Penny Wright (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to respond to what the minister was saying. The minister suggests that people who are opposed to the income management scheme as it is at the moment are imagining that it is humiliating for the people who are subject to it. In fact, the information upon which I am operating is the reflections and the information I am getting from the people who are subject to it. So it is not a matter of imagining it. People are telling us that they feel humiliated from having to be part of the scheme, because they do not have any agency or power in it. So the suggestion that some people are taking it up voluntarily is a totally different argument, because, of course, as soon as someone chooses to do something voluntarily, the power balance changes totally.

Certainly there may be people who find it useful, but the fact that someone is imposing this lack of decision-making opportunities on someone else—causing them to live their life in a way that they do not necessarily feel is appropriate, making it so that they have to act in that way and so that their children and the people around them see them being affected in that way—goes to the root of the criticism of this whole program. It is about disempowering people, which does not enable them to act from a position of strength and self-determination and essentially brings about the very kinds of responses and effects that you say you are trying to avoid.