The banks are getting ready to take over cashless debit card management – Part 2
By MelMac Politics
In 2013 former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott commissioned Andrew Forrest to do a review about Indigenous training and employment services. Creating Parity – The Forrest Review, was released in 2014. It was overseen and authored by Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation, the big four banks, Coles, Woolworths, and many others.
In 2017 while the calls for a banking royal commission were getting louder, the Minderoo Foundation invited senior executives from the banking and retail sectors, to attend a CDC Innovation Day. This was primarily “to create a roadmap for the development and implementation of an ‘item-level (SKU) blocking’ solution, and to solve other issues hindering the card’s acceptance, functionality and scalability.” The Innovation Day participants formed a working group to help Andrew Forrest produce his Cashless Debit Card Technology Report. If you read through the report it’s clear that it’s a meticulous plan for the government to implement.
A large scale rollout of the cashless debit card has always been the plan. This was made very clear in the review and the report. The cashless debit card (CDC), trials in regional areas to date have been managed by Indue Ltd, to give banks and retailers time to get their systems ready. The biggest problem for them to circumnavigate was the blocking technology. There has been so much focus on Indue, and the alcohol and drug narrative, that the banks taking over social security payments hasn’t received enough attention.
It was only in September last year (seven months after the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, release), that the government started to mention them when they said that they were, “working with banks and business to iron out issues with the card’s use in stores, improve mobile phone payment technology and to merge the quarantined cash system with regular bank cards.” It’s only been two months or so since the latest bank scandal was revealed, this time it was Westpac accused of over twenty-three million breaches of anti-money laundering laws.
Social Security Laws
Before we go any further, it’s important to remember that because of the changes to social security laws to allow the CDC trials to occur in the first place, the eighty percent of the social security payment that currently goes to Indue to dole out, makes it the legal property of Indue. If we allow the banks to take over, billions of dollars will be technically owned by them. Activating the CDC is considered consenting to the trial, whether you want to or not, you have to have a contractual relationship with Indue, and agree to their terms and conditions. Because Indue is technically not a bank, legality wise, how will this work if the banks take over? Indue aren’t signatories to the Centrelink Code of Operation or the ePayments code, does the legislative tweak for Indue also cover the banks?
The latest CDC Bill is attempting to pass legislation that is alarming
The key points of the new changes are –
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Extension of the CDC in trial regions from June 2020 to 2021.
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Extension of the CDC policy into Cape York and all of the Northern Territory (NT).
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The inclusion of the Age Pension and Distant Education Payments as mandatory income managed payments, within the Social Security Act for the first time.
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Allowing the minister (Anne Ruston), to act by ‘notifiable instrument’ to sanction income management support payments up to one-hundred percent in the NT. Should a minister have the power to intervene directly into people’s lives with no parliamentary oversight? There are also no protections in the bill for people from the potential abuse of this power.
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The removal of the CDC numbers cap, opening it up for a national rollout.
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The removal of independent oversight from within the CDC policy framework, and the removal of the evaluation reporting time limit of six months, at the end of the legislated trial period.
The last two points mean that the government is not even pretending that they’re trials anymore, that’s what the evaluations and reports are for. It also makes it easier to roll out across the country.
The push is on…
At first, the narrative peddled by the government and much of the media was that the CDC trials were to tackle alcohol and drug addictions, then it morphed into unemployment. Now that the push is on to roll it out into the cities, it’s being promoted as a “financial literacy tool”.
“The reason we haven’t done it in the major cities is because we need to deal with this technology issue, which we are now close to resolving,” Anne Ruston told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
“For this to be a mainstream financial literacy tool for Australia it does need to be rolled out away from just rural and regional communities, and that’s the conversation we need to have with the Australian public over the coming months.
“It does need to have a broader application than perhaps the social harm reduction that the original policy was designed on.”
Nine newspapers to date, have reported the same information as above.
“People on social security know better than most about budgeting and don’t need the federal government to teach them,” ACOSS CEO Cassandra Goldie said in a statement on Saturday.
“The cashless debit card costs thousands per person to administer. This is a waste of money going to the big banks. These public funds should be going towards increasing Newstart.”