Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, I did something that the Prime Minister of Australia still hasn't bothered to do. I visited the Western Australian northern Goldfields towns of Laverton and Leonora. The people of these towns are crying out for our help. They are crying out for their voices to be listened to.

There are many contrasts on display in these places. In Laverton, I could hear the unmistakable joy emanating from the community swimming pool as kids played after school in the cooling water. It's without a doubt a sound that warms your heart and brings an instant smile to your face as you're walking past. Sadly, that joy stands in stark contrast to the very different screams locals told me they hear as night begins to fall. It is a more confronting chorus that greets them time and time again. 'You can hear the screaming and the wailing, and you know what's going on. It's horrible,' one local, new to the town, told me.

I heard a series of devastating stories about life in Laverton and Leonora. There is clear evidence in both towns that the Albanese government's abolition of the cashless debit card has been a disastrous policy failure. In Laverton the present situation of a dramatic increase in alcohol consumption, assaults, domestic violence and general antisocial behaviour was described to me by one Indigenous leader as being 'like a speeding car going backwards'.

The locals can pinpoint the descent as having started in November of last year, directly after the cashless debit card was abolished in October. The local shopkeeper has the evidence in his sales figures. The sales of meat and vegetables has dropped significantly, and his biggest selling items are now noodles and coke. The kids are no longer being fed properly, if at all. People who were previously on the cashless debit card now withdraw up to $2,000 directly from the ATM in one hit to spend mostly on booze.

Laverton shire president, Patrick Hill, told me how, as well as cartons of beer, locals are now buying bottles or even cartons of spirits and drinking it like coke. He showed me a picture of a woman who had been brutally bashed and kicked by her partner on the street for over an hour outside the shire chamber. It was sickening. The night before I was in town another woman was stabbed by her partner, and the police were running an operation to locate the alleged offender. Emergency respondents say they are continually seeing women who have been bashed because of alcohol fuelled violence. Police in both towns do a brilliant job but are run ragged dealing with the violence and antisocial behaviour. Well over 90 per cent of all their work can be directly attributed to the abuse of alcohol. They are dealing with people addicted to alcohol on just about every job they attend.

A worker at the Leonora Community Resource Centre listed a catalogue of issues that have arisen since the cashless debit card was abolished, including people presenting as drunk or stoned and saying that they're hungry and adult children hacking into their parents' accounts, draining the cash and leaving them destitute. With all funds now available as cash, they now spend it quickly with nothing left for food and other necessities later on. Designated carers and single mothers whose payments used to go into the cashless debit card are now spending most of their money on drinking and then looking for food handouts.

The clear message from both towns is that the cashless debit card was not perfect and didn't solve all the problems but it made a big difference. Now that it has been abolished things have gone back to how they were before it was introduced. One Laverton local said to me: 'Anyone who thinks it didn't work has rocks in their heads.' Leonora shire president Peter Craig said: 'As well as quarantining 80 per cent of their money that could not be spent on alcohol, the card also helped teach those on it a better understanding of money, how to budget and how to pay bills. Some of that knowledge was being passed on from the women to the young people in the community. Much of those gains have now been lost as family members use cash to buy booze, and it's all gone before the bills can be paid.'

Many of the kids, who are dealing yet again with the consequences of drunken adults and unsafe environments at home, are no longer going to school or are attending much less frequently than in the past. There is a fear in both towns that suicide will again become an issue in the district, as it was before the cashless debit card was introduced.

Indigenous leaders that I met with in Laverton are very clear that alcohol is the scourge of their community and they need help in dealing with it. They all agree that alcohol is not culture. They have strong views about the sale of alcohol and the controls that could be put in place but reluctantly accept it is a legal product being sold by legitimate businesses. Their biggest concern is for their people, who they say are dying at an alarming rate. They all know others who are on dialysis because of the damage done by their alcohol addiction. It is well known that the publican in Laverton has, at the request of police, imposed his own restrictions on sales when things have gotten dangerously out of hand, which they have on a number of occasions. Minister Rishworth yesterday in the other place blamed an increase in the issues in these towns on an increase in the number of people travelling to these towns from the NG Lands and spending mining-royalty money. I can say to the minister: if you go and visit there, the locals will tell you that this is only part of the problem—and part of the problem that has always been an issue.

The biggest change, however, has been the Albanese government's ending of the cashless debit card. The presidents of both shires have written to the Prime Minister setting out a way forward and pleading for his assistance. They want the assistance to enhance the welfare of Indigenous people in both towns and also the transient population coming into their communities from the NG Lands, an area that makes up about three per cent of mainland Australia. The plan they set out in their letter covers improved community safety and cohesion by expanding youth engagement and diversion programs, job creation, better services, addressing of the issues caused by alcohol, investment in families, and on-country learning and education. They have specific ideas under each of these six categories and have worked on costing each idea. They are requesting a total investment across both towns of $81 million over five years, which could be split between the federal government and the Western Australian state government.

So far their letter, written on 20 February, has not even been acknowledged by Prime Minister Albanese. Most of all, when I was there, their message was that they just want the Albanese government to listen to them and to hear their voices. They think the Prime Minister should visit their towns and see firsthand what is going on, what they are going through. That's what the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, did. That's what local federal member Rick Wilson did. And that's what I did. The Albanese government should immediately restore the cashless debit card in these towns. That's what these towns themselves—the voices on the ground, the people who can directly see the impact of the withdrawal of the card—are pleading for the Albanese government to do.

Just because it was an election promise to get rid of the card doesn't mean the government should persist with a policy that, on any analysis, is a complete failure. Further to that, the Albanese government and the McGowan state government need to listen to the voices of the people in these towns. These are the people who know, every day, as the afternoon sets in, that that's when the trouble starts. These are the people who, every day, just before the bottle shop opens, see the queues in the streets. Look at what these people are asking for. They've written it. They've put it in black and white to you, Prime Minister. Do something to stop what is without a doubt a catastrophe playing out in these remote towns.

I know, just as the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, knows and just as the local member there, the member for O'Connor, Rick Wilson, knows, that we want to be able to return to Laverton. We want to be able to return to Leonora in years to come, and hear the joy of kids playing in the streets, seeing the kids being properly fed, not wandering the streets and wondering where their next meal will come from because their parents have withdrawn the cash, as they can now do, and have literally spent it on booze and consumed it. My fear, though, is that the Albanese government is just not listening and that there won't be many left, and all the joy in future years will be gone.