End to brief reprieve for Cashless Debit Card “trial” sites
The government will force people on to income management who lost work during the pandemic
The Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union condemns the government’s decision to recommence forcing new income support recipients on to the Cashless Debit Card.
This decision means that people who rely on a poverty payment to survive because of a global pandemic will be subjected to even further harm by the CDC, and even more damage will be inflicted upon their communities and local economies.
While Australia is in the middle of a national reckoning on sexism and violent misogyny, the government is attempting to quietly scale up a program that denies women safety, autonomy, and inhibits people’s freedom to leave violent relationships and households.
The racist targeting of the CDC continues the deeply entrenched colonial violence in the welfare system, as the First Nations women who the card is supposedly intended to “help” are again being denied self-determination. At the same time they are largely excluded from the public conversation about inequality and experiences of sexism and sexual violence.
The government has no evidence that this paternalistic, racist program helps people and yet it is shamelessly ramping up it’s dangerous income managment experiment, including with the CDC also being pushed into Cape York and the Northern Territory as of last week.
People new to income support from late March last year in the “trial sites” of East Kimberley, Ceduna, the Goldfields and Hinkler will now be forced to use a card that restricts 80% of their income, and tens of thousands in the Northern Territory and Queensland are being coerced into doing the same. Instead of providing people a humane level of income support and the community-led programs they have been pushing for, the government continues to invest millions in a program designed to control the pittance they receive.
The card doesn’t work and the government knows it. This is just another vehicle to shovel public money into the coffers of Indue and the big banks and retailers who are complicit in this abuse.
Media contact: 0413 261 362 / media at auwu.org.au
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