The trial for the government's cashless welfare card scheme is due to end in just a few weeks and, predictably and understandably, the government is trying to push through legislation to make it permanent.
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But what makes this push especially brash is the fact even some in its own ranks are concerned about the scheme.
The cards freeze up to 80 per cent of Centrelink payments so money can only be spent on what the government deems essential.
It prohibits people from spending money on alcohol, drugs and gambling.
Liberal MP Bridget Archer, in a feisty speech last week, said the cards would encourage Australians to see those on welfare as somehow lesser than others.
They would, she said, take away people's sense of pride.
"Applying a broad brush to all recipients in a current site, no matter their circumstances, is harmful and unhelpful," she told the lower house.
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Labor social services spokeswoman Linda Burney has also pointed out the scheme unfairly targeted Indigenous Australians.
Trials in South Australia's Ceduna region, the East Kimberley and Goldfields in Western Australia, and Bundaberg and Hervey Bay in Queensland are due to end on December 31.
The bill Scott Morrison is pushing to pass permanently puts welfare recipients in those areas on the cards, and transfers people in the Northern Territory to the scheme from another type of income management card.
Using broad-ranging schemes to scoop up a vast range of people with differing circumstances into a single system of welfare administration has vivid shades of robodebt about it.
But the government appears so far unconcerned about the inevitable potential for inequities that will arise as the scheme is administered in its current form.
And yet the narrative around the cashless welfare card is predictably positive - a way of saving those with money troubles from themselves by limiting what they can spend their welfare payments on.
The government ultimately wants us to believe that it has welfare recipients' best interests at heart when it restricts them from spending money on things it deems to be the cause of their need for welfare the first place.
It is a simplistic and demeaning policy that stigmatises rather than assists people to re-enter the workforce and society.
It also ignores the many other factors that may lead a person into a situation requiring welfare, either in the short term or over a stretch of months or years.
The program's stated objective is to "reduce immediate hardship and deprivation, helping welfare recipients with their budgeting strategies and reducing the likelihood they'll remain on welfare".
But effectively dictating what welfare payments should be spent on is surely a dead end.
Not all welfare recipients have problems with alcohol, or are unable to gamble responsibly. Not all are addicted to cigarettes.
All three of these prohibited things are legal and accessible to society at large, whether they cause problems or not.
It's facile and offensive to assume drinking, smoking and gambling are the cause of a person's difficult circumstances.
And it's hard to see what the end point is of such a scheme.
If it's to help welfare recipients regain a sense of self-worth, then forbidding them from things accessible to others is surely not going to achieve that.
