Australia: Cashless Welfare Program To Curb Harmful Substances
Australia expands cashless welfare card to tackle alcohol and other drugs.
Despite criticism and opposition, Australia will expand the roll-out of cashless welfare cards after a pilot scheme showed a sharp drop in alcohol and other drug abuse, the country’s prime minister announced.
The government introduced the debit card – touted as a world-first – last year to two remote communities blighted by high levels of welfare dependence coupled with significant social issues fuelled by alcohol and other drugs. Earlier this year, an initial evaluation of the cashless debit card trial – a scheme that controls how social security payments can be spent in two mostly Indigenous communities – found it had largely been effective “in reducing alcohol consumption, illegal drug use and gambling – establishing a clear ‘proof-of-concept’”. The evaluation also showed a clear drop in family violence.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said it would now be rolled out into a third site – the Goldfields region in Western Australia.
The card is designed to limit people’s access to cash, with 80% of a recipient’s welfare quarantined and not able to be used to buy alcohol or to gamble. The other 20% is credited to their bank accounts and can be withdrawn as cash.
Turnbull said two-thirds of all domestic assaults in the Goldfields region, where the card will next be introduced, were fuelled by alcohol, while alcohol-related hospital admissions and death rates were 25% higher than the national average.
Criticism of and opposition to the program
The Australian Greens are opposed to the card, calling it an “ideologically driven attempt to manage the money and hence lives of people living below or near the poverty line on income support” – per reports of the Straits Times.
The science of the program’s evaluation has also been questioned.
Australian National University researchers have criticized the reliability of a government-commissioned study used to justify the cashless debit card’s expansion.
The study, conducted by Orima research, has since been used by the government as proof of the effectiveness of the scheme, which critics say is punitive and coercive.
But the deputy director of the Australian National University’s Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Janet Hunt, has warned it is “unwise” to place too much stock in the Orima initial evaluation.
Hunt argues the Orima evaluation suffers from recall bias, uses flawed weightings for the two locations and fails to take into account crucial external factors that may be simultaneously improving conditions in Indigenous communities.
That includes the takeaway alcohol management system trialled at the same time in the east Kimberley. The study is simply too categorical in its conclusions, Hunt said.
There was another study – the Codeswitch report – that looked at the takeaway alcohol management program … they make very clear that they couldn’t untangle the impact that the takeaway alcohol program had from the impact of the cashless debit card,” Hunt told Guardian Australia.
They couldn’t say ‘yes, it was the takeaway alcohol management system that produced these benefits. So if they couldn’t work it out from that side, how can you claim it was the cashless debit card?”
Hunt said she was not ideologically opposed to income management but believes other support measures should be used first. She said cashless debit cards should be only used on a voluntary basis or as a temporary “circuit breaker” in conjunction with wraparound support services in situations of real crisis.