This is a very serious bill, the Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Repeal of Cashless Debit Card and Other Measures) Bill 2022, and it has the potential to impact thousands of Australians and their lives, their safety and their community. As we have heard from other speakers, the areas of our country where cashless debit cards have been trialled and used are regions that have been, tragically and unfortunately, afflicted by domestic violence and by drug use and addiction. The cashless debit card has been a good-faith effort to improve the lives of the Australians who live in those communities, and not just those on welfare but those who would be or could be impacted by poor decisions made by those on welfare—especially children. Obviously, no young children get welfare themselves or get a cashless debit card, but they’re often the victims in the lives of people who have, tragically, gone off the rails.
I want to take a step back. A lot of the debate we’ve had has focused on issues for Indigenous Australians, and there’s an understandable reason for that: the first trial sites for the cashless debit card were Indigenous communities. That was because some of those issues I mentioned were highlighted in Indigenous communities, particularly through various coroners reports about the BasicsCard, which I’ll get back to, and the cashless debit card grew out of that, in response. However, the cashless debit card has applied to non-Indigenous communities. Indeed, it has applied to the entire community of Bundaberg, a town of tens of thousands of people who are predominantly non-Indigenous. There are Indigenous people in Bundaberg too, of course, but it is predominantly a non-Indigenous population. It also has the cashless debit card. So this is actually not a policy or program that is focused only on Indigenous Australians. It is about people, and that is where we should centre this debate.
There is going to be, and there has been, a lot of political toing and froing here, with various claims about auditor’s reports and all those things, but we should come back to why we are doing this and what its impact is on Australian people and their families. I’m someone who has, fortunately, not had to resort to welfare myself over my life. But, when I think about these issues, I am struck by the difference between how we approach providing support to strangers, our fellow Australians that we might not know—how we provide help through this parliament, through our welfare system—and how we treat our own children, our own family members. I’ve got five children and I want to support them and help them grow up. They’re not yet of an age at which they would be applying for welfare, but, potentially, they could be in that situation where they might not have a job or might be between things. How would I help them if they didn’t have a job, weren’t in work or didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives? Or, if they did, tragically, get addicted to drugs and those sorts of things, how would I try to help?
Well, I tell you what, as a parent I would not go anywhere near or do anything close to how we administer our welfare system. I wouldn’t do that, because how we administer our welfare system for people, a lot of whom are on a BasicsCard or a cashless welfare card, is we say, ‘You’re in trouble; we want to help and support you’—that’s an admirable goal and aim—and then we just say, ‘Here, have some free money. Go down to the Centrelink office and you can get a few hundred dollars a fortnight. There are no questions asked. Just take it and do what you want with it.’ That’s not how I would try and support my children. I certainly wouldn’t do that. I certainly wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, Peter’—I will use different names so I am not identifying any kids; none of my children are called Peter—’here’s 500 bucks a fortnight; knock yourself out. It will tide you over until you work out what you want to do with your life.’ That is not to say I wouldn’t provide any help or any financial assistance to a child, but I wouldn’t do it without any strings attached. I wouldn’t be just handing over money. It would almost be a dereliction of my parental duty and obligations to hand over money and just let them go. I would help and try to support them, but in return I would want to see some response from my child, like doing some work around the home or applying for a study course or trying to train or doing something. That is what you do as a parent. You might fail—they might not do what you want them to do—but you try to put some boundaries, some discipline, some focus into your child’s life while also trying to help them.
It is a basic life principle that, if you are going to give something, you’ve got to get something in return. You need to teach people that principle. You need to teach your children the principle that you don’t get anything for nothing—well, you shouldn’t; at Centrelink you do. In normal life, you don’t get anything for nothing. You have to work hard to get paid; you have to exercise to get fit. You try and impart those lessons on your children.
Coming back to our welfare system, we do not do that. We treat people who need our help and support in a way that we would never even contemplate treating our children. That has traditionally been the approach, but, as I mentioned before, measures like the cashless debit card have been good-faith attempts to provide more give and take. We do want to help and support people, but there has to be an obligation that the help and support—in this case, the cashless debit card—is spent on things that are essential for someone’s own life, for their family and for the children they support with food, education and things that are important to them.
Yes, those restrictions are onerous for people and they provide less freedom than earning money in employment or a workplace environment, but it is very different to working and getting a pay cheque from week to week. You do not get that money for free. If you are working in a job, you do not get a pay cheque for nothing; you have to work. You have to give up time in your day. You have to give something to get something. Likewise, those on the cashless debit card get support, but there are some restrictions on how they can spend that money. That is not to say of course that all these good-faith outcomes have been perfect or solved all the problems. They are not going to do that.
The issue I have with the approach of the government is this: what are you going to do when this goes? What is the plan? We need to think about the history of the cashless debit card. This grew out of another attempt in 2007, 15 years ago, to do something similar: to provide restrictions on what could be bought using the BasicsCard. However, the technology around the BasicsCard was very restrictive, and it was even harder for people to work. The cashless debit card is better technology; it provides more focus on restricting items. Of course, it still provides a certain level of cash to people that they can spend on anything, but there is a component that is restricted.
The cashless debit card has been, you must say, successful in the sense that other people have wanted to join. We rolled it out in trial sites. We didn’t rush this out. It was a major change, and we tried to take it step by step, starting in some Indigenous communities before moving on to broader Australian communities, like Bundaberg, as well. We took it step by step while we were in government. But you can tell something is a bit successful when other people seek to join it, when they put their hand up and say, ‘Let’s do it.’ Communities in Cape York want to convert from the BasicsCard to the cashless debit card. There are people in the Northern Territory who want to go from the BasicsCard to the cashless debit card. They can see the benefits in this technology. The government’s proposal here is to take away the agency and sovereignty of those communities—in these cases, Indigenous communities—and take away their right to make that decision. It is to scrap it altogether and leave them with nothing.
But what are you going to do? If we go back to the old system I mentioned before—where we just hand out free money—we know that it will fail. It’s failed everywhere in the world. It’s not something just here in Australia and it’s certainly not something that is just Indigenous community related. This is not about blackfellas and whitefellas. I can take you to lots of suburbs in Rockhampton, near where I live, that are welfare deserts because we have destroyed the culture of work, the culture of family, the culture of community, through our pipeline of unrestricted welfare. And we pat ourselves on the back here in this place, thinking we’ve done a good job. ‘We’ve put out budget papers. We’ve spent $2 billion. We’re helping people.’ No, you’re not. You’re getting them addicted to free money that destroys their lives and creates a generational cycle that ends up, as I said before, with domestic violence, drug abuse and addiction. We know that.
We all have these communities, wherever we live, yet we continue this fiction of thinking that just an extra zero on the budget papers is going to solve people’s problems. We know it doesn’t, but it makes us feel good. It gives us a good media release. We can go on TV and say how good it is. But we destroy communities from doing it. And that’s what the government is proposing to go back to—the failed welfare policies of the 1960s and 1970s that were just terrible and wiped out whole communities of working-class and poor communities when factories left or economies changed. A lot of regional communities have lost their forestry or fishery industries, and they have completely descended into a violent cycle of welfare dependence that we have at least facilitated, sometimes by turning a blind eye.
We’re at least trying, with things like the cashless debit card. It’s not perfect, but what are you going to do instead? What’s going to be the alternative? We know what we learnt this week. We learnt more details yesterday in question time. The government are starting to wake up and understand that actually they can’t go down this path, and that, if we were to completely scrap all of the income management proposals we have in this country, it would consign communities to this cycle of welfare dependence. You’ve got lots of communities out there shouting at the government right now to wake up to themselves before we go back to the dinosaur age of free money and free welfare that destroys people’s lives.
There are going to be a huge number of amendments here in this place today. For those of you up in the gallery, it will be a long night if you want to stick around. We’re going to be here till the early hours of the morning probably, because the government has to completely overhaul this ill-thought-through legislation, to reintroduce income management opportunities for communities—to allow the people of Cape York to continue the cashless debit card, to allow other communities across the country to do the same.
It raises the whole question now of why we are here. Why are we doing this? We don’t need this legislation. The government are now apparently saying—we’ll know when we see these amendments—that they’re going to continue the cashless debit card. This is a broken promise I completely welcome, but they went to the election and said they’d get rid of it. As I said, it was ill thought through. They didn’t consult properly with communities that are on this card, and they’re now realising that and desperately backtracking. Well, I welcome that broken promise, and I won’t make a political point about it, because it’s better for communities for the government to understand the error of their ways and turn around here, do a complete U-turn, which is apparently what we’ve got happening here in the Senate.
But why do we need to do this bill? We don’t need to do this. We’ve already got the legislation in place. The government can adjust the trial schemes as they see fit. But they are embarrassingly persisting with this legislation, taking up the Senate’s time, making people stay here till all hours of the morning, making the note takers, the Senate staff, stay here all night, in a desperate attempt to save some face from an embarrassing policy decision they made on the hop, in a rush, in an election campaign.
So I do welcome that change, because what we need to do as a parliament now, in my view, is a little bit less talking—there will be a lot of talking over the next 24 hours, unfortunately, because we’ll be here for so long—and more listening to those communities on welfare, those communities that actually are affected by these changes.
Senator Rice: Less talking? You can talk!
Senator CANAVAN: That’s what we need to do. These government amendments are apparently going to do that, because they’re going to allow communities to request these changes. They’re going to allow them to do that. Hopefully the government will listen and not be so prideful as to obsessively insist on getting rid of something that some communities want and that works for them. I hope they do listen to them.
Senator Henderson mentioned earlier that Senator Chisholm had completely misrepresented the member for Hinkler yesterday and had accused him of not consulting with his community. Senator Henderson very succinctly rebutted the number of emails sent by the member for Hinkler’s office. The member for Hinkler had sent tens of thousands of emails and done hundreds of calls to local constituents about this issue. Overwhelmingly, the feedback from the people of Hinkler was that they support the cashless debit card. In the member for Hinkler’s case, 75 per cent of those surveyed said they support it. And it wasn’t just the member for Hinkler. The local newspapers around Bundaberg—the NewsMail and the Fraser Coast Chronicle—did their own independent survey that found that less than 30 per cent of people were opposed to the cashless debit card in the area in and around Bundaberg.
So the communities want it; they support it. The people who are going to be the real victims, if we persist with this obsessive attempt to go back to the era of free money and free welfare, will be those people who themselves are often not receiving the money but are on the receiving end of the destroyed lives that come from receiving free money. It’s about the mums who might be subject to domestic violence and the children who might go uncared for in people’s homes if we turn a blind eye to the corrosive effects of unrestricted welfare payments.
Free welfare might make people feel good in this place but it certainly doesn’t build homes. It doesn’t build communities. It doesn’t help people’s lives. We need to make sure that, if we’re going to hand out support to people, we also help them with their lives and the responsibilities that are required to get them back on their feet, in work and rebuilding their communities.
