Co‐design or top‐down welfare conditionality? An analysis of the impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander submissions to six parliamentary inquiries into the Cashless Debit Card

Abstract

The former Coalition Commonwealth Government consistently asserted that representative Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter Indigenous) organisations supported the introduction of the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) in multiple trial sites. Consequently, they depicted the CDC policy as an alleged exemplar of a co-designed policy model based on partnership with Indigenous community groups. This article examines the validity of this argument by analysing the views expressed by Indigenous organisations via written and oral submissions to the six parliamentary inquiries into the CDC from 2015 to 2020. Our findings suggest that with the exception of the first inquiry, most Indigenous submissions opposed the introduction or the expansion of the CDC. Yet, these critical views received only limited acknowledgement in the inquiry reports, and seem to have little or no impact on government policy concerning the CDC. It appears that the CDC policy is more accurately identified as a top-down policy imposed by government on local Aboriginal communities which,This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Paternalistic Welfare or Co-designed Partnerships with Local Communities? Analysis of Community Group Submissions to Six Australian Parliamentary Inquiries into the Cashless Debit Card from 2015–2020

“…This analysis specifically excludes the views expressed by indigenous organisations to these inquiries (totalling 95 submissions or 16% of all submissions), which have been subjected to separate analysis. The discrete findings from that study are presented elsewhere (Mendes et al, 2022). In this context, parliamentary inquiries are a tool of parliament whereby a parliamentary committee, consisting of a range of members of parliament from varied political parties and guided by terms of reference, investigates a topic of interest typically via written submissions and presentations to public hearings (Parliament of Australia, 2021).…”