Government mythology on income management,alcohol,addiction and Indigenous communities

The need to place feedback about voluntary income management in context

Then Minister for Human Services, Alan Tudge (in Mitchell, 2015), promotes income management by claiming that “when given the opportunity … to come off the BasicsCard fully 60% choose to stay on it because they realise it’s beneficial for them.” However, there are dubious ethics involved in adopting a simplistic understanding of feedback on voluntary income management in an attempt to justify continuation and further expansion of compulsory income management measures. Minister Tudge’s comments are contrary to grassroots feedback about how difficult it is for people to exit income management – including so-called “voluntary” income management. Many who are on voluntary income management have not understood they have an exit option. Bray and colleagues (2014: 238) refer to an interviewed legal service officer who reported that “[t]he people on Voluntary Income Management that we see don’t identify with it being voluntary”.

Tudge’s comment about voluntary income management also fails to take into consideration that there are other colonial surveillance policy factors contributing to the feedback the government receives from some Indigenous people about income management. For example, community feedback on income management in Alice Springs was influenced by historical and contemporary government practices of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families and communities (HREOC, 1997: 28–29; ATSISJC, 2016: 28; Bray et al., 2014: 168). This community stated “it would be a shame job if we said things had got worse for our children” after income management was introduced “and if we did, what would happen? Would the government take them away again?” (Bray et al., 2014: 168).

Government practices of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families and communities, known as the Stolen Generations, continue to loom large in the consciousness of Australia’s First Peoples (HREOC, 1997: 28–29). There is a direct link between compulsory income management and surveillance by child protection authorities, thus under the Commonwealth Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 s 123UC a person will fall under the compulsory income management regime if there is deemed to be a ‘child protection’ issue. Numerous Indigenous parents live under weighty surveillance undertaken by child welfare officials and this is increasingly combined with surveillance and control via income management. Community feedback from Alice Springs reveals that the threat of further scrutiny is ever present and acutely felt by those subject to the state’s far-reaching gaze.

Although favourable feedback about voluntary income management has been reported by some people on this particular measure, the vast majority of Australia’s income managed welfare recipients are caught by compulsory measures where evidence indicates a lack of benefit in most jurisdictions and some serious problems (Bray et al., 2014: xxi, 259, 136–137, 272; Deloitte, 2015: ii, 29, 47; DSS, 2017: 72). The government has avoided mentioning this nuance in their public statements about the benefits of income management. Numerous reports indicate that compulsory income management can create stress related health issues and depression for some welfare recipients. AIDA and CHETRE (2010: 25) report that compulsory income management can result in “cumulative trauma”, “shame”, “discrimination”, “stress”, and “trans-generational trauma” with “children seeing parents’ control and capacity undermined”. The Equality Rights Alliance (2011: 19) refers to a woman who had medically confirmed “heart palpitations” due to “the stress of being Income Managed”, which ceased once she was removed from the programme and could “manage her own finances again”. Bray and colleagues quote an Indigenous woman subject to compulsory income management who explained: “It makes life a lot harder actually. I was already suffering from depression and that just made it worse” (Bray et al., 2014: 199).

Exemption challenges faced by Indigenous welfare recipients

Indigenous welfare recipients subject to compulsory income management with the BasicsCard can apply for a twelve month exemption if they fall into the ‘disengaged youth’ or ‘long-term’ unemployed categories. However, as noted by the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples (2014: 3), it is arduous for them to do so. Difficulty for Indigenous welfare recipients in attaining exemptions was also confirmed by Bray and colleagues (2014: 83) who stated “[w]hen account is taken of exemptions, only 49.5 per cent of non-Indigenous people are on income management 13 weeks after their initial proposed commencement date, compared with 91.1 per cent of Indigenous people.” Consequently, there are racially disparate outcomes in accessing exemptions under the new income management scheme. Setting up an exemption system where formal equality operates is not the same thing as providing a system conducive to substantively equal outcomes. Government policymakers responsible for income management need to be aware that “racism must be understood in terms of its consequences, not as a matter of intentions or beliefs” (Winant, 2004: 126).

Human rights issues

Ongoing disproportionate application of income management to Indigenous peoples has given rise to criticism that the scheme is still racially discriminatory in its operation (PJCHR, 2013: 61–62; PJCHR, 2016: 60–61), contrary to Australia’s international obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has also expressed concern “that the income management regime is not rationally connected to achieving its objectives” and that “compulsory income management is a disproportionate measure” (PJCHR, 2016: 61). The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples (2014: 3), which includes 190 organisational members across Australia, has also stated that:

mandatory income management … must be replaced by a voluntary system with provision for case by case income management where warranted. Although income management has been extended to include select groups within the broader Australian population, the majority of those affected on welfare are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and hence the measure continues to discriminate heavily against Aboriginal people.

Intersectional disadvantage – a racialised and class based addiction narrative

The dominant income management discourse contains criticisms of the character and capacity of welfare recipients. Representations of alcohol related abuse as “welfare fuelled” (Tudge in Mitchell, 2015) are highly problematic. Perpetrators of alcohol related harm can be found amongst all social classes – but the narrative of addiction perpetuated by the government as part of their income management discourse stigmatises welfare recipients and imposes paternalistic restrictions upon them not placed upon other social groups. This violates the “Paternalism Test Principle” (Standing, 2014: 123) that “policy or institutional change is socially just only if it does not impose controls on some groups that are not imposed on the most free groups in society.” If parliamentarians supporting the expansion of compulsory income management are operating on the principle that taxpayer dollars should not be expended on alcohol (Tudge in Horn, 2017), it is important to note that a class based double standard is present. In his final two months of office as Prime Minister Tony Abbott spent over AUD$7,000 of taxpayer funds on alcohol with no repercussions (Johnson, 2016).

In addition to reflecting class discriminatory new paternalist and neoliberal welfare reform agendas, the government’s income management narrative of addiction echoes negative stereotypes about Indigenous peoples throughout Australia’s colonial history. Whilst Indigenous subjects have long been constructed “as requiring the paternal willpower of the state for salvation” (Nicoll, 2012: 183), the state’s attachment to coercively governing Indigenous peoples as part of their “civilizing mission” (Said, 1994: 131) warrants further examination. This dynamic routinely plays out in Indigenous policy and it is repeated in the income management context. The geographical locations the government has selected for income management disproportionately apply to Indigenous communities (DSS, 2016). This circumstance combined with the fact that Indigenous peoples in Australia are subjected to “racialised ascriptions of defective willpower” (Nicoll, 2012: 184) explains why so many Indigenous welfare recipients remain heavily over-represented in the new income management categories. Arguably, income management is connected with the colonial attachment to regulating the Indigenous poor with coercive mechanisms in an attempt to reimagine the colonial project as an ethical enterprise. Yet, as Fiona Nicoll (2012: 172–173) aptly points out, “racialised habits of … governing Indigenous people on the basis that – like addicts – they are incapable of knowing what is in their own best interest” means “[p]ossibilities for change within this dynamic are limited”.

The narrative of addiction illustrates “the work essentialism does for domination, and the ‘need’ domination displays to essentialize the subordinated” (Winant, 2004: 46). Evidently many of the recipients of classist and racialised essentialism who are subject to income management find this frustrating, “unfair, embarrassing and discriminatory” (Bray et al., 2014: xxi; Scott and Heiss, 2015: 61, 63). Nicoll (2012: 175) explains that “a degree of coercive power is implicit within discourses of addiction.” To use the framework of addiction means rescue is rationalised, indeed it is required. Welfare recipients portrayed as either addicted to welfare in terms of being “trapped in an intergenerational cycle of dependency” (Commonwealth, 2007: 6) or addicted to alcohol are therefore prime targets for government income management intervention. They can readily fall within government conceptions of ‘vulnerability’. This then ushers in what Nicoll (2012: 186) refers to as “a bloodless paternalism that seeks redemption as it delivers a ‘tough love’ that is impossible for Indigenous subjects to (legally) refuse.”

The dominant income management discourse also embodies the “politics of forgetting”, where the relationship between “past injustices and current symptoms” is under-examined (Douzinas, 2007: 87). This strategy attempts to circumvent analysis of institutional legitimacy/illegitimacy (Douzinas, 2007: 87) and substitutes focus on myth for a more nuanced understanding of ongoing economic disadvantage disproportionally experienced by Australia’s First Peoples. The “politics of forgetting” (Douzinas, 2007: 87) is especially important when considering the impact of income management on Indigenous welfare recipients – who have been significantly affected by colonial laws and policies excluding them from economic privilege as part of Australia’s racialised social engineering. As one Indigenous generation after another had few finances to pass on to the next, huge wealth disparities emerged between the colonisers and the colonised (Bielefeld, 2015: 100–103). Despite this historical injustice, current policymakers assert that income management is a suitable mechanism to overwhelming regulate the Indigenous poor, alongside comparatively small numbers of non-Indigenous others.

This dynamic embodies what critical race theorist Howard Winant refers to as “the new politics of race” (Winant, 2004). He explains that “racial differences often operate as they did in centuries past: as a way of restricting the political influence not just of racially subordinated groups but of all those at the bottom end of the system of social stratification” (Winant, 2004: 105). The dominant income management narrative therefore curtails more than spending patterns of those dependent upon government income support – by collectively portraying such people as deviants addicted to welfare and to substance abuse majoritarian politicians create powerful explanatory myths for poverty and inequality. The responsibility for poverty and inequality can then be conveniently transferred from government to individual welfare recipients whose “lifestyle choice” (Abbott in Griffiths, 2015) is presumed to be self-defeating.

Compulsory income management has also been taking place in the context of other alcohol policy measures first introduced as part of the Intervention that specifically target alcohol use of Indigenous peoples. Income management can therefore be seen as part of a complex racialised colonial project. One contemporaneous alcohol policy measure concerns Alcohol Management Plans (AMPs) for Indigenous communities. Pursuant to sections 16–19 of the Commonwealth Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2012 Indigenous communities are to submit their AMPs in the form prescribed and such plans are subject to ministerial approval before they are operational. It is interesting to contrast the government’s narrative of Indigenous addiction with what has happened in some Indigenous communities who have taken responsibility for formulating their AMPs but have been unable to get these legislatively required plans implemented due to the government’s untimely administrative delays. For example, Tangentyere Council has encountered numerous bureaucratic obstacles in having their AMP approved, which was “bounced” from one government department to another over many years (SCIA, 2014a: 37–38). Their experience is not unique (SCIA, 2015c: xxi). Such delays may feed into the government’s representation of Indigenous communities as disorderly spaces requiring top down coercive governance with disciplinary mechanisms such as compulsory income management, whilst simultaneously overriding self-determination efforts within Indigenous communities.

The ongoing significance of the addiction narrative

In the May 2015 Budget the Australian government announced that income management would continue for another two years. They declared that: “Income management helps people manage their welfare payments, encourages socially responsible behaviours and protects vulnerable Australians” (Australian Government, 2015). This claim ignored the growing body of negative feedback about income management and reveals an ideological commitment to income management regardless of evidence based research and a wide array of pertinent reports pointing to serious problems with the scheme (Bray et al., 2012: 94–95; 2014: xxi; PJCHR, 2013: 61–62; Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2012: 6, 9–10, 12–16, 30; 2013: 43–46). Income management is also slated to continue under the 2017–2018 Budget, purportedly to reduce “social harm in areas with high levels of welfare dependency” and support “vulnerable people, families and communities” (Australian Government, 2017a).

It is important to examine the political work that has been achieved by the dominant discourse on income management over the past decade of its operation in the Northern Territory. The Intervention appears to have normalised the idea of cashless welfare cards as necessary policy for welfare recipients presumed to be drug dependent and socially irresponsible. The Forrest Review (2014: 100–108) advocated further cashless welfare transfers in the form of a “Healthy Welfare Card” with 100 per cent cashless social security for all except “age and veterans’” pensions. Greens Senator Rachel Siewert responded that this proposal was “income management on steroids” (Siewert in Wild, 2015). Even so, there was bipartisan support to implement aspects of the Healthy Welfare Card via the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Debit Card Trial) Act 2015 (Commonwealth) (‘the DCT Act’), now reframed as the Cashless Debit Card by government (Commonwealth, 2015: 2).

There is some divergence from Forrest’s recommendations; the amount of income the government quarantines under this new system is 80% of a welfare recipient’s payment, reflected in the DCT Act section 124PJ. Those subject to it can apply to a Community Panel to have their restricted portion reduced to “a percentage in the range of 50% to 80%” (DCT Act section 124PK). The DCT Act allows for voluntary and coercive forms of income management in the trial communities targeted by the government (sections 124PG, 124PH and 124PJ). However, the vast majority of those subject to the scheme in trial communities are coerced into income management. At the time of writing, Indigenous welfare recipients are disproportionately represented in trial locations: Ceduna, Kununurra and Wyndham (ATSISJC, 2016: 91–91). Thus the new card is creating racialised disparities in terms of access to cash. As of November 2017, no government plan has been announced to replace government issued BasicsCards with the Cashless Debit Card issued by the financial services provider Indue Ltd; however, in the second reading speech for the DCT Act, Tudge stated that the Cashless Debit Card trial “will make a vital contribution towards informing potential future arrangements for income management” (Commonwealth, 2015: 3). This raises concerns about further privatisation of social security payments processes (Bielefeld, 2017: 30).

Tudge (in Mitchell, 2015) claims the Cashless Debit Card will be beneficial “for certain communities which have very high welfare dependence and welfare fuelled alcohol and drug abuse.” Addiction is central to this narrative of ‘need’. The notion of pathological welfare dependency is a key feature of new paternalism. Thus Vaillant (1997: 280) asserts that: “[l]ike addiction, the joblessness of welfare recipients is a self-detrimental illness that is susceptible to cure.” He contends that the cure is coerced “self-care”, explaining “that care must be coerced because the irrational self does not view such self-detrimental behavior as a disease” (Vaillant, 1997: 285). This so-called ‘cure’ involves intensive regulation of the poor. The reference to welfare dependency as a disease has been framed as though it were an urgent “public health problem”, which is also captured in the language describing “welfare dependency spreading from one generation to the next” (Schram, 2000: 84). This purported threat to public hygiene creates a rationalisation for permitting technologically invasive public health ‘solutions’, such as the BasicsCard and the Healthy Welfare Card/Cashless Debit Card.

Minister Tudge (2017) has heralded the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) trial as a “success”, claiming that it has reduced alcohol consumption and a host of other social harms following the release of consultancy research undertaken by Orima (DSS, 2017). However, commentators warn that this research contains methodological flaws so serious that it cannot be relied on as a foundation for drastic changes to social security policy (Cox, 2017; Hunt, 2017: 2–3). Hunt (2017: 2–3) observes that alcohol related data in the report contradicts the Minister’s claims. For example, in the East Kimberley 20 per cent of CDC participants reported more drinking in their community since the CDC was introduced, 18 per cent reported less drinking, 52 per cent reported that alcohol consumption remained the same, and the remainder were unsure as to how much alcohol intake had changed (DSS, 2017: 47). In Ceduna 14 per cent reported more drinking, 23 per cent said there was less drinking, 37 per cent indicated that alcohol consumption had remained the same, and the remainder were unsure (DSS, 2017: 47). Importantly, several Indigenous community leaders and numerous community members have called for the CDC trials to cease (Smart in Davey, 2017a; Smart and Peters in Davey, 2017b; Benning, 2017). They report that the CDC is creating problems for people such as increased alcohol consumption, financial stress, difficulties paying bills, shame, and suffering (Smart in Davey, 2017a; Smart and Peters in Davey, 2017b; Benning, 2017).

Resistance to neoliberal and new paternalist policy prescriptions

The triumph of new paternalism in government policy circles has coincided with the neoliberal assault on the welfare state (Soss et al., 2011: 2; Brown, 2015: 37, 133–134, 211), but such policies are frequently resisted by those defined in disparaging terms by the dominant discourse. This embodies what Nancy Fraser (2013: 54) refers to as a contested “politics of need interpretation”. This represents “the struggle over the interpretation of the need, the struggle for the power to define it and, so, to determine what would satisfy it” (Fraser, 2013: 57). Income management is an area where such political dynamics have resulted in a current victory for new paternalists and neoliberals. Yet resistance continues. Resistance can be express; however, it can also be covert. For example, it has been suggested that some Indigenous welfare recipients engage in resistance by purchasing food with their BasicsCards which they then swop for prohibited expenditure items (SCIA, 2015a: 19). Similar methods of circumventing the Indue Card have been reported (Davey, 2017a, b). This is unsurprising, as “all systems of domination create resistances” (Douzinas, 2007: 268). Another form of resistance by Indigenous welfare recipients when confronted with intensive regulation is to disengage from the social security system altogether. Evidence was given at the Alcohol Inquiry by Brian Stacey, Head of Policy for the Cape York Partnership, that “some people end up disengaging” with the social security system if it is made too difficult via welfare conditionality (SCIA, 2015a: 20). Consequently, such people do not receive the financial support they need. This may then create further problems with other high risk behaviour to satisfy material needs. It may also place additional burdens on their friends and families – in effect privatising ‘care’ for people in need.

Resistance to income management policies is likely to mount as neoliberal “outsourcing, downsizing, salary and benefits reductions, along with slashed public services” (Brown, 2015: 211) begin to impact upon ever greater numbers of the populace, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. As Wendy Brown notes (2015: 211), under neoliberalism “when economic ‘reality’ requires it, even the most thoroughly responsibilized individuals may be legitimately cast off from the ship.” As ever more people, even those who have played by the rules supposed to secure financial prosperity, find themselves short-changed by punitive policy prescriptions, pressure for social change will mount. Brown (2015: 132–133) explains that responsibilisation “discursively denigrates dependency and practically negates collective provisioning for existence” while positioning “the individual as the only relevant and wholly accountable actor”. Yet no amount of responsibilisation rhetoric can manifest the jobs required by those struggling with the consequences of unemployment.

The current challenge is to move beyond coercive forms of income management and formulate a vision that will create a more socially just reorganisation of resource redistribution. Australia’s income management scheme is a shaming, stigmatising system for resource redistribution (Miller in Davey, 2017b; Bray et al., 2014: 8, 94, 110, 137). This is not constructive. Non-stigmatised resource redistribution is essential for all welfare recipients, but is particularly pertinent for Australia’s First Peoples who have long experienced economic injustice as a key aspect of colonisation. To this end, some commentators have suggested that a Basic Income would be a preferable policy pathway for addressing Indigenous disadvantage, one more likely to deliver the necessities of life than intensified welfare conditionality (Altman and Klein, 2017: 9). A Basic Income has advantages of recognising work undertaken “in the informal sector” as well as “the absence of formal employment” opportunities in many remote regions of Australia (Altman and Klein, 2017: 9). Indigenous communities subject to income management are also simultaneously struggling with additional challenges – a lack of adequately funded community services such as health services, Aboriginal housing, meaningful employment, and culturally appropriate vocational training (Altman, 2013: 18, 67, 108–109). A concerted effort needs to be made to fund necessary programmes to alleviate disadvantage, and less funding is available to meet such needs when compulsory income management programmes absorb limited resources.

Cashless welfare card schemes promise considerable benefits for a new generation of “poverty profiteers” without delivering advantages for many of those subject to them (Bielefeld, 2017: 30–31). This is part of a broader global phenomenon described by Torin Monahan (2017: 191) as “poverty capitalism”, where governments outsource regulation and surveillance to third party providers who undertake costly monitoring of social security recipients and others experiencing abjection. Poverty profiteer policies have long been present in the United States (Soss et al., 2011: 178–185), and Australia’s ministers responsible for social security seem keen to follow these trends. At a cost of AUD$6600 to $7900 per annum for remote living BasicsCard holders and approximately AUD$10,000 per annum for Cashless Debit Card holders, income management is expensive to operate (Bielefeld, 2017: 30–31; 2014: 716). Over AUD$1 billion has been dedicated to this experiment thus far (Buckmaster et al., 2012: 34). In an age of economic insecurity fostered by neoliberal restructuring of the state (Standing, 2014: 1, 10, 21), and as more people need government income support, compulsory income management is arguably not the best use of finite resources.