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Paternalistic welfare or co-designed partnerships with local communities? Analysis of community group submissions to six Australian parliamentary inquiries into the cashless debit card from 2015–2020
Mendes, Philip Roche, Steven Edwards, Tegan
Mendes, Philip
Roche, Steven
Edwards, Tegan
Abstract
Prior to the election of the Labor Government in May 2022, consecutive Australian Liberal–National Coalition Governments argued that local community leaders and organisations endorsed the introduction of the restrictive cashless debit card (CDC) in multiple trial sites. As a result, the CDC policy was presented as a meritorious example of a co-designed policy model based on collaboration with local communities. This article explores this assertion by examining the views presented by local community groups via written and oral submissions to six parliamentary inquiries into the CDC from 2015 to 2020. Our findings suggest major divisions across community groups within the CDC locations. In four of the six inquiries, most community group submissions opposed the introduction or expansion of the CDC. However, these views received cursory recognition in the inquiry reports, with little influence on policy. This article concludes that the CDC policy is more accurately conceptualised as a centralised policy imposed by the government on local communities without considering local views.
Keywords
cashless debit card, parliamentary inquiries, co-design, local community groups
Date
2023
Type
Journal article
Journal
The International Journal of Community and Social Development
Book
Volume
5
Issue
2
Page Range
146-167
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
© The Author(s) 2023.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).