Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Northern Territory and those hundreds if not thousands of families across Australia in the trial sites for the cashless debit card. For the record, there are two trial sites in WA, one in South Australia and one in Queensland. One of the areas that I'm focusing on in terms of this issue that we are debating in the Senate is that I want to bring to the attention of the Senate some of the important information that has come through numerous inquiries that we've had. This important information is from people who have given evidence to senators throughout a couple of years of inquiries. I'd like their voices to be on the record:

That concern about women being able to leave violent relationships, in particular, has been raised over the years that we held the inquiry. It is a legitimate concern that continues to be raised through organisations like the Australian Council of Social Service and the Northern Territory Council of Social Service and also through women's shelters, who talk about the need for women to be financially able to leave those situations. It is important that the Senate is aware of that, because there have been views and anecdotal comments saying that, if we don't have something like the forced income quarantining of the cashless debit card, it will not help these situations. I'd like to put on the record that having forced income management actually exacerbates those unsafe environments for women and their families and prevents them from being able to leave those environments.

Olga Havnen from the Danila Dilba Health Service in the Northern Territory gave evidence to the Senate inquiry in 2019. I'd like to put her comments on the record:

More than 23,000 Aboriginal people have been subjected to income management or income quarantining since 2007—

in the Northern Territory. She went on:

The original objectives of income management were supposedly to improve the health, wellbeing and education outcomes of Aboriginal children and to protect women and older people from humbugging and violence. During the period 2007 to the present time—

2019, when she gave evidence—

there is an absolutely astonishing lack of credible evidence that income management has made any significant improvement to any of the key indicators of wellbeing: child health, birth weights, failure to thrive, and child protection notifications and substantiations. There are no improvements in school attendance, and certainly nothing we can see would suggest that there has been a reduction in family or community violence.

Our concerns with the proposal to transfer current recipients of the BasicsCard to a new cashless debit card is that what we're going to get is more of the same, and it fails to fundamentally address the significant structural flaws of the scheme—namely disempowerment, failure to address underlying structural issues, and the cost of implementation and ongoing management of the scheme.

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This is a failed experiment and should, I believe, be abandoned. The numerous so-called trials are expensive. They're an ineffective phoney that have caused untold misery and hardship. It's an outrageous waste of millions of dollars of public money that could have been better used to provide targeted and tailored supports—for example, things like parenting programs, treatment and support services for people with addiction and gambling problems, improvements in health and environmental health programs, and more funding for health, education and employment. There are a multitude of real, evidence based initiatives that could have been supported to improve the lives of Aboriginal children and families.

That was evidence given to the inquiry into the cashless debit card by the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee in 2019. It was given by Olga Havnen, the CEO of Danila Dilba Health Service in Darwin, which covers a huge population of First Nations people, including beyond the Darwin boundaries.

Walter Shaw is from Tangentyere Council, which is an organisation that looks after the town camps around Alice Springs. There are between 14 and 17 town camps around Alice Springs, so they have an organisation in which a town camper is a representative on the Tangentyere Council. Walter Shaw is the CEO of that organisation, and I'll quote his evidence to the community affairs committee inquiry:

I was only made aware 10 minutes before they walked into my office.

He was referring then to federal agency staff doing consultation of sorts on CDC. Mr Shaw said:

I refused to sit down with them during that conversation. After the fact of that conversation that was held—I think Mike was in the meeting alongside my chief operations officer—about three weeks later they requested rounds of consultation with town campers. They wanted to do a cluster approach of providing a level of community engagement and awareness that the cashless debit card is going to roll out and it's going to affect the affected people that are currently on any welfare or Centrelink income.

Where Mr Shaw was coming from was that this was a complete surprise. There was certainly no request about how they were going, and there was no interest in what kind of life people were having on the current system with the BasicsCard. This is quite critical, I emphasise to the Senate and to senators. There is already a piece of legislation in place, the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2012, which covers the Northern Territory and covers the policy of the BasicsCard. What is needed, senators, is a thorough inquiry and evaluation of the BasicsCard. We need to understand what has worked and what hasn't worked in the Northern Territory and what the families themselves think and feel about this regime that they've been forced to live under for 13 years.

The inability of the Senate to recognise that you want to bring in another policy over the top of one that you haven't even checked to see whether people have achieved the outcomes which were supposedly set at the beginning, in 2007, shows a failure of the parliament, of the Senate and of the government in particular. It shows that you don't care. You don't care. It's almost like you go out and you say: 'Look, we want you to live like this, but then we're going to move you to this, but then we'll move you over here to this. We don't know why, but it looks nicer and shinier over here and we think we should move you from that spot to that spot because it actually works for us. It doesn't matter about you.' That's how the people of the Northern Territory feel.

It's imperative for the dignity of the Senate that we base our collective decisions on information that comes from the people of Australia, from those families who experience what it is like to be forced into having their income quarantined, to be forced into a situation where they feel so disempowered but, worse, where their disempowerment will not be listened to as part of what the Australian parliament should be doing. It is what the Australian parliament should be doing in evaluating whether the particular policy that you've imposed on a people has actually worked and achieved what you intended it to. The best-case scenario, even with your best intents, you haven't even bothered to find out. So when people say, 'It's not working; please listen to us,' you choose to turn away, turn your backs and say, 'Too bad, too sad, you're stuck with it.' That's not the Australian Senate I want to be a part of, and I urge senators to make sure of their decision today.