Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a delight to join this very impassioned and important debate about the cashless welfare card. The case from the opposition is very much that this policy is racist, punitive, shameful and costly. I will try and address those four key points, but I will focus on the evidence. Many of us have visited Indigenous communities. You will hear both sides of the cashless welfare card debate there, so it's inevitable that we would listening to the voices that suit our line of reasoning. That is only natural. But it's very important that all of us don't just fly in like seagulls, spend a day and talk to our chosen spokespeople.

I have a particular interest in speaking to members in this chamber who've lived in a remote Indigenous community, paid the rates, paid the rent, lived locally and seen it for themselves. I'm not one who has done that. In 1993 and 1994, in that very, very difficult time pre welfare controls and welfare cards, I was spending a lot of time in Lajamanu, a semidesert Warlpiri community in the Northern Territory. That work in 1993 and 1994 gave me the time to spend night after night and week after week in this community and see the ravages of petrol sniffing at the time. The Warlpiri people, speaking their language, would meet in large groups and mourn the inability of traditional Indigenous structures to deal with petrol and how they could communicate with the youth that they felt that they'd lost. These kinds of problems, when you've seen them firsthand—I couldn't understand the Warlpiri conversations, except the term 'petrol sniffing', because they didn't have a word for the very thing that the traditional culture was attempting to control and deal with.

The card is not perfect, of course. The card is in many ways the best way that a Western system can deal with its own limitations, which is the payment of cash as a form of income replacement. Even the payment of cash itself creates problems, a point this debate seems to have almost neglected, because before the card we paid cash, and we had terrible problems. Were I to be introducing cash I would make all these same arguments about cash. This is a relative debate about the change between the payment of cash and the introduction of a portion of that payment not being cash. It is a very subtle argument that I feel is being lost.

There is nothing racist about the policy. It is true that some of these types of social malaise are higher in Indigenous communities. It is true we went first to the parts of this great nation where these concerns were greatest, but we got Indigenous community support for it, and the first thing we said was that this card will apply to everyone here, not just to Indigenous Australians. It is a great disappointment for me that the Labor Party continues to muddy the waters there. It is true it has been introduced in areas of predominant Indigenous population. It was done with community agreement and it applied to every Australian. It's a shame that that gets liquid papered away.

The elements of punitive and shame around these cards are very hard to avoid. It's quite right that there can be significant shame about being placed on a card; I don't deny that. There's significant stress and trauma about sitting a NAPLAN test; I can't help that either. But it is a shame if elected representatives kick that shame along and promote it, and fan the flames of shame by continuing to vocalise it. I can appreciate some people will not like a government policy, but, to be honest, everything has been done in this policy to make it applicable and acceptable. Honestly, we are both cultures that now live on credit cards. We live with cashless payments, whether they come from an employer or the government. My entire life is cashless now. To simply claim and poke people and say, 'Your card's a different colour,' is to overly aggravate this debate in a negative way.

We could see self-evidently that gambling and alcohol were causing a problem. And it's not that we say nothing else works. To the members on the other side, I say that the pedal is on the floor with every other program money can afford and we still can't fix the problem. I think it's a very high bar to say: 'You know what? You introduced the card and the problems didn't go away.' That's not a failure of the card any more than it's a failure of the social worker who's delivering social services or the OT who's delivering occupational therapy services; they don't fail because the problem wasn't fixed. This is one of a range in this causal web of dysfunction that exists in every corner of Australia—black and white, and everything in between—and we need to work in every corner to do our very best. The card is just one extra element of it. It deserves to be studied, it deserves to be evaluated and it deserves to be excoriated if people find that that, in fact, is what's happening.

In reality, this is one intervention sitting alongside a range of other reforms. I think the government's done a good job over time to technologically make this card almost indistinguishable from a credit card. You'd need a PhD to work out the difference when you're using those two cards—a cashless debit card and a credit card—going through a tiny supermarket or your local store.

Let's be honest here: where it's been introduced, virtually everyone in those communities is on the card. We've now moved to Bundaberg in doing a mainstream trial. I think it's repugnant to say, 'In Bundaberg 95 per cent of the people on the card are white, so this is racist against whites.' That's the absolute counterargument to what's being put to us today. It's nothing to do with the colour of your skin. Thank you so much to the member for Petrie for standing up and saying that this has got nothing to do with race. This is a great country that's trying to pull itself together and close gaps. It's wrong to characterise this card in such a way.

There have been multiple independent evaluations. Not all of them have been positive; we accept that. What I want to do is go through the incontrovertible evidence that there is less drinking reported, fewer drugs reported and less gambling reported—and that was the goal of the card. It didn't say those things would go away with the card; anyone who's lived in a community would understand they don't go away. We're only quarantining 80 per cent anyway, so there's still 20 per cent there. I'm speaking for Australians in every other corner of this country who would say it's only reasonable that 80 per cent of a taxpayer transfer to someone on income replacement should be spent on their kids, on food and on basic household expenses. Twenty per cent is still there for all the gambling and alcohol that you want. That point seems lost on the Labor Party.

Today I come into this great place to say that I stand for the 25 per cent of people in these areas who report that they drink less alcohol. Very few say that they drink more alcohol because of the card. I stand with those 25 per cent. I'm not going to have that ripped away from them. I stand for the 22 per cent who reported reducing the number of times that they drink and the number of episodes of heavy drinking. I'm not going to have that ripped away from them. I will stand with those 22 per cent. It doesn't mean that the other 78 per cent are drinking more and more frequently. That's not the case at all; they're not.

We know that there's a positive change in gambling behaviours. Twenty-one per cent of addicted gamblers have said that the card has created a positive change, and 35 per cent of that 21 per cent said it helped in gambling for themselves. More importantly, 43 per cent said it helped in relation to their extended family, 38 per cent in relation to their friends and 60 per cent in relation to what gambling is going on in their community. I won't have that ripped away from them. There's no-one gambling more because of this card. I'm not going to let those people down. Over 40 per cent of CDC participants say they feel safer. I'm not going to have that ripped away from them. Twenty per cent of cashless debit card recipients say that they've been able to reduce illicit drugs use, one of the most addictive things there is, and they report that it's reducing. I can't find any other program around the country that does that. If it exists, I'll roll it out next to the card, complementary, as a partnership approach. Fundamentally, we needed a way to stop the fanning of the fire and the supply of the cash that was creating this problem.

Forty-five per cent of respondents reported that the cashless debit card improved things for them in general terms most of the time. That's about half the community. And the other half reported that things didn't change much. I'm not going to rip that away from that 45 per cent. When we look at the initial evaluation—that was two years ago—41 per cent reported drinking less alcohol, with 37 per cent bingeing less frequently. These are extraordinary numbers and they need to be recognised in this place. Forty-eight per cent were gambling less back in 2017. Forty per cent of parents said they could look after their children better. I'm not going to rip that away from that 40 per cent. Forty-five per cent said they were saving money for the first time or better able to save money. There's no doubt the card does that. A family can find more money than they can dream of on the card because the money isn't being spent in some of these other restricted areas.

Merchants themselves reinforce this, saying that there are increased purchases of baby items, food, clothing, shoes, toys and other goods. I will never stop the card when it means a child won't be locked in the bathroom in faeces covered nappies while their parents do drugs or alcohol; I can certainly help these parents who report these massive changes. There's increased motivation to find employment. Our culture has had millennia to get used to alcohol and to realise that you can consume it so long as you can turn up to work the next day. The moment you can't, there's a problem and there has to be some kind of intervention. Those sorts of practises haven't had time to permeate through every corner of the nation. One day they will, but in the meantime we need to ensure that government transfers for income replacement aren't spent on unlimited grog. We're just saying that grog can't be more than a fifth of the household expenditure.

Most close to my heart is the Australian Early Development Census. We do it every year; prep teachers all around the country do it. These figures are extraordinary. Up in Kununurra, in the western desert, we saw very few solutions to heavy alcohol consumption. The number of vulnerable kids reported lacking two domains of progress fell significantly in Kununurra at the time of introducing the card. There were significant improvements in social competence, emotional maturity, language, cognition, communication skills and general knowledge. I've lived in a community where there was endemic petrol sniffing and foetal alcohol syndrome, and we knew of nothing that could make any difference to foetal alcohol syndrome. We had no solution. We couldn't even stop mums we could see were pregnant drinking alcohol all day, every day with their other child strapped in a stroller. There are no pubs in the communities I'm talking about. Children were strapped in strollers all day under a tree. We're trying to reduce the amount of money spent on alcohol, and the card has done that absolutely and obviously.

We've reviewed emergency food relief vouchers and the use of parcels in Ceduna. Within 18 months of being placed on the card, around one-sixth of participants no longer needed or needed way less assistance in that area. I will not rip that away from those parents. From 16 March through to 19 March, the three-year period, the unemployment rate across all four sites had fallen by at least one per cent in the context of nothing ever having reduced unemployment before. We can see when we look at merchant data that these cards have a stabilising force and they assist participants in paying for essential items. The Labor Party says that this card is a shame, when the reality shows that participants can actually pay for what they need. The card is a source of not shame but pride. Administrative data shows us that over $2.8 million worth of alcohol would have been purchased but hasn't been thanks to the card, and that includes gambling products. That's a significant reduction in alcohol sales. Obviously, those sales would have gone ahead without the card.

Since the COVID supplement in March this year, it was a very interesting natural experiment. Around $10 million has been spent within supermarkets and grocery stores—a huge jump—but the question is: what has it been spent on?

About $1.2 million of that has been spent on clothes and shoes, and a lot of that was for children. I will not rip it away from those families. But before you can suggest that this is just about more cash flowing through a community, there's evidence also of an increased spending on recreational goods and appliances. Examples would include TVs, PlayStations and other recreational equipment. But, for the first time, families that could barely live, as the previous speaker said, between payment fortnights are in a position now to buy recreational and other retail elements that could never be afforded before. What I am saying will infuriate urban Labor MPs, who are utterly out of touch with the conditions in remote Australia. They flew in in a Cessna, flew out that afternoon, spoke to the two people who were annoyed by the cashless debit card and were reinforced and brought it back here.

The Labor Party's arguments in this chamber about shame and about the punitive nature of the card, characterising it as racist and calling it shameful and costly, is one of the most disappointing elements of this debate. We can have this debate, and the card is not everything—but the card is something. The card has done its job clearly, by evaluation. And, in the context of remote Australia, where these are some of the hardest and most perennial and ingrained problems, maybe these solutions will be intergenerational. But I finish where I started: with these massive numbers of people who have ameliorated behaviour—reduced gambling; reduced drinking; are able to feed, support and educate their children for the first time. I will not walk away from you.

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