Healthy welfare card will protect the vulnerable

MY recommendation for a Healthy Welfare Card for vulnerable welfare recipients, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, will re-­engage families with spending.

Welfare must come hand in hand with education, vocational training, mentoring support and other services aimed at getting people into work and stable accommodation and away from vice, says Twiggy Forrest..

THROUGHOUT our history, Australia has built and refined a strong social compact between our government and citizens. It’s hard work and entrepreneurialism ­coupled with a safety net to help people up if they fall on hard times.

Although the broad values of this social compact have not changed, the realities of ­Australian life in 2015 have stretched it to breaking point. Intergenerational welfare ­recipients are excluded from mainstream society as drugs and alcohol run rife through vulnerable communities.

This poison creates serious social ills, most notably violence, especially against women. In some ­places one in 10 women are likely to be violently assaulted over the coming year, with more than 60 per cent of those attacks associated with alcohol or drugs.

The 27 recommendations from my Creating Parity report handed to the government last year strengthens both the mutual obligation and the safety net elements of the Australian social compact.

For welfare payments to be a hand up in hard times they must be used on healthy family spending. The Australian social compact does not tolerate taxpayer-funded welfare payments being spent on ­gambling, alcohol or drugs.

My recommendation for a Healthy Welfare Card (HWC) for vulnerable welfare recipients, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, will re-­engage families with healthy spending. The HWC is not income quarantine; it is cashless welfare. Recipients can buy almost anything, the only restricted items will be ­alcohol, gambling and cash-out, the currency of the drug economy.

The HWC is an improvement on the BasicsCard, which has a number of flaws that can now be removed. First, the BasicsCard only ­allows recipients to spend money on a small pool of goods in certain stores. The HWC can be used where a debit card can.

Second, the BasicsCard readily identifies its user as a welfare recipient, unnecessarily degrading someone who has fallen on hard times. The HWC will be provided through the existing financial system, each card will look and work like any other debit card. Third, the BasicsCard ­allows a 50 per cent allocation of cash, often more than $30 a day and certainly enough to fuel alcohol or drug dependency. The HWC will allow little to no cash component.

Welfare payments to the vulnerable, with no support or mutual obligation, could impose the welfare cycle onto another generation.

Welfare must come hand in hand with education, vocational training, mentoring support and other services aimed at getting people into work and stable accommodation and away from vice.

To dismiss the HWC as too hard or too paternal shirks our moral obligation to those most in need and declares the Australian social compact broken.

Put simply, anything less than a seismic change in our welfare, training and employment systems totally undermines the broad values of the Australian social compact.

Andrew Forrest is a philanthropist, business leader and founder of Aboriginal employment programs. He was chair of the government’s Indigenous Jobs and Training Review