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Co-design or top-down welfare conditionality? An analysis of the impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander submissions to six parliamentary inquiries into the Cashless Debit Card
Mendes, Philip Roche, Steven Conway, Lisa Castan, Lani
Mendes, Philip
Roche, Steven
Conway, Lisa
Castan, Lani
Abstract
The former Coalition Commonwealth Government consistently asserted that representative Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter Indigenous) organisations supported the introduction of the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) in multiple trial sites. Consequently, they depicted the CDC policy as an alleged exemplar of a co-designed policy model based on partnership with Indigenous community groups. This article examines the validity of this argument by analysing the views expressed by Indigenous organisations via written and oral submissions to the six parliamentary inquiries into the CDC from 2015 to 2020. Our findings suggest that with the exception of the first inquiry, most Indigenous submissions opposed the introduction or the expansion of the CDC. Yet, these critical views received only limited acknowledgement in the inquiry reports, and seem to have little or no impact on government policy concerning the CDC. It appears that the CDC policy is more accurately identified as a top-down policy imposed by government on local Aboriginal communities which, with some exceptions, neither requested nor consented to the policy.
Keywords
Aboriginal community-controlled organisations, Cashless Debit Card, co-design, parliamentary inquiries
Date
2023
Type
Journal article
Journal
Australian Journal of Public Administration
Book
Volume
82
Issue
2
Page Range
167-193
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Allied Health
Faculty of Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2022 The Authors. Australian Journal of Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Institute of Public Administration Australia.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.