Author: IGA_AEI

The Basic Card was introduced in 2007 by the Federal Government as part of Income Management with the aim to prevent people spending money on grog and drugs. The card can only be used at prescribed stores and for prescribed items. Most of the money received by people on government benefits is through this card. The card has been rolled out in the NT, and various place-based trials (2014):

• Bankstown (167)
• Shepparton (348)
• Playford (588)
• Rockhampton (467)
• Logan (949)

However in many communities the level of violence and drinking has not gone down, in fact has gone up in some areas. So presumably people are circumventing the spending restrictions and other issues are affecting the outcome.

The  Evaluating New Income Management in the Northern Territory: Final Evaluation Report (2014) conducted for the government provides the following table on the misuse of the Basics Card:

Ways of use of BasicsCard and related questions, LSNIM Wave 2, 2013 p 135.

There are also other probable social effects, such as the willingness of people to circumvent the laws they do not respect and interferes with their independence and self-worth.

Government Policy

A summary of this new policy approach is here. And a very good summary of the statistics, and comment on the lack of comprehensive data collection or analysis is here.

Checking data

The use of “double accounting” techniques are important for checking data, and there are simplified techniques that can be easily adapted to new topics. These techniques aim to approximate the result you would expect from the known situation, then compare it to the one given by the “authority”.

Techniques are: grouping or pattern matching to count in blocks; consider different cases as blocks and handle separately; simplifying the calculation by rounding; considering if the result seems likely.

Apply this to government policy in Aboriginal area – e.g. the proposal that the Basics Card will stop drinking and gambling.

The media reports that various individuals support the program, that they ‘have seen a decrease in violence in their community’. The program has been running for a while, so what are the figures?

There are firstly the issues around the children, who are the initial focus of the report. Is school attendance up as promised? Is better food being purchased from stores, especially community stores which are the main buying site for remote areas?

You can get figures from the police and family violence refuges – has drinking and domestic violence gone up since the introduction of the card in different regions? Some indigenous DSS and HACC data here

The data here shows number of people on the card – interesting there is no “unknown” just Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups.

Beyond the direct data

Consider the health effect on people of being denied control of their own (severely limited) finances. Studies have been done with employees of the British Civli Service and showed health effects from difference in pay scale results as those on a lower pay than those around them feel less control over their lives.

You can see some other issues arise from the data, such as the lack of practicality in its implementation, the vast majority of card holders are in NT, while there are few stores accredited there for them to purchase from.

For the latest report, see:

Evaluating the Cashless Debit Card Trial in Ceduna and East Kimberley: A Briefing Note by Dr Janet Hunt, Senior Fellow CAEPR, ANU

and the Greens Minority 2017 report to Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

These summarise the concerns over the method of data collection, and its analysis, when reviewing the effectiveness of the basics card against the criteria for which it was created

Research

The Basics card is not an effective response to protecting Aboriginal children and Aboriginal people’s wellbeing

The Intervention or the NT Emergency Response  was a policy enacted by the Federal Government in the NT as a reaction to the Little Children are Sacred Report, but did not seem to follow many of its recommendations:

The package was the Federal government’s response to the Territory government’s publication of Little Children are Sacred, but implemented only two out of ninety-seven of the report’s recommendations. The response has been criticised, but also received bipartisan parliamentary support. The then Prime Minister Julia Gillard has and continues to support the response, though her predecessor (and successor) Kevin Rudd did make some adjustments to its implementation. The Emergency Response has since been replaced by the very similar Stronger Futures Policy.

Also see the UN Special Rapporteur report – Anaya, James (February 2010). “Observations On The Northern Territory Emergency Response In Australia” (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 April 2013.

This report by the Rapporteur is based on the same data (figures, policies and community submissions) as is available to the Australian government when their reports were developed. Also see the Australian Human Rights Commission report. Yet the government continued the program in the face of this opposition.

This exercise is about being blind to possible interpretations of data.

Since the start of this program, much work has been done to expose the effect of this action and request better data collection to enable evaluation. Also there are requests to change the policy of intervention to one of consultation. See an economic analysis of the measure by Jon Altman that deals with government prejudice and inability to listen to the communities

He points out that the second report in 2009 from the NT Government on the effect of the Intervention. Some of the misuse of data is described in his report are:

…not all measures are given multi-year comparative coverage. But for those that are, some of the findings are extremely disappointing. For example:

• On health, child health care referrals are down, as are specialist audiological and dental follow-ups from referrals and reported child malnutrition is up despite the 85 licenced stores, the 15,000 BasicsCards and the $200 million income managed;

• On education, total enrolments and school attendance rates are marginally down despite the school breakfast and lunch programs and more and more police are working as truancy officers;

• On promoting law and order, alcohol, drug and substance abuse incidents are all up (p.32–33); domestic violence related incidents are up (p.33); and breaches of domestic violence orders are up (p.33) despite a far greater police presence. The most disturbing data are contained in Table 4.4.1 on p.35 which reports personal harm incidents reported to police: all categories are up except for sexual assault reports that are slightly down

First and foremost, they are comparative pre- and post-Intervention in prescribed communities, but they are not comparative with any other group in Australian society so it is hard to say how relatively bad outcomes are. All that is clear is that where time series information is provided almost without exception things have gotten worse.

Second, the quality of the Report is highly variable so in some key areas like land reform and especially welfare reform and employment there is the standard reporting of current outputs and no comparative analysis. And in the area of income quarantining there is still fraught methodology so it is store operators rather than customers that are surveyed, so while 68.2 per cent of store operators report more healthy food purchased, it is unclear if this ‘more’ is in dollar terms or quantity; and who is doing the purchasing? Interestingly, store operators report no change in tobacco purchase. (p79-80)

Consider the alternative approach suggested by the people the Intervention is supposed to “help”.

However this evidence is overridden in favour of personal stories that ministers or Aboriginal leaders have collected on the topic.

For example here:

Jenny Macklin cited so-called “evidence” on this matter in a press release last July when she said there was some evidence of an improvement in the consumption of fresh food. It turned out this “evidence” was based on phone calls to ten stores. Six said yes when asked if sales of fresh food had increased, without supporting evidence; one said no, and three were unknown.

So much for evidence-based policy replacing ideology.

A more academic article on the issue.

National Library resources

The National Library has put these links on the website to help investigate this issue:

Statistics related to Australia’s Indigenous population, including health and social issues, can be found on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website. Use the ‘Past and Future releases’ tab to find statistics for previous years. The downloadable reports include statistics on child abuse and neglect.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has a statistical overview of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia including child protection.

There are also a number of websites that provide reports and other information about the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, or intervention. Many of them describe the development of the program and others provide supporting documents and evidence such as statistics.

• Social Justice Report 2007, Chapter 3

• Child Abuse Prevention Issues no.19 Spring 20

Research

The Northern Territory Intervention is justified on the basis of community stories. Is there an alternative that you can support with evidence?

For a broader description of the culture that lived here for 50,000 years, read The Dark Emu, by Bruce Pascoe. This book is largely based on evidence from the diaries of early Europeans in Australia and provides a very different picture to that taught previously.

Another approach to this is the genetic testing of ancestry, both of people and the development of agrarian food supply, which is a growing field of opportunity, but there are risks involved.

Quoted from here:

There are issues around how reliable the conclusions made based on genetic tests are. The tests look for variation amongst a population that has married the Europeans who came here recently, and that variation from the rest of the population will be the “Aboriginal component”

Genetic make up of an individual is important in Australia and North America in defining a person as Aboriginal, which gives them access (or not) to special services, benefits and membership of the Indigenous community.

Many issues are raised in this article, including the reliability of data developed for the US gene pool and the need for Indigenous people to control how any data is used. Most importantly in Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity relate to community engagement as well as blood line.

In general, geneticist have had a bad reputation with Aboriginal people since tests were made without permission in the 1990’s. The theft of genetic data, and more recent research made with proper authorisation raised concerns about undermining the relation of Aboriginal people to land.

However the research results recently claim to show that Aboriginal people came here in one wave with no other people coming to settle until 1770, although the data is small. This suggests the Aboriginal link to Australia is much stronger than just being “the previous wave of immigrants”.

The access to this data and its use is of concern for Aboriginal people. Collecting data on people that is beyond their experience to understand how it is analysed, what it means or how it is being used (eg this material is available for any future research work) is contentious. See concerns from Indigenous Americans

Some of these studies have raised questions about tribal control and regulation of research, assessing risks and benefits of research participation, and implications of participating in genetic research for tribes.

Quoted from this article

In Aboriginal communities this ancestral information is kept in oral memory. Particularly women will discuss this regularly to update and check their relationship to anyone they have not seen for a while, or new children.

We are all fascinated with our ancestry, but for Aboriginal people this also signifies the area of land they have links to. Recent research has shown that the link to a specific area of land for Aboriginal people goes back 50,000 years:

Remarkably, we find evidence for the continuous presence of populations in discrete geographic areas dating back to around 50 ka, in agreement with the notable Aboriginal Australian cultural attachment to their country.

See the ABC article for a good discussion of how the genetic data was used to develop the theory.

Research

Is the theory that Aboriginal people have lived in specific areas of Australia for 50,000 years significant and and how might this cause their knowledge to differ to other people’s knowledge systems