Cashless debit cards protect Aboriginal women and children

 

The Left seems to be increasingly more concerned with the ‘rights of the individual’ when those individuals are alcoholics, addicts and abusers assaulting female and child victims — the rights of the victims themselves are ignored.

Empty rhetoric and vacuous, overused ‘weasel words’ are used to bolster the  argument against obviously effective tools like the Cashless Debit Card (CDC).

When those in the sheltered towers of academia — such as Melbourne’s Dr Elise Klein in a recent article — denounce the CDC, they are in effect attacking voiceless, marginalised Australian women and children, who endure a life completely alien to those in virtue-signalling metropolitan coffee claques.

To witness Labor now align themselves with the Greens and backflip on their bipartisan support for the CDC being trialed further afield can be likened to watching them supply dangerous drugs to an addict or weapons to a violent abuser. It seems the rights of the perpetrators come first.

In the Aboriginal tradition of thousands of years, the rights of the collective mob quashed the rights of the individual. This was a matter of survival in a hunter-gatherer system. But we live in the modern age, in a modern country — informed by the Enlightenment’s upholding of the rights of the individual. And the CDC aims to defend those individual rights against the tyranny of the mob.

Yes, traditional society was based on a demand-share economy. Sharing reinforces kin relationships and boosts the status of the sharer. Men have higher status than women. They are less obliged than women to share. Before money, it was the only way people could expect to survive. Now, in a cash economy, it is an economic disaster easily descending into abusive ‘humbug’.

When applied to food distribution, theoretically everybody got to eat. Even then, women sometimes missed out on their share if they were married to demanding and uncaring husbands.

Even the highly empathetic anthropologist Diane Austin-Broos in her book, ‘Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past’, admits that children sometimes are undernourished because their carers — wise and ethically minded elders — are so readily inclined to give money away to kin, especially adult male relatives, leaving less than enough to buy adequate food for dependent children.

The demand-share principle is deeply ingrained, taught from the beginning of life. Sharing is deeply emotionally satisfying but it excludes the ability to budget, to plan and invest in the future.

Refusing to share can provoke verbal or physical assault. The acceptance of interpersonal violence in small scale societies can lead to ferocious attacks on wives and to ‘granny bashing’, the young assaulting the old to obtain the means to finance addictions.

Many Aboriginal families have found ways to cope being generous to kin, proud of their identity but also budgeting to feed and house their families. Most in the remote communities and town camps are trapped in poverty because of unquestioning loyalty to tradition.

Once, people lived in small family groups scattered across a vast country. Demand-share worked. Currently there is overcrowding and dangerous addictions. Addicts expect their kin to fund their addictions without question. This is disastrous.

Dr Klein is selective in the research findings she accepts. She cites the rise in crime in the Kimberley under the CDC trial, but ignores the rising crime levels in Broome, Derby and Fitzroy Crossing where the card has not been trialled.

She does not know life in the regions where research has been carried out or the culture lived there.

However, Senators Marlarndirri McCarthy and Patrick Dodson do understand this culture. So why then do these Labor politicians take advice from inner city Green academics who have likely never set foot in a town camp or lived in a remote community — where women’s and children’s lives are in daily danger?

They should both understand that the CDC helps recipients to combat their own addictions, and allows them to say ‘no’ to addicted kin. It helps them feed their children, and learn how to budget, and to pay their bills.

I know this because I live amongst it. Because I regularly talk to women affected by alcohol abuse and violence — and because they tell me the Basics Card and the Cashless Debit Card make their lives safer.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is an Alice Springs councilor and a research associate at the Centre for Independent Studies