Last month, the public feelings on the cashless debit card were made clear, as Australia put pressure on their MPs to block the proposed Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Continuation of Cashless Welfare) Bill 2020, which initially pushed to make the trial permanent.
While this public outcry succeeded in pressuring the LNP to change the proposed amendment to extend the trial rather than make it permanent, we still find ourselves with two more years of the card - at least in the four trial sites. These trials are plagued by evaluation reports that just won't give the government the data they want to justify the scheme's continuation, and yet they doggedly pursue its survival regardless.
The Hon. Linda Burney released a press release last month asking why this was the case. She stated that Labor had put a series of questions to the government regarding the insufficient evidence the card actually works, widespread community concerns including those raised by members of the government's own backbench, its disproportionate impact on First Nations' people and its plans for a national rollout.
Unsurprisingly, Ms Burney reports these questions were met with a refusal to answer.
The government failed to release the most recent evaluation report from the University of Adelaide on the scheme's efficacy (which cost the taxpayer $2.5m) prior to the parliamentary debates and votes and Minister for Families and Social Services, Senator Anne Ruston, has admitted that she had not read the report when the decision was made to push to make the card permanent.
Earlier this year, the Indigenous Australians' Minister Ken Wyatt and O'Connor MP Rick Wilson said that this report will have "no bearing'' on effectively passing the legislation. As events unfolded, these two MPs have been proven correct. And, I can't help but wonder at the point of expending such a sum on a report that is not going to be used to inform policy decisions, nor even facilitate lip service to evidence-based policy planning. This failure to release reports prior to decision making is not new. The evaluation report released in May 2020 came after the parliamentary decision to extend the trial to the end of the year, despite having been completed in December 2019. But perhaps, we should not be surprised by this fact as previous independent reports have not shone a favourable light on the program.
A 2016 report on Income Management by the UNSW concluded that mandatory income management does not result in long-term behavioural change at either the individual or community level and actually resulted in unintended negative consequences of such programs including increasing people's dependence on welfare.
This was echoed in the 2020 joint study into the scheme conducted by the University of South Australia and Monash University, which concluded that the cashless debit card scheme was failing to make the intended impact on the problem behaviours it was designed to target.
The trial failed the people, who is it benefitting?
In December 2020, Guardian Australia revealed that it had seen an as-yet-unpublished draft of the MIA University of Adelaide's 2020 report and that the findings concluded that there was 'little consensus... as to whether the CDC was fulfilling its intended aims and having a positive impact on levels of alcohol and drug misuse.'
This adds fuel to Ms Burney's December claim that, "If the report proved the card worked, the government would have released it by now".
So even if you discounted as 'bleeding heart rhetoric' the compulsory participant's stories and Senate submissions detailing the frontline experiences of the card that documents the stereotyping, the shame, embarrassment and mental health impact that this scheme has on the people it is supposedly meant to be helping; even if you ignored racist undertones of disproportionate Aboriginal representation in the scheme (40 per cent of scheme participants are Aboriginal compared to representing 3.3 per cent of the population); even if you turned a blind eye to the staggering administrative errors and overwhelming exit application processes; the total lack of evidence of the scheme actually achieving the intended goals should convince you it's time to put this scheme to bed once and for all.
As Associate Professor Ruth Phillips from the University of Sydney said, it is "anti-welfare, punitive, costly and ineffective," so why on earth is the Australian government still so determined to keep it going?
The trial failed the people, who is it benefitting?
Zoë Wundenberg is a careers consultant and un/employment advocate impressability.com.au