Social Services Minister Anne Ruston has recently furiously denied the Morrison government has any plans to impose the degrading cashless debit card on aged pensioners.
In an interview earlier this year she spoke of "the broadening of the use of the card," explaining the direction of this trajectory: "I think initially there was a very strong view that the card was around dealing with gambling, alcohol and drug related social harm in community but what we've seen with the change with technology is that it actually has become a financial budgeting tool so that people on low incomes can manage their budget..."
At the conclusion of the interview she reaffirmed the government's satisfaction with this particular "technology," which, in this case, is code for instrument of disempowerment and control: "We are seeking to put all income management onto the universal platform which is the cashless debit card."
But there's much to be said about the cashless debit card. For a start it is quite profitable. Not so much for those who are forced to use it but certainly for Indue, the company that operates it. Proposed by mining magnate Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest back in 2014 and championed by his foundation, it is a wonderful example of why people on low incomes do not need people on high incomes to tell them how to manage their money.
This "technology" is not designed to address the lack of income adequacy. Instead it quarantines 80 per cent of a person's income, restricting how this can be allocated, based on the offensive and inaccurate assumption that if you receive a working-age payment then you are either likely to have an addiction or be a poor manager of your meagre finances and in need of some "parental" supervision by the government via a for-profit private company.
Which is why the card is such an insulting proposition for aged pensioners, and for everybody who is currently forced under its regime. It stigmatises. And as for the glowing reports the government likes to give it and its predecessors, the Australian National Audit Office has noted that it is "difficult to conclude whether there had been a reduction in social harm" as the government's "approach to monitoring and evaluation was inadequate".
Compulsory income management was imposed in the first instance on the basis of race as one of the flagship programs accompanying the disgraceful Northern Territory Intervention of 2007. Consistent with the historic trajectory of colonisation, it was the bearer of systematic disempowerment and infantilisation. As Yolngu Elder, Dr Djiniyini Gondarra OAM observed in 2012: "People are sick and tired of being controlled. When people are sick and tired of control they just give up hope ... They cannot live for the day because their lives are controlled by somebody else." And before we get too comfortable about Senator Ruston's assurances regarding aged pensioners let us not forget that First Nations aged pensioners in so-called "prescribed communities" in the Northern Territory were in fact included in the compulsory income management regime in 2007.
Elaine Peckham, Central Arrente Mbantua woman and founder of the Central Australian Aboriginal Strong Women's Alliance (CAASWA), was one of the pensioners forced into compulsory income management. In 2010 she told a Senate Inquiry: "I am holding in my hands a BasicsCard [a predecessor to the cashless debit card] which I am on. Pensioners and people with a disability will go off that. What does that guarantee us? I have tried to go through the process of getting off the BasicsCard. I found that I had to prove that I am a good mother and a good grandmother - and now I am a great grandmother. I did not have to prove anything to get this BasicsCard but now I have to prove myself to get off it. So what incentive is that for us? Where do we stand? ... We would like to see our basic rights given back - not the BasicsCard."
You don't build a strong and diverse society by humiliating people. You don't create equality by damning those who are often already made to feel damned.
The ANU's Dr Elise Klein has found in her own research in the East Kimberley, that the program makes people's lives much harder: "Those targeted are a broad group needing support for a broad range of reasons, yet all are treated as if they have issues with alcohol or drugs or gambling. Most of the people on it do indeed have a common problem: that is trying to survive on meagre payments in remote environments with a chronically low supply of jobs."
Professor Greg Marston, from the University of Queensland, reported that: "The majority of people didn't have a problem with spending or budgeting, what they had a problem with was inadequate income support payments. In fact, most of the people we spoke with were very good at budgeting, they just didn't have enough money to cover all their expenses."
The cashless debit card, like other forms of compulsory income management, is punitive and paternalistic. Rather than being based on evidence it is based on an ideology that devalues and demeans people strictly on the basis of their need for income support. The sickeningly offensive attitude of the purveyors of this "technology" is that if you need to use the social security system it is because "you can't look after yourself."
We have a social security system, albeit dangerously denuded, that is there for people who need it, from veterans and aged pensioners to people with a disability, parents and other carers, students and people experiencing unemployment. No one should have assumptions made about them based on the fact that they are claiming their right to assistance.
Income adequacy will never be addressed while we have a government that is obsessed with compulsory income management. The inadequacy of JobSeeker and other payments has been highlighted during the current pandemic. It has also been abundantly clear that the temporary coronavirus supplement immediately lifted people out of poverty and financial hardship.
Inequality is evidenced starkly when we look at income inadequacy, whether someone is in paid work or not, bearing in mind that the rampant insecurity that has been carefully structured into the labour market, combined with government attempts to crush and restrict collective bargaining, means that a job is not necessarily a protection against poverty. But there is much more to inequality. It is also imposed through the differential imposition of control and coercion, whether on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, age, or any other means of discrimination and disrespect.
You don't build a strong and diverse society by humiliating people. You don't create equality by damning those who are often already made to feel damned.
Inequality is deliberate and carefully structured. Our social security system cannot be viewed in isolation from the way we organise our economic activity as a society, how a system that measures everything and everyone in relation to profit and profitability exposes us differentially to avoidable hardship, violence, injury and even death.
But the desire for a more equal society springs forth from every sphere of life. It is our only hope. It is deeply personal but profoundly collective, and its shoots are visible, even while there are those in power whose hearts are set on crushing souls and putting people down.
Senator Ruston is well-known for her comments opposing an increase to social security payments ("Giving [people] more money would do absolutely nothing ... probably all it would do is give drug dealers more money and give pubs more money"). Her assurance that aged pensioners will not be forced onto the humiliating cashless debit card gives little comfort to those who are currently under, and those who are yet to be brought under, this degrading regime.
- Dr John Falzon is senior fellow of inequality and social justice at progressive think tank Per Capita. He is the author of The Language of the Unheard (2012) and a collection of poems, Communists Like Us (2017). He was national chief executive of the St Vincent de Paul Society from 2006 to 2018.
