Witness after witness to a senate inquiry into poverty has shared how compulsory income management and onerous Centrelink requirements are damaging Indigenous people and communities.
The senate community affairs reference committee, chaired by Greens senator Janet Rice, held a public hearing on Tuesday into the extent and nature of poverty in Australia.
Dr Francis Markham from the Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) explained to the inquiry that Indigenous people in remote communities are disproportionately affected by poverty.
He said more than half (57 per cent) of Indigenous people in remote communities were living below the poverty line and that rate had increased by 11 percentage points in the past decade.
CAEPR's analysis has found that, geographically, Indigenous poverty was most concentrated in the Northern Territory and in the Kimberley in Western Australia, but in non-remote areas, where most Indigenous people live, Indigenous poverty rates were gradually falling.
"A significant cause of escalating remote Indigenous poverty is the near absence of private sector jobs in remote regions, constraining Indigenous communities to the limited number of suitable publicly funded jobs available and to social security," Dr Markham said.
"And to put it bluntly, the rate of social security payments are too low and punitive policies like the Community Development Program (CDP) have been counterproductive."
CDP is the former coalition government's controversial remote employment program, under which job-seekers had much higher mutual obligations to receive their Centrelink payment than people in urban areas.
Income management - such as the Basics card in the NT and the cashless debit card - is when a proportion of a recipient's social security payment is quarantined and only able to be used for approved purchases at authorised vendors.
Associate Professor Elise Klein, a member of the Accountable Income Management Network, told the inquiry that compulsory income management often entrenched poverty and disproportionately targeted First Nations people.
"Experiences of poverty linked to compulsory income management cannot be separated from the punitive nature of social security linked to the dramatic inadequacy of payments as well as other welfare conditionality programs such as the Community Development Program," she said.
Dr Klein said compulsory income management also disempowered those subjected to it.
She said there were Aboriginal people in the NT who had been left on compulsory income management for more than 15 years - since the program was first introduced under the Howard government's Intervention in 2007.
"Some were just teenagers when they were first put on it and have now spent their whole adult life having their money controlled by the federal government," Dr Klein said.
"We must consider the deep impact this has on people's rights in terms of choice, empowerment, but also economic inclusion."
Dr Klein said she was concerned the government's new income management program made it difficult for people to appeal decisions and offered no clear way to exit.
"This new scheme has been very poor at best and consistently overlooks Aboriginal-controlled organisations and their expertise when it comes to compulsory income management," she said.
First Peoples Disability Network chief executive Damian Griffis told the inquiry Indigenous people with disabilities have strength in their cultures but are "devastatingly and disproportionately" impacted by social exclusion and poverty.
"Ongoing legacies of colonisation, like institutionalisation, incarceration, stolen wages (where states quarantined wages of Indigenous people and never paid them), removals of children and institutionalised ableism and racism in policies, programs and services across the life course and across all sectors and systems contribute to this ongoing poverty," he said.
"We are anxious to share solutions to addressing poverty among First Nations people with disability, which we say needs to be a national social justice priority."
The inquiry's report is due on December 5.
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