A new research paper has issued a damning assessment of the quality of the report the Turnbull government has been using to promote its cashless welfare card trials, saying the report shows the program is not working.

Janet Hunt, the deputy director of the centre for Aboriginal economic policy research at the Australian National University, says the government has ignored serious flaws in the Orima Research report, which it released this month.

She said the report showed the government’s cashless card trials had not actually improved safety and violence figures in the two trial sites in Ceduna and the East Kimberley, despite that being the point of the card.

Her findings support the work of social researcher Eva Cox, who has already found significant problems with the design of the report, including the way interviews were conducted in Indigenous communities and the ethics of the process.

“Indeed, the authors qualify a number of their apparently positive findings with various caveats, but, at the same time, the evaluation itself has serious flaws, so even these findings are contestable,” Hunt says in her report, The Cashless Debit Card Evaluation: Does it Really Prove Success?

“Despite this the trials are continuing and new rollouts of the cashless debit card are proposed elsewhere.”

Earlier this month the Turnbull government announced Kalgoorlie as the third trial site for the controversial cashless debit card, claiming the card had inspired significant reductions in alcohol consumption and gambling in Ceduna and East Kimberley since trials began in March and April last year.

It also released an evaluation report of its two existing trial sites, saying the report showed the cards had “been effective in reducing alcohol consumption and gambling in both trial sites and [is] also suggestive of a reduction in the use of illegal drugs”.

Hunt said the government-commissioned report could not be relied upon to prove the cashless welfare card was working.

She said people interviewed for the evaluation may have told interviewers that they drank less than before the trial began, but such recall over a year “is not likely to be very reliable”. She said since respondents had to give their identification to the interviewer, they may have said exactly what they thought the interviewer wanted to hear, and certainly would not have incriminated themselves.

She said participant reports of change in alcohol use in the community may be more accurate than their reports of change in their personal use, but, in this case, the results were very mixed.

And the suggestion in the report that gambling had reduced in the two trial sites had come with a number of qualifications, but these qualifications had been “completely ignored by the minister and the prime minister”, she said.

“The theory behind the trial was that, if drinking, drugs and gambling decreased, violence would decrease and people would feel safer,” Hunt writes in her report.



“The report acknowledges that that there was ‘no statistically significant change’ in people’s feelings of safety, and concerns for safety at night remained, particularly in the East Kimberley.



“So how might we interpret these findings? First, perhaps – despite all the flaws in the evaluation – there has actually been positive change on the ground in relation to the three behaviours targeted (alcohol consumption, gambling and illegal drug use). But if that is the case, these changes do not appear to have affected the key harms that the program was supposed to address, namely safety and violence.

“The other possibility is that the program is not reducing the alcohol, drug and gambling behaviours it was meant to target. This could be because people are finding ways around the constraints of the card, or because the problems require far more than a card to solve.

“In either case, the program is not working, and the theory of change needs revisiting,” she said.

Alan Tudge, the human services minister, said the cashless debit card trials had been a huge success, and Turnbull has said they are responsible for “a massive reduction in alcohol abuse, in drug abuse, in domestic violence, in violence generally”.

Hunt said: “Someone needs to tell them that the report does not say that.”



Jenny Macklin, the shadow minister for social services, says it is increasingly clear that the government cannot rely exclusively “on this flawed evaluation to continue rolling out trials of this card”.

“The government needs to spend more time consulting with the local communities, particularly in the proposed Kalgoorlie trial site area,” she said.

“Labor has long believed that these trials should only be rolled out where the communities are genuinely in favour. They have to make sure that communities get the extra wrap around services that people need.”