Is this the answer?
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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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I don't need to watch the video, I've witnessed first hand, violence and kids neglected in ways most people wouldn't believe.
I'm not sure this will totally 'fix' the issues but maybe it will help?
Malcolm Turnbull to be shown ‘war zone’ video from regional towns in push for cashless welfare card
A shocking video showing the “war zone” conditions of regional WA towns will be shown to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Canberra today as a delegation from the State calls for an urgent expansion of the cashless welfare card.
The video, compiled by out-going Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan, regional councils and the Minderoo Foundation will be presented by a group of indigenous and community leaders who want to see the card rolled out to towns ravaged by welfare-fuelled drug and alcohol abuse.
https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/wa-violence-video-aims-to-shock-pm-ng-b88561650z
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Some people have very strong views against it. I'm kind of open to either side of the argument – at the end I guess it comes down, at least in a simplified sense, to dignity vs physical wellbeing. For what it's worth, I've used limited supermarket vouchers (limited in the sense of no alcohol/cigarettes) a couple of times when I was in dire financial straits and just needed to buy groceries, and found they were a useful temporary measure. But I'm not sure how different that is to this proposal, and what the psychological effects of longterm usage of such cashless welfare cards would be.
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partypie
Joined: 01 Oct 2010
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| David wrote: | | Some people have very strong views against it. I'm kind of open to either side of the argument – at the end I guess it comes down, at least in a simplified sense, to dignity vs physical wellbeing. For what it's worth, I've used limited supermarket vouchers (limited in the sense of no alcohol/cigarettes) a couple of times when I was in dire financial straits and just needed to buy groceries, and found they were a useful temporary measure. But I'm not sure how different that is to this proposal, and what the psychological effects of longterm usage of such cashless welfare cards would be. |
I wish it wasn't necessary for these measures to have to be considered. However the effects on children of growing up in families where substance abuse takes priority over decent food and housing, and violence is part of daily life is far worse than poor self esteem from welfare dependence. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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One certainly tends to think so. Would be good to hear a strong case against, though.
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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The greens won't let you down David .....
Greens senator Rachel Siewert said the mining magnate was using the same tactics as the Howard government in 2007 over the Northern Territory intervention and so-called “Basics Card
“Using violent imagery then offering a one-dimensional, paternalistic and previously failed approach to a complex problem shows that Andrew Forrest is more concerned about furthering his ideologies than looking at what works,” she said.
“We should stop wasting money on income management-style approaches and start looking at real solutions that work"..... without offering any 
He said opponents of the cards, including the Greens, were covering themselves in shame.
https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/andrew-forrest-under-fire-for-using-video-in-welfare-card-shock-tactic-ng-b88564370z
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Here's their whole policy page on it. I don't find their approach as a whole overly convincing, though their specific concerns are worthy of consideration:
https://greens.org.au/cashless
| Quote: | Unanswered Questions about Cashless Welfare Cards
1. What happens if you lose your card?
The Government claims that it will be possible to print cards at the trial site. However, they failed to identify any details about how this would happen, and how people could manage on weekends if they left the area they usually lived in.
2. What about if shops charge you a surcharge for using your card?
This scheme targets people on income support who are living below or near the poverty line — that means every dollar counts. The Government acknowledges that while they will pay any bank fees they won't pay merchant fees (ie surchages).They say they are working with merchants to try and reduce fees on the trial site, but at estimates they admitted they have been unsuccessful in getting merchants to drop the charges. They are not talking to merchants outside the trial site. So even if they reduce fees in the trial site when people travel they will have to pay standard fees.
3. What if a shop has an EFTPOS minimum?
The Government was unclear; it said it would *try* to remove minimum EFTPOS limits in Ceduna. Try.
4. And what about if the satellite signal stops working in remote regions and the EFTPOS machines stop working?
It happens! And the Government doesn’t know.
5. What happens to those people who don’t want to be part of a trial where the government tries to manage their money? What happens if they leave the trial site?
If you are forced to be a part of the trial, even if you leave, you will still remain on the trial until you no longer meet the ‘trial eligibility requirements’, or until the trial is over.
6. So, a community panel gets to decide how much money you can get in cash if you want to decrease the per cent quarantined. In small towns, these people could be your neighbours and you have to tell them your financial details. What happens if they reject your request for more money?
Not much. There aren’t clear details on how decisions will be reviewed, or if people can apply for an independent review.
7. How about evaluating the trial? Keen on finding out if it really works?
The Government couldn’t answer this one properly either. They do not have a mechanism to evaluate the role of the card in the so called trial as they have no comparable community receiving just additional services and not the card. The Government in estimates admitted they would not provide funding for services to another community without the debit card trial to provide a meaningful comparison. |
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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I know this bloke is held in high regard but I know a few people who've worked close with Twiggy and he 'aint the saint he'd like the world to think he is.
Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest labels Greens ‘a party for paedophiles’ as cashless welfare card stoush continues
The Greens refused to attend the screening for reasons Mr Forrest dubbed "human rights horsesh*t".
"I have to hold the Greens accountable here; the Greens might as well be the party for paedophiles, the party for child sex abusers -- you’re the party of human rights and you’ve forgotten the human rights of children, just call yourself the party for paedophiles," he said, according to Fairfax Media
https://thewest.com.au/politics/federal-politics/andrew-twiggy-forrest-labels-greens-a-party-for-paedophiles-as-cashless-welfare-card-stoush-continues-ng-b88566254z
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Forrest certainly isn't doing his cause's credibility any favours with this sort of childish rhetoric. This is all starting to smell a lot like the NT intervention, where an expose of the worst violence and abuse in Indigenous communities leads to a heavy-handed 'something must be done' response that only makes Aboriginal people feel like they're being targeted again. It's a shame doubly because some of what he says rings true: many urban progressives genuinely don't seem to care about violence and abuse in Indigenous communities and only seem to get exercised when they have white racists to point the finger at. However, Forrest's over-the-top behaviour is just ensuring that there can be no sensible middle ground in this debate, meaning that once again, either nothing gets done, or the wrong approach is applied without adequate consideration.
I'm also perplexed as to why he's having a go at the Greens here. Their support won't make any difference (and they've made it perfectly clear that they won't support it at any rate); it's the two major parties he needs onside. Sounds more like a few old grudges are coming to the surface.
Note that I'm still not opposed in theory to his proposal, but it's something that needs worthy, measured consideration, not something that's a) targeted at Aboriginal communities specifically or b) a knee-jerk response to some guy's 'greatest hits' Indigenous violence supercut.
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| partypie wrote: | | David wrote: | | Some people have very strong views against it. I'm kind of open to either side of the argument – at the end I guess it comes down, at least in a simplified sense, to dignity vs physical wellbeing. For what it's worth, I've used limited supermarket vouchers (limited in the sense of no alcohol/cigarettes) a couple of times when I was in dire financial straits and just needed to buy groceries, and found they were a useful temporary measure. But I'm not sure how different that is to this proposal, and what the psychological effects of longterm usage of such cashless welfare cards would be. |
I wish it wasn't necessary for these measures to have to be considered. However the effects on children of growing up in families where substance abuse takes priority over decent food and housing, and violence is part of daily life is far worse than poor self esteem from welfare dependence. |
Yep.
Is it being considered for all welfare payments or only unemployment? I don't agree with it for disability, but certainly for unemployment. Along with job training and assistance with finding a job, be that education, interview attire, social skills, whatever. Encouraging people into the workforce.
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partypie
Joined: 01 Oct 2010
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| I wouldn't know, but there are non aboriginal families where substance abuse and violence is common. |
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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| partypie wrote: | | I wouldn't know, but there are non aboriginal families where substance abuse and violence is common. |
There definitely is. But nothing in comparison to some communities.
This is from 2013... sadly, not much has changed.
DO you want the shocking truth?
There's a place in the world where dreadful violence is regularly inflicted upon women - rape, terrifying assault and murder.
In this place, women of a certain ethnic group are 80 times more likely to be hospitalised for assault and injury.
In this place, up to 20 people live in some houses and children are stressed out and neglected.
In remote areas, up to 65 per cent of children attend school for fewer than three days a week and up to 60 per cent of them fail the national early developmental index which measures a child's ability to cope with starting school.
Apart from the outrageously high rates of violence, unemployment is rife, and thousands of people are battling alcohol and gambling abuse.
Aboriginal men and to a lesser extent Aboriginal women and non-indigenous men were responsible for violence against Aboriginal women.
Dr Bath blamed alcohol and drug abuse, overcrowding and "consistent unemployment".
"Alcohol is the worst factor by a country mile," he said.
"Between 60 and 70 per cent of violence is directly related to alcohol.
"The facts are generally known, but it's a delicate area.
"Most of the people who are familiar with the details don't want to put a set of shameful allegations against the Aboriginal community and in particular the menfolk."
If these women victims were white, we would hear very loud outrage from feminists.
If their killers had been white, we would hear outrage from the Indigenous activists.
Why is there such a deafening silence when both victim and perpetrator are black?
"I believe that we can blame the politics of the progressive left and its comfortably middle class urban Indigenous supporters."
http://www.news.com.au/national/violence-against-aboriginal-women-80-times-worse/news-story/1185e7c359058b4f1af4dc8c30836e5c
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Rundle on Forrest's white saviour complex and the stark reality of how the welfare card is actually being implemented:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/08/14/rundle-forrest-forces-the-issue-on-cashless-welfare-card/
| Quote: | Twiggy's Tarzan antics and the problem of the white saviour
Guy Rundle
The story goes that Che Guevara, after a year of exhausting fighting in the jungles of the Congo, where he had been trying to spark socialist revolution, packed up the whole effort after a Congolese revolutionary accused him of playing Tarzan, a white hero swinging into save the poor blacks.
Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, Fortescue minerals supremo, makes an unlikely Che Guevara. But he appears to have caught more than a touch of Tarzan syndrome after years of offering his assistance to Aboriginal people. Forrest is currently barnstorming around Canberra and Sydney, spruiking the cashless welfare card, with a film of chaos on the streets at night in some Aboriginal communities. Anyone suggesting the cashless card isn’t a magic cure to social ills is getting a serve — such as the Greens, whom Forrest has called “the party for paedophiles”.
This isn’t new. Forrest — let’s drop this cutesy “Twiggy” stuff — first came to prominence in indigenous affairs, swinging in on a vine, to announce that he would create 50,000 jobs in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and thus create a firm employment base for Aboriginal people across remote territories. The 50,000 jobs promise was being made at the same time as hundreds of Aboriginal-held jobs were being destroyed by the Intervention, and its Labor-implemented aftermath, during which white managers took over what had been local roles. Trumpeted endlessly in News Corp, the 50,000 jobs have now disappeared.
Somewhere along the way, Forrest appears to have decided that a major problem is not an absence of opportunity to work, but an absence of will among Aboriginal people, created by a combination of substance abuse and welfare dependency. So he has swung round hard to a campaign of behavioural micromanagement, using cashless welfare cards.
The cashless cards are currently being trialed in Ceduna and the East Kimberley. They sequester 80% of a user’s welfare income on the card, making it impossible to use it for anything other than food and other basics, and usable only in high-priced local community stores.
The government has hailed the trials as a great success, with minister Alan Tudge — yes, him again — pointing to a commissioned report that says that a third of those subject to the card had drunk or gambled less than they would otherwise have. But as Elise Klein has made clear in The Conversation, the government has cherry-picked the report it itself commissioned. Firstly, the report doesn’t establish that those who reduced their consumption of such were problem consumers. Secondly, 49% of those surveyed said the card had made their lives worse, and 20% said it had made their children’s lives worse.
To the surprise of no one, the Indue cashless card roll-out and application has been beset with the same problems attending that other Tudge-led triumph, Centrelink debt “recovery”. The card was introduced into societies with problems of educational levels and low digital literacy, but it required a complicated set-up, via card or app. Like all such systems, it gives merchants the power to rip off customers. It interrupts patterns of sharing and co-operation, and, in the name of developing autonomy and responsibility, it teaches Aboriginal kids whose families use it that actual money is not for them.
The situation is made worse because it is used in conjunction with the cruel and useless Community Development Programme (CDP) work-for-the-dole scheme applied to Aboriginal people. This is a scheme that works off the same fantasy as Forrest’s 50,000 jobs promise did — that the remote North and West could work as a functioning full-employment capitalist society if the will was there, on both sides. Consequently, the CDP is a series of largely pointless busy-work, busy-training schemes for jobs that will never be there. Its conditions are worse than they are for non-remote work-for-the-dole schemes (i.e., de facto white work-for-the-dole schemes), and participants are breached relentlessly, on the slightest excuse. The harshness of the CDP regime is dictated by the ideology underlying it — that Aboriginal people must be socially and psychologically re-engineered, and once they have been remade thus, the jobs will flow, and communities will become prosperous and autonomous.
There’s a case for forms of income management, under community permission and control. But given the tepid positive results, and the very negative ones reported, the best next step would presumably be the Senate committee inquiry into the workings of the card, as proposed by the Greens.
It’s this suggestion that appears to have Forrest calling them a party supporting paedos, as he takes his fillum on a roadshow to the PM, and to NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, to try and persuade her to adopt the card across NSW.
Tarzan swinging in on a vine again — and denouncing all the other people he accuses of swinging in with their own solutions. Is regional and remote-area community welfare best served by this ad-hoc process? Surely, if Forrest wants the best possible results, he will want the best possible process of assessing the results to date. After all, recent engagements with Aboriginal people haven’t gone so well — such as Native Title negotiations at Roebourne in the Pilbara, where a Fortescue deal with a splinter group would have seen $4 million in native title royalties on a project with a potential $200 million yield. That was overturned by the court, but not before the negotiations tore the community apart. Maybe Tarzan should keep swinging right on through to somewhere else, this time around. |
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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A good friend of mine worked closely with Forrest a few years ago.
He isn't the bloke he'd like the public to believe he is. An arrogant, tight arse wanker is the description I've been given.
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partypie
Joined: 01 Oct 2010
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| Skids wrote: | A good friend of mine worked closely with Forrest a few years ago.
He isn't the bloke he'd like the public to believe he is. An arrogant, tight arse wanker is the description I've been given. |
I've heard similar ... But at least some of the resources industry is Australian owned |
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