RADICAL Federal Government plans to widen its control over how welfare recipients spend their benefits have been described as a “cynical manoeuvre that has nothing to do with addressing the causes of disadvantage and exclusion in Australian society”.
St Vincent de Paul national council chief executive officer Dr John Falzon said the Gov-ernment’s decision was more about responding to criticisms that the Racial Discrimination Act had been breached by the current compulsory income management plans applying only to certain Northern Territory indigenous communities.
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ecumenical Commission executive director Graeme Mundine said the plan would still be discriminatory as its first phase would cover only the Northern Territory “and that three-quarters of the 20,000 or so people it would affect are either Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders”.
Catholic Social Services Australia executive director Frank Quinlan said the Gov-ernment’s proposal would do little to resolve the issues facing some of the most disadvantaged Australians.
The leaders’ comments came after a Federal Government announcement that Families Minister Jenny Macklin would be able to declare any locality as an area of extreme disadvantage under new laws that will open up welfare recipients to compulsory income management.
Under the changes to apply from July next year, welfare recipients in designated areas face having half their payments quarantined for food, rent and other essential items.
Initially the Government will roll out the scheme across the Northern Territory.
Ms Macklin said she would decide after the scheme had been properly evaluated in 2011-12 whether to extend it to other areas around Australia.
Mr Quinlan said CSSA was concerned that “many effective programs are not adequately funded and that programs such as welfare quarantining will have little positive effect on their own and may even have the effect of further demoralising some poor families”.
“The Federal Government’s announcement that (could) see welfare quarantining rolled out nationally … appears to shift discrimination from indigenous people alone to poor people living in disadvantaged areas right across Australia.
“The Government is proposing to take the most regressive aspects of the Northern Territory emergency response and apply them nationally without the new resources that were applied in the Northern Territory.
“Helping people move beyond disadvantage requires a balance between incentives and support.”
Both Dr Falzon and Mr Mundine said budget management education programs would be a more effective long-term strategy to ensure the effective use of welfare ben-efits.
“Anyway it’s all a furphy – just language distracting the community from the real issue which is why people need to be on income support in the first place and who’s really to blame,” Dr Falzon said.
Dr Falzon described the proposed scheme as “discrimination by postcode” and said the Rudd Government in implementing such a scheme “was going down the American path of close supervision of people who are doing it tough”.
“What has been happening in the Northern Territory is racial discrimination – the new scheme will turn this to class discrimination,” he said.
“It demonises a group of welfare recipients and labels them as incapable of taking care of their own affairs.”
Mr Mundine said the compulsory income management plan was likely to cause more harm than good.
“The reality is there are a lot of damaged people in some of these Northern Territory communities,” he said.
“All this will do is to build further resent-ment … make these more depressed from lack of control over their lives and send them sinking further into drug and alcohol abuse.”
Mr Mundine said there were many more effective ways of bringing about positive change and that the latest plan typified government attitudes to these communities.
“In spite of good intentions, authorities seem to be going about things the wrong way once again,” Mr Mundine said.
“Once again everything is being imposed from the outside.
“So there’s no ownership of such schemes in the communities – and if local people aren’t involved, such schemes are bound to fail.
“Instead of saying to these communities: ‘What are your hopes, dreams, desires and then how do we work towards this?’ they come in with a stick and say the current system is not working, scrap everything.
“Everyone gets bashed around the ears because unfortunately a few groups may have mucked up.
“The fact is there are many good things going on in communities – things that are working such as Aboriginal health services.”
Mr Mundine said the closing down of CDEP (Community Development Employ-ment Project) programs had been a major error.
“The programs didn’t work all the time,” he said.
“However, when they did, people were educated about the value of work and filled in their time doing things in the community like gardening, garbage clean-up and so on.
“Now there’s nothing to take their place.
“Compulsory income management plans are not going to provide any worthwhile answers.
“Much more promising are community-based programs such as those offered by Caritas around better training on income management and education on the effects of alcohol abuse.”
Meanwhile, the Federal Government has recently announced it will reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) in the Northern Territory in 2010.
This follows criticism by the United Nations. RDA provisions were suspended by the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) legislation implemented by the Fed-eral Government in August 2007.
