Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That Social Security (Administration) (Declared income management areas) Determination 2012, made under section 123TFA of the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999, be disallowed.

That Social Security (Administration) (Vulnerable income management areas) Specification 2012, made under subsections 123UCA(3) and 123UGB(2) of the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999, be disallowed.

That Social Security (Administration) (Vulnerable Welfare Payment Recipient) Principles 2012, made under subsection 123UGA(2) of the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999, be disallowed.

That Social Security (Administration) (Specified income management Territory – Northern Territory) Specification 2012, made under subsections 123UCB(4) and 123UCC(4) of the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999, be disallowed.

That Social Security (Administration) (Declared child protection State – New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria) Determination 2012, made under section 123TF of the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999, be disallowed.

In moving this disallowance motion I would like to point out the reasons I think the Senate should support it. I am well on the record as not supporting income management, and I will articulate that yet again here, as well as why I think this is a disastrous approach and why it would be a good idea to stop it going any further.

These regulations activate the income management powers, which are an extension of an expansion of the intervention powers which were brought in under the banner of Stronger Futures. One of the regulations deals with the extension of income management to the long-term unemployed in the Northern Territory. This is a technical regulation due to some changes that were made under Stronger Futures. The other motions extend income management to trial sites around Australia and provide powers to the minister to introduce the place based income management in the five trial sites of Bankstown, Shepparton, Logan, Rockhampton and Playford.

The Greens have consistently opposed income management because it is a radical and frankly terrifying departure from the basic principle of the social security safety net that makes Australia a fair and more equitable country. Maybe it is not fair to use the word 'radical', because this is actually one of the most socially conservative policies yet to come from the government. This government now has a strong track record in implementing punitive social policies. It is a government which, last time we met in this place, finished a job that even John Howard was not prepared to do they pushed another 150,000 single parents and their children onto the significantly lower Newstart payment. At least the Howard government grandfathered that cohort of parents.

It is a government that apologises for generations of trauma but then just as quickly moves to give its own, hands-on demonstration of a paternalistic approach to another generation of Aboriginal Australians. It is a government that favours delivering a budget surplus rather than providing better outcomes for low-income families.

If it is not a radical departure from the basic tenets of our social security system, which is based on ensuring a minimum income for all eligible citizens without seeking to disempower the recipient by supplying their income in kind rather than in cash, then I do not know how else to describe a policy whose stated objective is to control how income is spent in order to 'encourage socially responsible behaviour, including in relation to to the care and education of children'. The concept of income management is clearly rooted in a notion of new paternalism that flies in the face of nearly 50 years of continual progression away from the heavy-handedness of a less enlightened era.

The social security net is one of the most important features of our democracy and the way of life in Australia. It is meant to ensure that there is some minimum standard of living for each and every Australian. There are already stringent tests to access that support in the first place. To now impose upon some of the recipients of that support that they must now demonstrate somebody's version of socially responsible behaviour is to promote the idea that disadvantage is primarily a result of the individual's failure to demonstrate the necessary social values and norms.

I do not deny that there is some welfare dependency in this country. There is of course—and I have spoken about this at length—entrenched poverty and patterns of prolonged interaction with the social security system in our communities. However, income management is not the answer. We need to be addressing the barriers.

For those who are inclined towards increasingly heavy-handed top-down solutions when they are confronted by wicked social problems, income management feels like a really easy solution. But the only people it actually helps are those who seek to deny the basic rights of all Australians to a minimum standard of living, regardless of their personal circumstances and regardless of gender, ethnicity, education or ability.

I have no doubt also—while I have had a go at the government—that those in opposition also have strong views around this particular measure. It was them after all who introduced income management in the first place. In fact we have evidence of these views most recently in the speech by the shadow Treasurer, Joe Hockey, which he gave earlier this year, in which he suggested that our social safety net was an entitlement and sought to imply that we need to be removing some of these entitlements; whether he actually meant the social security net is unclear.

A safety net is not a luxury; it is a basic right that we offer to all Australians. After all, anyone can find themselves out of work, laid off, ill, in crisis or living with crisis or family breakdown. Looking after one another is one of the proudest traditions in this country. Our social security system is a powerful demonstration of the basic values of equality and of opportunity.

This decision to start punishing and maligning the individual when there are clearly structural barriers, entrenched poverty and generational trauma violates this tradition. And for what? The evidence we have suggests that this is only making sure that some people are even further disadvantage and socially excluded. Concerns about the application of this policy on disadvantaged communities were possibly best expressed by Professor Tony Vinson, a member of the government's social inclusion board, who raised concerns that his widely respected research on disadvantaged regions—a well-known piece of work—would be wrongly used to target social security recipients or income management. He said:

… charting the distribution of disadvantage throughout Australia was intended to concentrate positive, inclusive forms of assistance for individuals and families caught in entrenched disadvantage, not to increase their exposure to sanctions.

The fact is that income management is a huge social experiment in new paternalism. Even the way the minister describes these five sites as 'trial sites' demonstrates that the government is embarking on a brand new path with this policy.

The government has consistently emphasised the importance of evidence based policy. For example, Minister Macklin has spoken of her 'unshakeable belief in the power of responsive, evidence based policy to drive progressive reform at many different levels'. However, we believe the growing body of evidence from the last four years worth of income quarantining in the Northern Territory demonstrates that this policy is not working.

I will point out here that the process of Stronger Futures and the extension of it to these trial sites has gone in the absence of meaningful evaluation. When I asked in estimates about the progress of the evaluation of the current NT process, I was told there was a draft for the first part of it which was sitting with either the department or the minister. It still has not been released.

While I am that point, there was an article on Saturday, 15 September, in the Weekend Australian which said:

NEW research from a major study of indigenous children and their families in 11 sites around Australia shows overwhelming support for income management, with 77 per cent of respondents saying income management had led to positive changes to communities.

It goes on to document that.

When I went to the FaHCSIA website to find that information on that Saturday, guess what? It was not there. Wave 3 of that longitudinal survey was not there at the time—it is now but it was not then—and wave 4 is still not available. When I asked in this chamber, through an order for the production of documents motion—which the chamber supported—those documents indicated to me that wave 4 data had not been released. In fact, on the note that I got, it says: 'Wave 4 data has not yet been released.' That is a document that was tabled in the Senate in response to my order for the production of documents motion. So I ask: how come that information was released when it was not publicly available information and any other member of the community could not check the validity of that information? Maybe I am too cynical, but my cynical response is that that was a leak so that the government could claim, without any evidence or any backup that anybody could look at, that people are happy on income management.

But when you look a bit deeper and look at the survey that was undertaken you see that there are in fact some issues around that. The question does not differentiate between whether it is compulsory income management or voluntary income management—and people's responses to voluntary versus compulsory income management are very different. It combines Centrepay in with the question about income management. Centrepay is completely different from income management. The survey was over a large number of Aboriginal communities, not just those who were subject to income management. I question the use of that data, but it is an example of more of the same. Income management and the so-called successors of income management have been a matter of spin by this government to try to justify continuing this top-down paternalistic approach.

I had some other background work done on income management. The background briefing I received, looking at weighing and summarising the evidence, said:

There is no clear evidence that the policy is working. In none of the locations in which it operates is there unambiguous evidence for or against the effectiveness of income management. The overall picture emerging from the available evidence is one in which positive changes have been uneven and fragile.

There are no demonstrable improvements that justify the continuation of income management. The independent report from March 2010 by the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association, in collaboration with the University of New South Wales Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation and with support from the Fred Hollows Foundation, raised serious concerns about the continued future wellbeing of Indigenous children and families under the Northern Territory intervention. The health impact assessment found that compulsory income management had ‘profound’ long-term negative impacts on psychological health, social health and wellbeing as well as cultural integrity.

The study of income management, looking at women's experiences, which was completed by the Equality Rights Alliance in May and June 2011, shows that, of the more than 180 women with direct experience on income management who participated, 79 per cent wanted to exit the system, 85 per cent had not changed what they bought and 74 per cent felt discriminated against. That discrimination has a palpable impact on people. The government conducted a telephone inquiry of store owners and concluded on that basis that the sales of fresh food had increased. I said at the time that was a very dubious way of collecting information. Earlier on in the income management experiment, the Menzies Institute demonstrated, using other assessment tools, that there had not been a measurable impact on the sale of tobacco or junk foods.

On top of the example I used about spin on results, this adds up to there not being quantifiable evidence to show that income management works. In fact, there is evidence to show that it disempowers people. The Public Health Association of Australia, in evidence to the recent Senate inquiry, acknowledged that this practice disempowers individuals. They said:

In addition to undermining autonomy and self-determination—which are pre-requisites for good health and wellbeing—universal compulsory income management violates Australia's human rights commitments and the principles of citizenship.

Given the lack of evidence and the potential to negatively impact on the community empowerment, it is deeply concerning to the Australian Greens that income management is being rolled out in these five new trial sites and that the Social Security Legislation Amendment Act, as it is now, empowers the minister to give referral powers to the state and territory agencies, ostensibly extending income management by stealth across Australia. These are, we believe, inappropriate powers to hand over to the states.

Let us look at the instruments that I am seeking to disallow and look at what they talk about—and, specifically, I am referring to Social Security (Administration) (Vulnerable Welfare Payment Recipient) Principles 2012. This is the instrument that puts in place allowing the income management of so-called vulnerable people. And why could you be vulnerable? Financial hardship, failure to undertake reasonable self-care—who's definition?—homelessness or risk of homelessness. I will take you to one of the paragraphs that talks about financial hardship. It says:

(a) the person is unable, due to a lack of financial resources, to obtain goods or services, or to access or engage in activities, to meet his or her relevant priority needs; and

(b) the lack of financial resources mentioned in paragraph (a) is not solely attributable to the amount of income earned, derived or received by the person.

Of course, you have to put that in! You have to put that in because every single person on Newstart would be experiencing financial hardship, as we know that Newstart is $130 below the poverty line. So just when do you decide that a person is in financial hardship when they are already living $130 below the poverty line? Who decides? Centrelink, a social worker, decides that someone is living in financial hardship. Then there is 'failure to undertake reasonable self-care', where it says:

(a) the person is engaged in conduct that threatens the physical or mental wellbeing of the person;

Under homelessness it says:

(c) is using, or is at risk of needing to access, emergency accommodation or a refuge.

What is 'at risk'—that they are living in poverty; that they are not able to know where their next rent payment is going to be made? People are very nervous about this vulnerability criteria and what it actually means. Then it goes onto decision-making principles and talks about the person who ' is applying appropriate resources to meet some or all of the person’s relevant priority needs.' Again, it comes back to: if you are living on Newstart you cannot meet all your relevant priority needs. Income management is about punishing people. It is a top-down punitive approach that does not address the fundamental barriers of how people manage to get off Newstart and into paid employment.

I have also been asking constantly about the cost of these particular measures. Last time I asked about the cost —bearing in mind at estimates we were told only 102 people had gone on at the five trial sites at the moment—the government could not tell us what the total cost of establishing and setting up income management in these five trial sites was. I have had a bit of a stab at it, as have other people at some of the other sites and, in the Territory scheme, which affects around 20,000 people, the community calculated it as $4,100 per person per annum. Just to put this into a bit of perspective: this is a third of the allowance paid to unemployed people on Newstart.

I was trying to do some figures on the costs of the rollout of income management in Western Australia. Looking at the figures that we were able to access, it works out at about $11,900 over the period of time that the trial has been operating. Those were only the figures I was able to get hold of at the time and that were publicly available. This is a significant cost and, again, the amount per person from information that we got from estimates and the income management in the APY Lands is $8,000 per person.

My proposition is that that money would be far better invested in helping people overcome the barriers to gaining employment, to gaining education. Imagine if we invested that sort of money in early childhood learning to overcome the impacts of otitis media. You would automatically raise the number of kids that would go on to year 12. I also believe that you would be diverting a lot of people out of the criminal justice system for those that were listening to my talk earlier about the impact of otitis media and poor hearing, and interaction with the criminal justice system.

This is not the appropriate way to be helping the most disadvantaged in our community. These powers in these trial sites as yet do not address the issues around long-term unemployed and disengaged youth other than the instrument that deals with that issue in the Northern Territory. Again, income management is not the best way to deal with long-term unemployment. We have heard a wealth of evidence in the inquiry into Newstart that is ongoing at the moment that clearly shows where money needs to be invested and where we need to be addressing long-term unemployment. Income management is not the way to address that.

There is no evidence that income management works. There are other measures that we should be addressing that would truly close the gap and give people long-term support. It is interesting to note some of the reports that have come from the financial counsellors, because part of this measure was supposed to be financial counselling. The financial counsellors have concerns. (Time expired).