures) Bill 2022, which has a long title. Essentially, it's a simple bill that seeks to deliver on a commitment to abolish the cashless debit card. When I first came to this place, I had the good for fortune to be asked to serve on the Senate Standing Committees on Finance and Public Administration and that meant that I was deeply involved in a number of inquiries into matters which affected First Nations people. At the time I was on the committee, it inquired into the Indigenous Advancement Strategy, it inquired into the Community Development Program and it inquired into the legal services that were available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who required services because they were facing legal proceedings of some kind.

A common theme flowed through the government's approach to all of these inquiries. The last government's approach to policy making in relation to First Nations people was almost entirely devoid of input from First Nations people. It was an approach that proceeded with a set of ideas about what would be good for community; it was not an approach that sought to engage community in the design or the delivery of programs that were inflicted upon them. The results were very clear in each of the programs that we examined in these communities. It is a deeply flawed way of dealing with communities that continue to suffer very significant impacts arising from a legacy of colonisation. However well-intentioned those were who sought to design and implement these programs, their inability to understand that unless we involve community in the process of building programs these programs would not be successful, and that inability to understand then flawed almost every measure that was implemented by our predecessors, who now sit on the other side of the chamber.

The bill before us seeks to remedy yet another one of these failed interventions. The cashless debit card was introduced as a trial. The government at the time said that this was something they wanted to try with communities and they built an evidence base to evaluate whether or not it was a program that was in fact working. But like so many of these interventions, firstly, the people who were subjected to this trial were not really adequately consulted at all and, secondly, the trial was not constructed in a way that would yield an evidence base that would support a decision to continue or discontinue the program.

The evaluation conducted by ORIMA into the effectiveness of the trials in Ceduna and the East Kimberley was utterly inconclusive at best, a point made by the ANAO when they reviewed it. There was insufficient credible evidence at that point to support the establishment of further trials. Despite that, the government relied on that evaluation to roll out more and more trials of the card. At the time, Janet Hunt, who was the deputy director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU, said that the evaluation showed the cashless debit card had not improved safety and reduced violence, despite that being one of the trial's key objectives.

The ANAO report into the implementation and performance of the cashless debit card trial in 2018 uncovered some very serious issues, including false reporting of data collected through the trials. The evaluation noted a decrease in ambulance call-outs when in fact there had been an increase. The evaluation also said there was an increase in school attendance, but the ANAO found Indigenous school attendance had decreased after the introduction of the card. The Auditor-General's report of the trials also raised very real and serious questions about the cost of the program, including the high cost of the trials, budget overruns and flawed procurement processes.

It seems a long time ago now, 2018, but, despite all of this information, the government persisted with an approach that, at the very best, you could say didn't have any evidence to support it, and, at the very worst, you could see there was evidence to suggest that it was not working at all. This is basically the problem. Communities were not involved, the evidence didn't suggest it was working, but those opposite pushed ahead. The program unfairly targeted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people from low socioeconomic areas. The evidence that keeps getting brought back to the parliament over and over again refers to the same kind of language. It talks about stigma, it talks about humiliation, it talks about having agency taken away from people.

These kinds of reports should give policymakers pause. It's unlikely that programs that make people feel this way are going to have an effective or positive social benefit. It's surprising to me, even now, that our predecessors in the LNP were not inclined to listen to those voices when they repeatedly came before government and said over and over again that these kinds of measures are harmful to us and harmful to our people, harmful to our sense of self, discriminatory and stigmatising. It's an important reminder to us in this place why a voice to parliament is so critical and overdue. If we want to close the gap and engage with First Nations communities, then solutions and policy need to be genuinely community driven—not top down, not imposed. It's on this basis that I support the bill