Labor rewrites history on cashless welfare as it quietly traps people in income control programs

The Antipoverty Centre is disturbed by comments from Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek and Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy yesterday regarding the failure to deliver Labor government’s promise to end compulsory income control programs such as the BasicsCard and SmartCard.

Cashless welfare was first introduced during the Intervention and prevents people on Centrelink payments, the vast majority of whom are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Northern Territory, from directly accessing some of their funds. The senate community affairs committee will receive evidence of the harm caused to people subjected to these programs at an inquiry hearing today (watch here from 9am).

Ending compulsory participation in cashless welfare programs was the only concrete promise Labor made to improve welfare recipients’ lives in the 2022 election, but the government recently made changes that removed a time limit on the programs – with no announcement or explanation. This continued betrayal is preventing more than 30,000 people in poverty from exercising choice about how to manage their income.¹

Quotes attributable to Antipoverty Centre spokesperson and DSP recipient Kristin O’Connell

Welfare recipients are the experts in our own lives. People on Centrelink payments in the Northern Territory have never been given a choice about whether these programs should exist, from the time the BasicsCard was introduced under John Howard in 2007 to its repeated extensions under Anthony Albanese.

Tanya Plibersek is attempting to portray Labor’s refusal to follow through on its commitment to end compulsory income control programs as an outcome of extremely flimsy consultation.²

But we know the government has no evidence that welfare recipients want to be forced to use the BasicsCard and SmartCard, or believe it should be imposed on people without their consent. If this evidence existed, the government would publish it in a heartbeat to justify its broken promise.

These paternalistic programs violate people’s rights. There has now been evidence of the harm they cause for at least a decade. Affected communities have opposed them from day one. All forms of compulsory cashless welfare must be abolished.

Media contact: email media at antipovertycentre.org or call/message 0413 261 362 via Signal

Labor in opposition vs Labor in government

• Senator Malarndirri McCarthy, 9 December 2020: “The anger has never gone away. That sense of deep oppression, of racism, has gone on for 13 years since that Intervention, in the policy of the BasicsCard. [The community] are very passionate about the fact that income management that is forced upon them is unfair, is discriminatory and racist. The BasicsCard was imposed as an income management measure under the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007. Twelve years later there has been no evidence to show any success of the BasicsCard.”
• Shadow Social Services Minister Linda Burney, 19 April 2022: “Our fundamental principle on the BasicsCard and the Cashless Debit Card, it should be on a voluntary basis. It’s not up to Labor or anyone else to tell them what to do. At the moment it’s compulsion and that’s not Labor’s position.”
• Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek, 17 September 2026: “These discussions told us that people want the government to work with them to create solutions, rather than make decisions for them.”
• Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy, 17 September 2026: “What we agreed to abolish was actually the cashless debit card, and that’s what we took to the election, and that’s the card we actually abolished… There has always been the BasicsCard in place.” Senator McCarthy said First Nations people had indicated at various points that they wanted to keep the BasicsCard.