Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to support the government's bill, the Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Income Management Reform) Bill 2023, but also to support the amendment moved by the shadow minister, calling for the reintroduction of the cashless debit card across the current trial sites.

This is very close to my heart. The Goldfields and the northern Goldfields are a part of my electorate and I have worked with those communities since late 2015 for the introduction of the card. I've watched this debate and I've watched members from the other side, including the assistant minister, make statements that are completely untrue. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they made those statements out of ignorance, as opposed to some other term which, as it's unparliamentary, I can't use in this place.

One of the furphies I've heard over and over again is that the card was imposed on these communities. Nothing could be further from the truth. In late 2015, when I was in Leonora one evening, a wonderful, beautiful Aboriginal elder, Nanna Gay Harris, approached me to say that there had just been two teenage suicides in the town—that two young females, sadly, had taken their own lives. She pleaded with me: 'What can we do about this? What can you do?' I said: 'Look, I haven't got all the answers and I don't even know if I have got an answer, but I know that we're trialling a cashless debit card in Ceduna, which would restrict the amount of money that a welfare recipient would receive. Eighty per cent of that money would go on their card, and that money wouldn't be available to buy alcohol or drugs or for gambling. I don't know whether that is the answer, but we can give it a go.' She said: 'Please. We need to do something in our community.'

It's also a furphy that these communities weren't consulted. This was followed—and these are Department of Social Services figures—by 270 consultations across the northern Goldfields part of my electorate. I attended some of them. We travelled all across the Goldfields with people from DSS to explain how the card would work, and most of the communities embraced the cashless debit card. It's a mistake to say that we forced this on the communities. We travelled to places like Tjuntjuntjara, 600 kilometres east of Kalgoorlie in the Menzies shire. The people there made it very clear they didn't want the card. 'We don't want this Indue fella,' is what they said. We carved the shire of Menzies, in which Tjuntjuntjara sits, out of the legislation. The town of Menzies would be in the card trial, but the community of Tjuntjuntjara would not be in the trial site. To the north, the Ngaanyatjarra Council made it very clear they didn't want the card, so they didn't get the card. No community in the northern Goldfields who wasn't crying out for the card had the card imposed on them. I want to put that furphy to bed very early on in my speech tonight.

When the card was introduced, we saw some amazing results, anecdotally. In towns like Coolgardie, where there's one store, one side of the store sells groceries and household items, and the other side of the store sells alcohol. Once the card was introduced, all the people that were queueing up on one side queued up on the other side. Children were being fed and going to school with lunch. The demand for breakfast services and others diminished considerably, because, all of a sudden, the money wasn't being spent over here in the bottle shop queue; it was being spent over there in the grocery queue. Rents were being paid, the power bill was being paid—all the sorts of issues that create dysfunction and instability in families because all the money is being spent over here at the alcohol till. That was repeated right across the trial sites, whether in Kalgoorlie—which is a much bigger town of 30,000 people and it's much harder to identify the individual outcomes—or in Laverton and Leonora, back to towns with one store. Des Cannons, the owner of the Laverton general store, told us just the other day, when the Leader of the Opposition visited the northern Goldfields, that the difference is dramatic. From pre the cashless debit card to the cashless debit card, the shopping patterns are dramatically different. Of course, now we're back to no cashless debit card. So we're seeing massive dysfunction returning to those communities, particularly in the northern Goldfields.

The leaders of those communities travelled to Canberra this week. I welcome them into the House: Peter Craig, President of the Shire of Leonora; Patrick Hill, President of the Shire of Laverton; and Marty Seelander, who is the CEO of the Pakaanu Aboriginal Corporation. They have travelled a long way, believe me. It's a thousand kilometres from Laverton to Perth. Then you get on a plane, and you fly from Perth to Canberra. It's not easy to get here. These people didn't come because they wanted to take a week away from their very busy work and their jobs. They came here to tell people in this place what life is really like on the ground in their communities.

We were in government for nine years, and I can't remember an incident where a member of the previous government disrespected people of my community, like the assistant minister disrespected these people in a radio interview on ABC Goldfields on 15 February. In response to a question from the presenter, Ivo da Silva, about Patrick Hill talking about the dysfunction in his community since the removal of the cashless debit card, the assistant minister said, 'I don't think this is the time to play cheap political games.' This is the shire president of a community that's in crisis, who is much loved across the Goldfields. I listened to that interview, and the presenter, Ivo da Silva, was very much taken aback by this attack on someone who is so well regarded and so well loved across the Goldfields community. The minister went on to say that, basically, Patrick Hill was wrong, that there are many complex matters and that many people on the ground told her that the cashless debit card didn't actually make that much of a difference.

What would have stung about that for Patrick Hill and the other members of the Laverton Shire Council was that the following evening, when they all walked out of the shire council building at nine o'clock after their shire council meeting, there was a woman lying on the street right outside the shire building—and I know this because I saw the bloodstain on the road when I arrived there a few days later. She was badly beaten and bleeding profusely. Of course, they administered emergency first aid. They called the police and the ambulance, and the woman was flown to Perth. Subsequent CCTV footage revealed that the man sitting just up the road a way had systematically beaten and kicked this woman for an hour and 10 minutes. An hour and 10 minutes! He had kicked her in the head so many times that half her scalp was missing. If people don't believe that this happened, it happened right outside the shire building the day after Justine Elliot questioned these people about whether they were making up or exaggerating the problem in their town. I just think that it's an absolute disgrace that they were disrespected in that way. I certainly hope that the assistant minister apologised to them this afternoon when, apparently, she met with them.

So here we are, in the situation where we're seeing the outcome of what is, effectively, policy by Facebook—policy by social media. There are some people who are active on Facebook who managed to get the attention of the member for Bruce and others. They ran a very successful campaign denigrating the cashless debit card. These are people who I have to say live a very long way from Laverton or Lenora—a long, long way. They denigrated the cashless debit card and the Labor Party saw a political opportunity to campaign. They made up this complete nonsense that there was some plan to introduce a cashless debit card for pensioners and they refused to vote on a motion put to the Senate by Senator Anne Ruston, who was the minister at the time, basically saying that the cashless debit card would never be introduced to pensioners. That would have been inconvenient for the lie that they were spreading around the place, but they got some political advantage out of it—no question. I would venture to say that there were probably votes in it in some electorates—probably quite a lot of votes.

But the people who paid the price for that were people like the woman outside the Laverton shire buildings on the evening of Thursday 16 February. They're the people who paid the price. That's the blood money that she paid for a few extra votes. So I'm here tonight to plead with the government for the Prime Minister and the minister to come to the dispatch box and take a leaf out of Peter Beattie's book. He made a political art form out of saying, 'I'm sorry.' Come, because you got this one wrong. Come to the dispatch box and say that you're sorry. Say that you're sorry you got it wrong and that you understand now that there are people who are really suffering because of the decision that you made. This isn't just student politics anymore, there are real consequences to the decisions being made in this place. Those consequences are being played out in towns like Laverton, Leonora, Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie and Menzies. That's where the consequences are playing out. It isn't too late, though; those communities were making progress. Things had stabilised and there were fewer alcohol-related incidents.

We saw over the weekend reports in the national newspaper that crime statistics in one of the other trial sites, Ceduna, in the seat of my colleague the member for Gray, have risen by 100 per cent. They have doubled. Those people are paying the price for the decisions that were made here in this place. As I said, it is not too late for the government to do a Peter Beattie here and to admit they got it wrong. The Prime Minister could come in here along with the minister and say to the people of Laverton and to the people of Leonora: 'We're sorry. We got this one wrong and we're going to reinstate the card.' Call it the SmartCard; call it whatever you like. It's still being run by Indue, contrary to many of the minister's statements. Call it what you like. Reintroduce the SmartCard. I'll be the first to get on my feet and congratulate the government for making a courageous move. Given that we've now hit 7.30 pm, I will conclude my comments. But, to the Prime Minister and the minister, please consider— (Time expired)

Debate interrupted.

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