Lashless welfare- a person centred approach

 The proposed cashless welfare reforms, the brain child of Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, hereafter referred to as Twiggy, was passed by the house of reps, in what the uncharitable side of me suspects was a deal with former social services minister Scott  Morrison, to throw former PM Abbott under the bus in favour of current PM Malcolm Turnbull, get the job of treasurer and sneak the legislation through before anyone had really considered any alternative plan. The ensuing media frenzy over the leadership spill let it go past with hardly a murmur from the same mainstream media that had participated so enthusiastically in entrenching a propaganda of lifters and leaners.

It's officially known as Healthy Welfare. It's not. It's a cashless debit card, with certain merchant code categories blocked, those relating to alcohol and gambling merchants. (Here are the likely initial  codes-5813, 5921,7801, 7802, 7995) 20% will be accessible in cash, via the persons nominated bank account. 20%. For a person on newstart, that's $25.90 a week in cash. Or the equivalent of an average teenagers pocket money. It starts in Ceduna, in Febuary 2016. It affects all working aged welfare recipients except aged and veterans.

This is the plan to stop alcohol, drug and gambling addiction, domestic violence, child abuse and entrenched disadvantage, particularly in remote communities with a predominately indigenous population and high unemployment. It's a breathtakingly, brutally simple plan. Infantilise welfare recipients and restrict their access to things only responsible grown ups can be trusted to manage. Take away their access to cash. Problem solved? 

I don't see how that solves the underlying issues that cause alcoholism, or family violence, or anything in particular, but that's exactly how  both sides of our political spectrum are planning to deal with social problems that happen to real people, in real communities.

I am not a billionaire with mines  near remote communities. I do live in a community with many indigenous residents (shout out Mounty County, 2770!), some of whom may be welfare dependent, and if that's all it takes to design a welfare reform that affects the rights of every Australian, not just the ones CURRENTLY needing centrelink assistance, then I'm willing to have a go. Unlike Twiggy, I've coped with the reality of living on welfare.

People do not walk into Centrelink offices as broken units of employment that are fixed with a job. They're individual human beings, their needs and stories are varied. Simply getting a job cannot be the only goal as it only addresses the financial needs of a person, and that's only part of a persons  welfare. Their welfare depends on them also having food, accommodation, education, social supports, travel, being able to maintain health and set individual goals.  What we have is a payment system, we could do with a real welfare system. One that actually looks to the entirety of a persons  welfare.

If Healthy Welfare is the goal, and that's a goal that isn't without merit, why such a punitive method to achieve so little in terms of supporting the health and welfare of vulnerable Australians? Welfare is a care model, we are all the carers of those who are unemployed, disabled, sick, elderly and young families.  Person centred approaches have been proven to be best practise across a variety of care models, in terms of outcomes, efficiency and user satisfaction. We already have examples of rollouts of person centred models such as the ndis, and we know they work.

A simple, regular self appraisal of a persons health and welfare, probably in the form of a fortnightly questionnaire designed to determine if a person is needing extra supports and capable of directing them to relevant community services in a timely manner. It's both more compassionate and efficient to provide services before untreated issues become problems, and also helps a person to achieve their goals, be they employment related or otherwise.

When a self appraisal form is submitted it either does or doesn't (through self appraised measures) trigger an immediate response from caseworkers, who are provided with resources to recommend and refer clients to relevant services to provide the supports they are requiring. A refuge network operating through Centrelink could provide temporary, secure and anonymous accommodations for those who indicate that their immediate safety is at risk, and support them in planning their long term future, transitioning to new accommodations, etc.

It'll be easier if I just use an example. Let's look at Eddie, 48, partnered, three children, lives in Ceduna, long term unemployed. He's got a couple of convictions, from his younger and wilder years, but that's all behind him now. His has his family, and his extended family all live in town. It's a simple life, they can't afford luxuries and they do the best they can with what they have, he will take any work he can find but nothing's going. These days, Eddies idea of a wild time is the family get together for a BBQ in the backyard and a few drinks. Under Twiggys cashless welfare, Eddie can't have a drink, or gamble, and can only access 20% of his income in cash. With a person centred, lashless approach, Eddies regular self appraisal leads him to see that he has symptoms of depression, and he's directed to help. As he gets his treatment for depression going, his case manager meets with him and they discuss how they can make this work with his goals. He explains that exercise has made him feel a lot better and reminded him of how much he enjoyed sports when he was young and he starts to think about personal training as something he could maybe do, and even help people to feel healthier. Eddie is supported into exploring this option and eventually opens a successful business providing sports activities and training programs  as after school activities for the kids in his community. Eddie and his family transition out of welfare dependence.

Eddies sister, Sarah, had a drug problem. She thought she had it under control, but she began finding it harder and harder to cope with her habit and her day to day life. Her partner, Chris, was concerned that she may need help, and indicated extreme concern for a partner/immediate family member. Chris was counselled with a drug and alcohol worker and felt empowered to discuss the issue with Sarah in a compassionate and non judgmental manner that lead to Sarah self appraising as needing support and getting that support to be healthy in the form of rehab, relationship counselling to help them overcome this problem while keeping their relationship on track, and a plan for finishing her education to achieve her goal of becoming a veterinary nurse . Sarah was given all the tools she needed to succeed again. Cashless welfare stops her buying drugs, but she may never get the support she needs overcome her addiction and find a plan for her future.

All the relevant community services already exist, and these people are already entitled to use them. Its just a matter of making it accessible and letting them be in charge of their lives. Person centred welfare doesn't have to be more expensive than either the current model, or Twiggy's reforms. It's just efficiently using services for the purpose they're designed to be used for. Every Australian is entitled to have their health care needs met, and  access to drug and alcohol services, mental health services, community supports are as  essential  to health as food and exercise. There should be no stigma in having health needs that have to be met. It's simply a furtherment and fulfilment of the original plan for Centrelink, to manage services to people in need of social security as part of the Commonwealth Services Delivery Act, 1997. That didn't change after Centrelink became part of the Department of Human Services after the Human Services Act 2011. 

If an area is self appraising as needing, for example, more drug and alcohol resources due to an influx of drug use in the area, then more services must be provided to fill that need. A community flooded with ice needs help, they don't need their cash cut off. I can hear a voice in the back suggesting to do both, but why take a punitive measure when a compassionate one will be more effective, more efficient, and long term cheaper? We need strong communities, we have to provide the tools for communities to be strong. We can't beat communities down and expect them to be strong enough to be self reliant.

A person centred approach to welfare is simply a better choice. It's better for business, as it's creating a healthy workforce, its better for the economy as it's creating healthy taxpayers that both contribute to the nation and cost less in untreated health issues that spiral into expensive, life/work limiting treatments and/or conditions, i'ts better for the equality of the nation and it's better for the individuals involved.

In the interest of full disclosure because yes, I know how the Internet works, I am permanently dependent on centrelink. I shouldn't have to explain my situation, to state which category of recipient I belong to, to justify my deservingness. That I am permanently dependent should be enough.

 It's not, is it? What if that means I'm a bludger with no intent of ever working? It doesn't. The mythical bludger is a fiction, a handy scapegoat. Those are unemployed people. They are not unemployable. They can't find jobs that aren't there or that they aren't suitable for. I'm not really unemployed, I'm providing a service.  I'm a carer for a young man with autism, an accompanying intellectual disability, sensory processing disorder, non 24 hour sleep/wake disorder, behavioural issues, avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, and he's totally non verbal. Are we deserving enough yet? Point being, I have both some experience of life on Centrelink, and a lot of skin in this fight. Furthermore, as a carer, part of my duties involve advocacy. I would be negligent if I were to not to look to his best interests and defend his right to full participation and equality in the community.

From an entirely practical viewpoint, I cannot manage his community participation program, an essential part of which is travel training and learning about money and its value, with $21.35 cash a week (DSP, 18-20, living at home $402.70). I can't teach him different note and coin values with conceptual money on a debit card. His mind doesn't work like that. He needs real, tangible things he can see and touch. ($10 note for a $9 DVD, wait for the change, check, does nine plus one equal ten? Lets check with the other money, yep, that's right)  Learning to manage money is essential to any independence he may be able to achieve, for him be able to fulfil his own needs, for him to be able to self advocate. "I want to buy this" is an act of self advocacy. 

None of us are alone on this island. We all depend on each other, no matter what the anti-welfare propaganda tries to say. I don't drive at the moment, but I still depend on the roads being there to get the goods and people to where they have to be. I'm not in uni, but I depend on higher education to give me the doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers. I've never called the Fire Brigade but I depend on them being there if there's a fire. Not using a service doesn't mean a persons welfare isn't dependent on it's existence. Without a fire brigade existing, we would all be on our own in a fire. We aren't. We know to dial 000. We depend on them answering and providing the service they have been tasked with providing. Our welfare depends on that service being there when we need it. 

Centrelink is no different. Whether you use it or not, you depend on it. To be there when YOU need it, and to pick up the slack and support the people that we, as a nation of carers for our vulnerable, have failed to help get back on their feet. None of us can say with any guarantee if we will or won't need it in our lifetime. It's our right to seek the services we need. If the government wants to decrease unemployment, they have to create jobs, because the alternative methods of making unemployment disappear may buy votes in a tempestuous political climate, but such methods tend to be both unpalatable, and human rights violations. Job seeker networks aren't providing the answer to unemployment, they're just another in a long line of  socialised welfare replaced with voluntary charity funded by corporate religions, and indeed Labor, who have also shown more and more punitive measures. And yet business after business, network after network pops up to take jobseeker funding. And where's that leave the unemployed? With no more work skills than they had before.Cashless welfare endangers people, people who need support. Person centred welfare provides that support. Its just like the fire brigade, we presume people are competent to call if there's a fire. We have to presume they're competent enough to self appraise and advocate in their own best interests. Its simply best practise.

I had planned on pointing out the human rights aspect of this, but I've covered it previously http://crackpotmanor.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/its-not-about-tax-payers-its-about.html, 

if anyone is interested. 

I've tried hard to not add to the political divide with this. I don't want to keep defending my community from outrageous and unfounded slurs and thus be part of the ideological propaganda of lifters and leaners. Instead, I've proposed a simple, workable alternative that will achieve the desired results while rejecting the mythology of leaners. I don't have an entire ministry of social services at my disposal, or a  billionaires resources, and I'd  never presume to postulate that this is actually an extension of ongoing neoliberal policies, but I'll leave you with this question, if I can think of a better model for welfare reform, why couldn't the relevant parties? 

A Practical Guide to Caging a Child in A School

So, you're a teacher having issues doing your job, which is to teach, due the behavioural challenges of a child with autism? You may wish to follow the example of a public school in  Canberra and have a cage purpose built for that particular child. They did just that. A 2m by 2m "enclosure" made of pool fencing.

Now, as a teacher, you obviously can't just bring your own fencing and modify your classroom, you'll have to follow procedure and  report to the executive staff
 and discuss the issues you're having with teaching your class, and they will undoubtedly expect and encourage you to try other methods, but in Canberra, at least, persistence and concerted effort may result in the executive staff deciding to create a cage.

Once the executive staff has made the decision to erect a purpose built structure to enclose an individual student, its time to figure out how much it will cost. Get some quotes. First, look for builder/designers of kid cages. If there are none in your local area, a pro tip is to look at businesses that make products that can be used to enclose other things than children. Pool fencing should suffice. A general rule is if it can be used to keep a child out, it can be modified to keep a child in. It's best to get more than one quote, so get a couple of fencers to come to your school and quote on how much it will cost to build a structure in a classroom or other area of your school to enclose a specific student, and ask for their expert advice on how big it should be.

Now that you've sorted the design and cost for your cage building, you'll have to figure out how to pay for it. General funding may be acceptable but you may be able to access funding designed to modify the learning environment for students with disabilities, to help them learn. Whichever source of funding you choose, your school principal will have to sign off and approve of cost of the cage that has been built to enclose a specific child, and the helpful school administration staff will handle all the correspondence for you.

Pro tip- while building the cage designed and purpose built for the purpose of enclosing a specific student, the tradespeople may disrupt learning, it helps to do an out door activity until the work is done. It's probably going to require at least two tradespeople, even for a small cage, because panels of pool fencing are quite unwieldy. The cleaners will clean up any mess the tradespeople leave behind.

And there you have it, your very own cage in a classroom, purpose built for the purpose of enclosing a specific student, and all it took was the complicity of many people, a small amount of money and a complete lack of respect for the rights and personhood  of the autistic student in question.
         
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This actually happened. In 2015, Canberra, Australia.

It's not about tax payers, its about human rights

            Australia has decided it will trial cashless welfare, and will restrict some purchases to welfare recipients, starting with alcohol and gambling, and ending who knows where. They're calling it Healthy Welfare and promoting it as a measure to reduce domestic abuse and child abuse, when it is in fact, inherently unhealthy and likely to entrench abuse and dependency.
             Let me explain how this will work- centrelink (Australia's customer liaison for welfare, and a range of other government services) will issue an eftpos card that will limit both the amount of cash a card holder can access, but also limit the products the card holder can purchase, all while branding a person with a mark of inferiority that they MUST use for every financial transaction. every single transaction. when you get a haircut, when you buy toilet paper, you have to show your healthy welfare card to the person operating the checkout to conduct the transaction, like your very own slave brand.
            A version of this 'income management" has already been trialled in Australia's remote indigenous communities, in response to the trumped up, 2007 "Little Children are Sacred" report, which alleged widespread, entrenched child abuse and led to the introduction of the Basics Card, which limited cash, purchases AND could only be used in selected retailers, all in remote communities that already faced exploitative food costs due to distance and availability. This is significant, because having seen that the public will acquiesce to restricting the rights of some groups if they believe that group is guilty of  violent acts against the vulnerable, the Australian government is now hoping to expand the group of people of those whose rights are restricted, by including the unemployed, people with disabilities, single parents and eventually all welfare recipients except the aged and veterans (and I wouldn't bank on that).
          The officially touted rationale behind this is an idea that welfare recipients are on a frenzy of drug and alcohol fuelled violence and gambling, that impacts negatively on women and children, and creates a dependency cycle that is financed by the tax payer, who receives nothing, or next to nothing, for their efforts. This manages to be false, unsophisticated and very convenient. Its plain wrong.
       Firstly, it is wrong because it presupposes domestic violence and child abuse are more prevalent and more costly and detrimental to society if it occurs amongst people who receive welfare. Secondly, its operating from the fallacy that welfare recipients are a homogeneous group. They are not. they are all distinct individuals who do not share flaws with all others in their income bracket. Thirdly, it presupposes that lack of access to certain substances and products and activities will solve problems as complex and diverse as violent, antisocial and addictive personality traits and that an addict, for example, will cease to be an addict if they get a job. Wrong, they'll just have more money to spend on the addiction. Its not the income source that's the problem, its the addiction. Similarly, a person who assaults an intimate partner or family member doesn't suddenly learn a new method of conflict resolution when they gain employment. It's not the income source that's the problem, its the violent behaviour.
      And perhaps its biggest wrong is in the mistaken idea that its tax payers money, and where that must logically lead. No one is paying tax to pay for welfare, or roads, or education. they're paying tax because they are legally obliged to do so. Its the law. Its the participation fee for being on the winning team, for participating as an individual in a system that found a purpose for you. Yes, tax paid does go into government coffers and is used to pay for services and programs. That's what governments do. They fund things. They provide things in the form of various services, institutions and infrastructure. People pay tax because the law dictates that they do, no one says you have to like it, or be enthusiastic about it, in fact, feel free to shake your fist if you like. It won't change anything, but it might help.
        The general tone in the Australian public at the moment is that tax payers shouldn't have to work hard to fund dole-bludgers (and can we please start spelling that right? Dole, with an E, bludger with a D and a G) and malingerers pretending to be disabled for the mythical welfare perks, like wheelchair ramps and accessibility. Whether this is due to convenience and media manipulation or mass persecution delusion is yet to be determined.
       What any individual paid in taxes and feels they received in return has no relevance to whether
 all individual adults in our society should have full autonomy and agency to make decisions that they          feel/think are best for them, at any given point in time. What any past group of tax payers paid and what society and infrastructure was provided for them to live out their lives in has no relevance to whether any other group should have the exact same rights as any other person or group of people in today's society, regardless of income bracket and tax paid. Get it? The tax anyone paid is not relevant to anyone's rights as a human in our society.
            Whether all Australians should have the same right to autonomy is relevant, because the Healthy Welfare proposals aim to strip that autonomy by depriving a sector of the community of cash and certain products. HealthyWelfare is essentially newspeak for "you haven't paid enough tax to get drunk enough to beat up your loved ones". Ok, it's also newspeak for a lot of other things,but that one is catchy. Insert whatever you like after the "you haven't paid enough tax to..." and you should be able to see that it's plain wrong. "You haven't paid enough taxes to give your children a free education". "You haven't paid enough tax to drive that kind of car, have that kind of phone, wear your hair like that". One persons taxes do not negate another persons autonomy. If they do, then it veers into ownership. "I PAID for this so I will dictate what YOUR necessities are and exercise dominion over you". Ownership of another person is slavery.
            It proves difficult for some to equate a group they are accustomed  to thinking of as lazy people who refuse to work, as slaves, because slaves are almost synonymous with hard work to our way of thinking. In truth, there are many kinds of slavery, but a person who is owned, by a person or by a group of some kind, who had their agency limited and diminished by someone who "paid" for them is not free. They may not fit your concept of enslaved, but they are owned.
      Income Management is really income diminishment. Prior to the 2013 election that saw the Abbott led LNP coalition take power, there was debate about whether the basic rate of newstart, or job seekers allowance for a single person, was actually sufficient to meet the necessities of life in modern Australia. Now that debate is silent and a new debate over how people who receive welfare should spend that money has arisen. There's been no significant change in the benefit paid  but the consensus has changed considerably, from one that recognises the hardship of living on less than half
the average worker, to one that seeks to restrict and add to that hardship, by letting the welfare   recipient know they are now "owned" by the general public, a bit like a celebrity, but with none of the wealth, fame or perks. And without agency to make the same choices as other people in our society.
          When one group is denied rights, essential human rights, it is not the just the domain of warm and fuzzy do gooders, its an affront to all who hold the concept of human rights dear, and that should be every one who enjoys the benefits of human rights. Tax payers, Australian tax payers most certainly, enjoy the benefits of human rights. There's still work to be done, but the Aussie tax payer is generally one of the luckiest people in the world. They even do get more rights than the welfare recipients, without introducing new impingements on the freedoms of others, simply by having more purchasing power. They have to right to choose from a larger range of options simply because they can afford to make a choice from a border range. Less money equals less choice. More money equals more choices and more opportunities to make decisions that will have long term benefit to an individuals quality of life.
       And, if agency and autonomy are paid for in taxes, and lack of payment means lack of right to autonomy and agency, surely then those that pay more taxes should have more rights than those who pay less? In which case, which rights should be stripped from the working class, the middle class, the upper middle class? If the full complement of human rights is only applicable to those who have paid the most tax, at what income bracket will other (inviolable) rights kick in? Will lower income tax brackets have to sacrifice the right to marry, the right to practise religion? The right to education?
      Or will it be the less articulated right of a person to not have their throat slashed by the hungry poor for the purpose of making a healthy, rich ragout? Because no thinking person can believe that basic human rights can be taken away from only some humans, without losing that right yourself. That's how universal rights work. They're for everyone, even people we dislike or disapprove of. Anyone supporting the diminishment of some people's human rights is supporting the diminishment of their own, because they are the same human rights.
        You have the right to work, you have a duty to pay tax on earnings, and you also have a right to social security that doesn't diminish your human rights.