Right to Social Security
For ensuring the right to social security:
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The right to social security is protected under Article 9 of the ICCPR, to which Australia is a signatory. This right has been interpreted as obliging governments to "guarantee that the right… is enjoyed without discrimination, and equally between men and women" in accordance with Articles 2 and 3 of the Convention. It is also required that the benefit is "not provided in a form that is onerous or undignified".
Income Management
The Income Management Regime was introduced in 2007 as part of the Northern 
Territory Intervention, then known as the Emergency Response. Even at the time, the link between sexual abuse and income management was somewhat tenuous, resting on an assertion from ‘some people’ who gave evidence to the inquiry that if welfare was quarantined it might impact positively on alcohol consumption, and hence, presumably, on sexual abuse. The inquiry’s tentative suggestion that income management was ‘worth investigating’ was taken up in spades by the Howard government, which introduced its management scheme to the vast majority of Indigenous people in the Territory on income support.
In its original form, income management applied to 73 prescribed communities, and 10 town camp regions in the NT. It quarantined 50% of a welfare recipient’s income, which could only be spent using a government-issued card (known as a BasicsCard) with a personal identification number. Income-managed funds could only be spent in certain stores, and could not be used to purchase excluded items such as alcohol, tobacco or pornography, or be used for gambling.
The practice of quarantining a percentage of welfare payments through the Intervention’s income management scheme was applied as a blanket rule. No case-by-case consideration was given for Indigenous people living in ‘prescribed communities’, regardless of how they were managing their payments prior to the Intervention. Essentially, the income management scheme had the effect of ensuring that controlled income was not expended on prescribed items, such as alcohol, gambling products and tobacco. The introduction of the BasicsCard meant that the Indigenous cardholders could only utilise funds at specified outlets, often had to pay higher prices within stores and were subject to purchase limits and surcharges.
In 2010 the Rudd Labour Government reinstated the Racial Discrimination Act in its application to the NT Emergency Response. It passed legislation to extend income management to all welfare recipients in the NT, provided they met certain criteria (Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Reform and Reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act) Act 2010; Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2016, p. 37). The regime was modified again by the Stronger Futures package of legislation in 2012, enabling a range of state and territory authorities to refer locations outside the NT for income management. Thus in 2016, it applied to 15 locations outside the NT (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2016, p. 38).
By 2013, a person in the NT could be subjected to compulsory income management if they were classed as a ‘long-term welfare payment recipient’ (aged over 25, and in receipt of unemployment benefits, youth allowance or parenting payments for 12 of the last 24 months); disengaged youth (aged 15 to 24, and receiving youth allowance, unemployment benefits or parenting payments for three of the last six months); or ‘vulnerable income management referrals’ (on most welfare benefits, and referred for income management by a Centrelink social worker, a child protection worker, or by the Territory’s Alcohol Mandatory Treatment Tribunal) (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2016, p. 38). There is also a category of ‘voluntary’ income management. Income-managed funds might be subject to automatic deductions to meet a range of ‘priority needs’ such as food and rent, with the remainder still only accessible using the BasicsCard (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2016, p. 39).
Despite these changes, the IMR still disproportionately affected Indigenous people, who comprised over 90% of people in the scheme. The Government has stated that the scheme does not affect eligibility or payment amount, but only places conditions on the payment. However, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights considers the conditions “sufficient to constitute a limitation on the enjoyment of the right to social security.” In 2016, the Joint Committee on Human Rights also stated that compulsory income management was “an intrusive measure that robs individuals of their autonomy and dignity and involves a significant interference into a person’s private and family life”.
A blanket approach also breaches the non-discrimination provisions found in various international human rights treaties. This is because it is a policy that has been applied to whole areas, where the population is overwhelmingly Indigenous. In 2017, Pat Turner, the chief executive of the national peak body on Aboriginal health, stated that the utilisation of the BasicsCard not only “reminds Aboriginal people every day that they are treated as second- and third-class citizens in their own land”, but that its prevalence in Indigenous communities was inherently “unfair” and “a form of control”.
There is also no evidence that making the payment of welfare conditional on school attendance is effective at increasing attendance rates (within the initial 5 months following the introduction of income management, school attendance rates decreased by 2.7%). Rather, it breaches the right to social security and potentially deprives families of much needed financial support, especially if there are underlying factors as to why the child is not attending school. The 2014 Final Evaluation Report on Income Management in the Northern Territory concluded that there was no tangible correlation between income management and improved food intake, financial management skills and child health and welfare outcomes (e.g. there was no improvement to infant birth weight as a result of income management). Moreover, the scheme was actually counterproductive to the rectification of the cycle of welfare dependency experienced by Indigenous people. The report also found that the implementation of income management was not successful in altering behaviour regarding spending patterns.
The Health Impact Assessment of the NTER purported that the implementation of income management strategies had a detrimental effect on the psychological health and spiritual and cultural integrity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Specifically, the way in which the scheme overstepped Indigenous leadership, governance and control was damaging to communities. The assessment recommended that partnership between Indigenous communities and the government be struck and that income management adopt an opt-in approach or be reserved for those who have displayed an explicit sense of non-compliance, abuse or neglect, as opposed to being a blanket policy. Such recommendations were not adopted by the government.
A study by the University of Sydney and Menzies School of Health Research found that the Income management under the Northern Territory Intervention ‘has definitely had no positive impact on children’s wellbeing’, and argued that ‘if anything it had negative impacts on school attendance, particularly in boys.’ The same study also found that babies born shortly after the roll-out of the Intervention were smaller at birth by roughly 100 grams. This could have been the result of additional stress, or changes to nutrition as a result of the policies, however this link is not explicit.
Currently, systems of voluntary income management are in place in some Indigenous communities. Differentiating itself from its compulsory counterpart in the Northern Territory, voluntary income management affords Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people with the choice to actively participate in the income management scheme. The Special Rapporteur on the rights of the indigenous people detailed that Indigenous women were generally in support of this form of income management due to beneficial effects it has had on food security and the general safety and wellbeing of women and children.
Consistent with this, in March 2016, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights made two significant recommendations in relation to the NT’s IMR. Firstly, it recommended that community-led income management only occur ‘where there has been a formal request for income management in a particular community following effective consultation on the particular modalities of its operation, including whether it should be a voluntary program’ (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2016, p. 62). In other words, income management in a community must be driven by that community. Secondly, it recommended that income management only be imposed on a person ‘when that person has been individually assessed as not able to appropriately manage their income support payments. Information concerning rights and processes of appeal should be provided to the person immediately and in a language that they understand’ (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2016, p. 62).
In 2019, the Federal Government announced that in January 2020 it would move all people in the Northern Territory from the Basics Card to the Cashless Debit Card (see The Guardian Article). If this occurs, it will be a significant change (and for an explanation of the difference between the two cards, refer to Australian Parliament Government post).
The Cashless Debit Card (originally the Healthy Welfare Card) was a key recommendation of Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest’s review of Indigenous jobs and training, Creating Parity – the Forrest Review, commissioned by the federal government in 2014. Still officially on ‘trial’, the card is designed to test the concept of cashless welfare arrangements by disbursing particular welfare payments to a restricted bank account, accessed by a debit card which does not allow cash withdrawals. A default amount of 80% of a trial participant’s welfare payments is placed into such an account.
The card is intended to work as similarly as possible to any other bank card, and to work at all existing terminals and shops, except those exclusively selling restricted products such as alcohol and gambling products or cash withdrawals. While the Forrest Review recommended that all of a recipient’s welfare payment go into such an account (Forrest, 2014, p. 104), the trial has accepted that ‘people need cash for minor expenses such as children’s lunch money or bus fares.’ Consequently it allowed the remaining 20% of welfare payments to be available in cash. Research results on the impact and effects of the Cashless Debit Card have been conflicting and controversial. Evaluations by ORIMA and the University of Adelaide have been used to justify expansion of the trial. However, these reports have been criticised for methodological flaws, and for alleged inconsistencies with the testimony of people ‘on the ground’.
There are other conflicting studies; for example, a 2019 study found that the card was strongly resented by many of its participants in Ceduna.
The 2016 observations of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights are as true of the Cashless Debit Card as of income management. In fact, it may be said that they are more true, since the Cashless Debit Card is more interventionist and draconian in several ways — in particular, because it sequesters a greater percentage of income than does income management, and because it applies compulsorily to a greater range of ‘trigger payments’ than income management, including, for example, the disability support pension. In any case, the experience of income management, as well as many decades of government control of indigenous people’s income during the pre-Whitlam years, suggests overwhelmingly that such measures only have a chance of success if driven by, and not imposed upon, Aboriginal people.
Restricted Access to Independent Review
Amendments to the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 (Cth) have prevented those on the income management scheme from appealing to the Social Security Appeals Tribunal. This means that they have no access to independent review. The Government's justification was that review would "take too long" and would "undermine the timing of the emergency response".
Abolition of CDEP
The abolition of the Community Development Employment Program and the resulting lack of jobs in remote indigenous communities also contributed to violations of this right to social security. Indigenous people were forced to shift from employment that allowed a level of financial independence, to move onto welfare payments with compulsory quarantining.