Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

A paper for the Unitarian Church, Grey St, East Melbourne March 15, 2009 by Clare Land - On behalf of ANTaR Victoria

Welfare payments and school attendance: An analysis of experimental policy in Indigenous education in issues paper for the AEU, Larissa Behrendt and Ruth McCausland August 2008

Thank you for your invitation to ANTaR Victoria to speak with you here in your sacred space today. I agreed to give this paper as an information-sharing service to your community. I am a former campaign and community development worker for ANTaR Victoria and currently a member of ANTaR’s Committee of Management. I’d like to salute those listening on 3CR, being a fellow listener myself, and a programmer for the last 8 years. The last 5 of these have been on a show called Fire First, presented together with Gunai-Maar man, Robbie Thorpe. I’d also like to apologise for my slight unease addressing you in a sacred space, which is not the sort of space I frequent. Nevertheless, while familiarizing myself with your website, I did seriously consider the proposition that I might just be a Unitarian without knowing it.

Your community approached ANTaR for a speaker who could address the topic of the control of Indigenous parents’ welfare payments to increase school student attendance – a bipartisan federal government policy.

I will share with you today the results of my brief self-educational foray into this topic. However, I will conclude this talk with an epilogue which goes to a broader topic – a topic in which I am more in my element: that is, analyzing existing efforts and future possibilities in non-Indigenous solidarity with Indigenous struggles. Today, I’ll restrict this to a brief look at the Sacred Treaty Circle process, devised by Denis Walker – son of Oodgeroo Nunuccal.

It is in the context of political struggle that I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people as the traditional owners of the land we are gathered on this morning. To me, the act of acknowledgement confers a responsibility to act this out, make this real. I acknowledge the long and continuing struggle of the Wurundjeri people to look after this place in the proper way. And beyond that, I acknowledge the greater Kulin nation, and neighbouring nations, from whose lands we in Melbourne now derive our livelihoods.

Now to the question of Welfare Control – the attempt to force Aboriginal people to send their children to school or see their welfare payments seized by the government. Larissa Behrendt and Ruth McCausland - from the Jumbunna House of Learning at the University of New South Wales - have produced an Issues Paper on welfare payments and Indigenous school attendance which I rely on heavily in my presentation to you today. Their research amounts to a compelling rejection of the idea, the background, the implementation and the cost of this policy.

Following Behrendt and McCausland, firstly, I’ll sketch for you what welfare restrictions have been imposed and who is subject to them. Then I’ll place the policy in context, which is all one needs to do in order to demonstrate what a draconian and misguided experiment it is. Finally, I’ll summarise the proven alternative strategies.

So, the policy hinges on a new, individualized, so-called Income Management Regime. The Federal Government has changed laws so that it can divert all or part of an individual’s welfare payment into a managed account. This account is linked to a card that can be used at certain supermarkets and registered providers, so that it can only be used to pay for items like food, clothing, household items, childcare, health, education and training. In the Northern Territory, some welfare money is deducted and given direct to schools to pay for children’s breakfast and lunch.

Who is subject to this control? Anyone who lives in certain proscribed communities in the Northern Territory – whether or not they have children and whether or not those children attend school regularly or not. This is a blanket control measure that applies even to elderly people – anyone who lives in certain locations.

Similar measures apply to adults living in certain communities in Cape York in North Queensland, and whose children do not attend school, or who are neglected or abused; or adults who are convicted of drug, alcohol, gambling or family violence offences; or adults who live in public housing and are naughty – for example don’t pay rent, create nuisance, do illegal things there, and so on. This is the brainchild of Noel Pearson who successfully negotiated with the Queensland and Federal governments to make a deal enabling his experiment in welfare reform. This is based on his self-professed philosophy in favour of ‘new paternalism’.

Another form of welfare control also applies in the Kimberleys in Western Australia, where child protection officers can now recommend parents’ welfare is controlled if they are suspected of abuse or neglect of their children.

New South Wales is also trialing a welfare control measure which removes education and family tax benefits from parents whose children were not attending school.

One of the legislative amendments that the Howard Liberal-National coalition government introduced as part of its Northern Territory Emergency Response, and which was passed with the support of the Australian Labour Party, is that which removes the right of Indigenous people to appeal decisions made about their payments by Centrelink under the new policy. Keep in mind also that like most of the other legislation, this can be used not only in the Northern Territory, but applied to all welfare recipients.

It is important to remember that the ability for governments to quarantine some or all of an individual’s welfare payment and then dictate how it may be spent is totally without precedent in the developed world. This is a radical policy. Other countries’ experiments with welfare control have made ‘school attendance a condition for eligibility for a payment, rather than determining how a proportion of that payment will be spent once eligibility is determined’ (Behrendt and McCausland).

Now, I’ll summarise for you what Behrendt and McCausland found. They reviewed the results of similar welfare control programs conducted elsewhere and discovered that:

The existing studies and evaluations of these kinds of welfare control programs, both in Australia and in North and South America, are, firstly, very small in number. There is very little evidence about whether or not such programs have worked here or elsewhere. However, where these studies do exist, they suggest that in fact, such programs are incredibly ineffective at increasing school attendance and, let alone educational outcomes. The ALP Federal Minister Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin had just extended this policy for 3 years, despite assuring us on taking office that her policies would be based on a ‘thorough, forensic analysis of all the facts and all the evidence’.
The welfare control policies in the Northern Territory and Queensland have goals including increasing the proportion of family income spent on food, clothing, housing; increasing attendance at school; reducing dependency on welfare and encouraging engagement with the so-called ‘real economy’; re-establishing social norms; and to enforcing ‘proper’ parenting behaviour. These aims are all supposed to serve the overarching goal to better serve the interests of children living in Indigenous contexts and communities and on Aboriginal land. Behrendt and McCausland point out – and so have Catholic Social Services researchers – that the measures introduced to attain these goals actually serve to disempower and remove responsibility from parents, rather than inculcating more responsible habits;
The administration of the welfare control policy is extremely costly, involving, for example, the appointment of an extra 300 Centrelink staff. The cost of controlling the welfare payments for each person on welfare in the Northern Territory is about $3,000 annually. The total each person would be receiving on their full welfare payments each year is only $10,000 anyway. So this is a disproportionately high cost. Behrendt and McCausland argue this is too much to spend on a program that is designed in defiance of related, proven strategies (more on proven strategies later). Of the $1.2 billion total new or re-directed funding for Indigenous-related commitments made by the Rudd ALP government since we elected them, just over half (ie $637million) is specifically for the Northern Territory Emergency Response.

So now that we’ve looked at the policy and its downsides, I’d like to report to you the findings Behrendt and McCausland made about viable alternatives. They do indeed find that programs with similar aims that contrast from the ALP-Liberal model in significant ways, are actually effective.

These include:

Welfare and household finance programs run by Aboriginal organizations for families who volunteer to participate, have had some success. They work by educating and supporting Aboriginal parents and families in household finances, banking, saving, planning and so on.
To achieve the stated goals of the welfare control policy, it would be more effective to provide assistance – for example: supportive community controlled programs, and or intensive case-work - to parents, rather than punishment. Financial incentives, rather than financial punishments, are slightly more effective in some programs in the USA, but even so, the outcomes have basically been woeful.

To conclude this part of my talk, it’s helpful to step outside of the welfare-reform approach to Indigenous policy. The welfare control approach requires a huge financial expenditure on monitoring and surveillance which would arguably be better directed to redressing poverty. It is not all about law and order, truancy and ‘bad parenting’. Reasons for not attending school include poverty and associated ill-health including hearing loss; unattractive school culture and discrepancies in teaching quality, so that attendance differs markedly between classes; individual issues for students whereby siblings from the same families have different levels of school attendance; lack of motivation to attend school given the apparently unaltered life chances for those who do attend; some parents reporting their own lack of influence over children aged over 12 years; and being deprived of infrastructure: there are simply not enough places nor is there the necessary furniture and equipment for all Indigenous children to attend school. If we take all this into account, there is suddenly a lot more scope for confronting the underlying causes of low school attendance.

The Sacred Treaty Epilogue

As an epilogue to this talk, I would like to take what might seem a large detour and talk about Sacred Treaty Circles. This might not seem such a leap if you understand Indigenous rights as interconnected, and consider education inextricable from cultural rights and affirmation, health as connected to land rights, and empowerment as connected to sovereignty.

Many of you, I am sure, have been following the dramatic events at St Mary’s Catholic Church in South Brisbane, where Father Peter Kennedy has recently been fired, after his progressive policies simultaneously attracted more and more followers, as well as the increasing ire of the Catholic hierarchies.

Not only did Father Kennedy encourage greater involvement of women in his services, and bless homosexual unions, but – and this has not received nearly as much profile - he entered into a treaty with Bejam Denis Walker of the Nunuccal people in November last year.

For those of you who have not heard of Denis Walker’s Sacred Treaty Circles, ANTaR Victoria has a section on our website where you can download a copy of his deceptively concise 2-page treaty, with accompanying explanatory words - by Denis. You will see that Denis has studied not only his own law system, but the British legal system, as well as the Bible and many historical Papal decrees. As a result of this he is able to argue that under our own law, and its divine origins, we are obliged to uphold Aboriginal land rights and sovereignty. His Sacred Treaty Circle process provides a mechanism which not only bridges our two legal systems, bypasses the illegal sovereignty of the state, confronts the moral dilemma of colonisation, and at the same time enacts, revives and sustains Aboriginal culture and community in real and practical ways.

We interviewed Father Peter Kennedy recently on 3CR on Fire First. I took the chance to ask him about supporting him and St Mary’s. He agreed that one of the most powerful ways of acting in solidarity would be to replicate his initiatives in other congregations. So I leave you with a challenge and an offer. While you do so much, would you explore taking the next step? ANTaR Victoria would love to assist you in this.

Thank you.