Pat O’Shane slams Cape York income management welfare program

Pat O’Shane lands key Cape York income management job but slams welfare reform program.

Pat O'Shane says she has no truck with inflicting monetary penalties on impoverished people.

Australia’s first Aboriginal magistrate Pat O’Shane has been appointed to a key income management job on Cape York, but has slammed income management as an “extreme punishment”.

The Australian reported last week that Ms O’Shane was the Queensland government’s preferred candidate to head the Family Responsibilities Commission, the centrepiece of Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson’s welfare reform program in five Cape York communities.

Outgoing commissioner David Glasgow retires this week.

But in an extraordinary interview with ABC Radio National today, Ms O’Shane says she fundamentally disagrees with the key role of the FRC — the ability for local commissioners to quarantine welfare payments for community residents who fail to send their kids to school or are charged with criminal offences.

“To penalise, to inflict or impose, a monetary penalty on people who are impoverished...is an extreme punishment indeed and I have absolutely no truck with that kind of behaviour from officials,” Ms O’Shane told the ABC.

She said she was due to start her role next Monday, after being personally approached by Queensland Deputy Premier and Aboriginal affairs minister Jackie Trad and her director-general Chris Sarra.

Ms O’Shane said she did not know any of the local commissioners — respected elders appointed to the FRC — and did not even know their names. But she said she would travel to the Cape and meet them, and would not “impose my ideas” on how the FRC should change.

The body is caught in a funding battle between the state and federal governments.

Queensland is moving to overhaul the welfare reform trial and replace it with an agenda called “thriving communities”. It has committed $2m in the latest budget for one more year of FRC funding.

The federal government says it has offered a three-year funding deal to the state for the FRC, but it has not been accepted and the Commonwealth did not set aside any money in its most recent budget for the program.

Some of the local commissioners spoke to The Weekend Australian and warned the loss of the FRC would set their communities back more than a decade.