The Turnbull Government intends to control how est. 7.5 million of these people spend these transfers by placing the money in cashless debit card accounts and restricting the availability of actual cash to 20 per cent of the transfer amount.
This income management scheme is being rolled out nationally under the guise of an unrestricted 'trial'.
However the justification for this scheme is beginning to crumble under closer scrutiny.
News.com.au, 14 September 2017:
WELFARE recipients spend less on alcohol as a portion of their income than all other Australians, new figures show.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics this week released its household expenditure statistics report, breaking down how Australians spend their money.
And it’s managed to crush a few stereotypes with the data.
The report shows that Aussies overall spend more than half of their average weekly spend on goods and services on basics, covering things like housing, food, energy, health care and transport.
Aussies spend an average $846 of the weekly household spend of $1,425 on these items and service.
Included in these basics are food and non-alcoholic beverages, but booze is counted separately, and the results make for some interesting reading.
Australians whose main source of income was from government pensions and allowances, were found to spend an average of $12.14 out of their $677.19 on alcoholic drinks, or 1.8 per cent.
Overall, Australian households on average were found to spend $31.95 of their $1425.03 weekly spend on alcohol — a total of 2.2 per cent.
Those whose main source of household income came from their employer, or their own business, were each found to spend 2.5 per cent of their weekly household spend on booze, and those whose income fitted into the “other” category indulged 2.5 per cent of their weekly budget.
The findings come amid a government push for a cashless welfare card that quarantines a large chunk of Centrelink payments and can’t be used to pay for alcohol, cigarettes, or gambling.
It seems Turnbull, Abbott and Co have just lost the excuse that welfare recipients as a group are heavy boozers.
Well, I hear you say; then it must be that they need their incomes managed because they all smoke like chimneys. Except tobacco sales have been falling for years and its’s not as easy to find a low-income or unemployed smoker of any age as it once was.
Or if they don’t have the first two ‘vices’, then it must be all those lottery tickets they purchase that show a need to control their finances. But the facts set out in Australian Gambling Statistics 32nd Edition (p.93) show that households in Australia might have spent as much as 0.002% of their disposable income each year on Lotto or the like. Hardly a national scandal.
But what about those ubiquitous poker machines? Well again according to Australian Gambling Statistics 32nd Edition (p.152) households really go overboard there - they actual spend per capita around 1.057% of their annual disposable income on this form of gambling and in the last 20 years on record this figure has never climbed higher than 1.808% annually. In dollar terms this means that welfare recipients are probably spending between $0 and $5 per week on electronic gambling.
So if most people receiving welfare payments don’t constantly have a drink in their hand and a fag on their lips while they look up the Lotto results and if they're not all hunched over poker machines on a daily basis – what exactly is the point of this universal cashless debit card?
Of course! It has to be because most of these 7.5 million welfare recipients are relatively poor - which is an obvious character defect requiring punishment coercive correction according to those financially comfortable right-wing politicians in Canberra and their fellow travellers.
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