Pat Dodson has described the cashless welfare card as a “public whip” designed to control Indigenous people and said the federal government should focus on holistic solutions to problems of alcohol, drug addiction and violence in remote communities.

The Western Australian senator’s comments come on the eve of a week-long trip by the former prime minister Tony Abbott to the East Kimberley, which was one of the first two trial sites for the cashless welfare card program. He will spend time in the towns of Kununurra, Wyndham, and Halls Creek, and the remote community of Balgo.

Abbott committed to spend a week each year in a remote Indigenous community when he was in The Lodge and has kept it up since losing the leadership to Malcolm Turnbull.

He is one of a string of federal politicians to visit the Kimberley in recent weeks – including Turnbull, who visited Broome earlier this month – but his trip will be the longest.

Dodson, a Yawuru man who is based in Broome, said the visit was unremarkable and suggested Abbott would “hear what he wants to hear” when talking to people in Kununurra and Wyndham about their experiences on the card.

“I haven’t heard him say much on anything since I came to the parliament on anything to do with improving the lives of Aboriginal people in remote communities,” he told Guardian Australia.

Dodson said he had heard “mixed messages” about the card, which he said was “simply a public whip to make people comply through the draconian measure of controlling their income”.

“I’m not convinced that it’s the solution to anything,” he said. “It may be a short-term measure that’s an extreme measure, in the same way that you incarcerate people as a short-term measure to get people off the streets. But that doesn’t work.”

The card has been trialled in Wyndham and Kununurra since April 2016 and the Turnbull government last week introduced legislation to allow those trials to continue indefinitely. Additional trial sites are expected to be announced within weeks.

Abbott defended the program on 2GB radio on Monday, saying: “If you’re a working age person on welfare – particularly if you’ve got kids – why shouldn’t a very significant percentage of your taxpayer income be quarantined for the necessities of life?



“This has got a lot of potential for the welfare system right around our country.”

Merle Carter, a Gajarrong and Bunuba woman and Kununurra community elder, said she was glad Abbott was visiting.

“It’s good that politicians do come,” she said. “They should come and talk to the people, get their point of view, the ones that are on the card.”

She said she hoped Abbott would not only listen to people’s problems but also hear their solutions.

“Usually, when there’s a problem in the community with Aboriginal people, there’s also a solution from the Aboriginal people,” she said.

On the shortlist for future trial sites in Western Australia are Port Hedland, on the Pilbara coast, and the Eastern Goldfields around Kalgoorlie.

“Some people say it works for them, like the alcoholics: it works for the alcoholics,” Carter said. “Because what we got in Kununurra is people that do sly grogging.

“If you are going to take the alcohol and drugs off people you need to put something in place first. There’s a rehabilitation centre in Wyndham but I would say it’s just a Band-Aid. Whatever they have put in place is just a Band-Aid solution, it’s not a real solution.”

For others, Carter said, the card further entrenched poverty by cutting them off from the secondhand goods market, which trades in cash.

The card is designed to prevent people from buying drugs or alcohol or gambling, so cash withdrawals are limited to 20% of a person’s fortnightly welfare payment. The remaining 80% can be used like an Eftpos card to buy anything except alcohol or gambling products, provided the vendor takes Eftpos.

“Some of the ladies that are on the card, they can’t buy things that are on Kununurra trading post because you can’t buy things with the card, you need cash,” Carter said. “If you are paid on a Wednesday by Saturday you have run out of cash.”

In Kununurra, Carter said, the cash trade in secondhand goods was “very, very valuable”.

“They haven’t got the money to just walk into the shop and buy what they needs, so most of them buy things at Kununurra trading post, or at the garage sales on the weekend, or at the markets.”

Abbott told the West Australian he would also be looking at school attendance rates and would be volunteering as a teacher’s aide.

He said governments should insist on 100% school attendance rates as “a matter of urgency” and said education was particularly critical to people living in remote communities because “it gives them the freedom to move if they want to”.

“If you can’t read or write, if you don’t have a decent primary or early secondary education, it is very hard to function in our society,” he said. “You are almost consigned to live in an isolated place, if you like, your own small world.”

Achieving parity between school attendance rates for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students is a goal of the Closing the Gap program, with a deadline of 2018.

School attendance was a problem, Carter said, but the causes for truancy were complex: health issues, such as foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and chronic ear infections, made it difficult for some children to focus in class.

“The teachers need to be more educated about that so they know to sit those kids up the front, because if they sit at the back they are not going to hear what’s going on and they are going to be disruptive, just like the kids with FASD,” she said.