By Ruth McCausland.
First Posted Monday, 30 June 2008 at On Line Opinion.

On the first anniversary of the Northern Territory intervention, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin announced a $17.6 million trial aimed at improving school attendance by making parents' welfare payments conditional on their children's adequate school attendance. Starting next year, parents in Hermannsburg, Katherine, the Katherine town camps, Wallace Rockhole, Wadeye and the Tiwi Islands whose children are not enrolled in or do not regularly attend school may have their welfare payments suspended until they do so.

Measures such as making parents' welfare payments conditional on their children's school attendance have a seductive simplicity. People have become tired of being told that the causes of disadvantage and dysfunction in Indigenous communities are complex and long-standing and require responses in the same vein. 

The coercion and paternalism of past policy eras appeals to some people who despair at the levels of violence and hopelessness in some Indigenous communities.

The Rudd Government seems to have embraced the significant "mutual obligation" policy legacy of its predecessor - a shift from the notion that welfare payments are an inalienable entitlement to minimal financial support from the government by those raising children or those unable (though not necessarily unwilling) to participate in the workforce, to a system where such payments are conditional on an individualised contractual arrangement where the recipient must fulfil certain behavioural or other obligations imposed by government.

It is appealingly labelled "mutual" despite the obvious disparity of power and choice between the parties.

That welfare payments should be conditional on certain behaviour has become a kind of received wisdom in Australia - the notion that certain people receiving government benefits should "give something back" to society. Starting with Work for the Dole for young, unemployed people, it was then extended to people on parenting and disability pensions and now to entire communities.

Supporters of mutual obligation underpinning welfare policy argue that those receiving income support are not simply entitled to government assistance and that there should be an obligation to make an "active" contribution to society. Such a policy approach is closely associated with American new paternalist Lawrence Mead, who stated that such measures "assume the people concerned need assistance but they also need direction if they are to live constructively".

Noel Pearson has been Australia's strongest proponent of conditional welfare, arguing that welfare payments without a requirement to give anything back in return has led to an undermining of Aboriginal notions of reciprocity and in turn, powerlessness and dysfunction.

Pearson's view of welfare has had enormous influence on policy in Australia, embraced with gusto by the Howard government and now it seems by Rudd's. Mirroring proposals by Pearson in his report From Hand Out to Hand Up, changes to the Social Security Act made to support the Northern Territory intervention have given governments unprecedented new control over individuals' welfare payments.

It was not widely publicised that changes to social security and family assistance legislation now enable Centrelink to place any welfare recipient on "income management" based on certain triggers, where up to 100 per cent of a person's welfare payments can be "set aside" and "directed to appropriate expenditure". Those triggers can include unsatisfactory school attendance by a recipient's child, or in the Northern Territory, just living in or visiting a particular area.

Referred to benignly as "income management regimes", 50 per cent of the income support and family assistance payments of every Indigenous individual in those prescribed areas in the Northern Territory has been quarantined for an initial period of 12 months - irrespective of whether they have neglected or abused their children, or even if they have direct responsibility for children at all.

The Rudd Government has confirmed its support for the welfare-school attendance policy nexus, with Minister Macklin advocating trials in the Kimberleys, Cape York as well as the Northern Territory to reportedly give the Government the evidence it needs "to find out what works".

Despite the characterisation of such schemes as trials, there has been little public information or debate about the policy rationale behind such an approach. Nor has there been much scrutiny of whether the stated aims of the trials have much connection to their measures.

This appears to sit in stark contrast to Jenny Macklin's assertion that her government's Indigenous policy-making would be based on a "thorough, forensic analysis of all the facts and all the evidence".

Critics of mutual obligation describe it as "selective paternalism" in the way that it treats some Australians as capable of making decisions in their own interests or those of their families, and others as not. Implicit in the mutual obligation framework is the assumption that policy makers are more "rational" and "moral" than the poorest welfare recipients. For example, wealthy families receiving the Baby Bonus aren't required to demonstrate that they've spent their government welfare payment in the interests of their children.

Catholic Social Services Australia has recently identified a number of major problems with mutual obligation-based welfare policy in this country - namely that it stigmatises rather than supports recipients of income support; it is punitive and focused on deterring claims rather than assisting recipients to meet their obligations; it frames welfare reliance as if it were a law and order issue with a focus on enforcement; and it in fact removes responsibility from individuals, families and communities.

In relation to Indigenous communities, the approach is based on the questionable proposition that passive welfare has led to learned helplessness and dependence, whereas active welfare and mutual obligation will create self-reliant, self-governing communities and good citizens who'll stop drinking and send their kids to school.

The notion of linking parents' welfare payments to their children's school attendance is new to Australian social policy. However, versions of this approach have been implemented over recent decades in the US.

A number of state governments (who have responsibility for welfare programs in the US) began experimenting with programs linking families' welfare payments to their children's satisfactory school attendance in the 1980s. As part of the major welfare-to-work reforms undertaken by the Clinton Administration in 1996, states were given the power to introduce Individual Responsibility Agreements whereby welfare recipients must fulfil certain obligations to receive payments, such as their children regularly attending school.

An evaluation by David Campbell and Joan Wright in 2005 published the first comprehensive findings of evaluations of seven programs that linked families' welfare payments to their children's satisfactory school attendance. The study found that programs linking welfare payments to school attendance are based on assumptions of questionable validity, including the fact that they implicitly define the problem as one of parental or student negligence.

Evaluations surveyed found that such programs spend disproportionate resources monitoring attendance rather than confronting the underlying problems associated with poverty. The data supported the proposition that welfare school attendance programs will not succeed in improving attendance unless supportive case management services are an integral part of the program.

A common feature of successful programs to improve school attendance and achievement was that of a creative collaboration, which intentionally builds bridges between public agencies and the community, often by engaging parents or community-based organisations. Evaluations also found that illness rather than truancy was the major cause of absence - a finding which undercut the idea that financial sanctions alone are likely to alter attendance patterns.

The relevance of such a study to Australia and to Indigenous communities in particular is debatable. However, it does appear that Australian policy is being influenced by new paternalist approaches adapted from the United States, so the evidence that does exist bears reflecting on.

In fact, these shifts in Australian policy are unprecedented in their attempts to control how welfare recipients spend their money.

In the US, attempts to make welfare payments conditional on school attendance relate only to eligibility - where payments are reduced or suspended as a punitive measure for not meeting specific obligations. There are no policies in the US or elsewhere that allow governments to withhold welfare entitlements in a separate account and dictate its specific use.

It follows that there is no research that supports this approach as an effective measure to make parents more responsible, or to improve children's lives.

The only evaluation that is publicly available of a scheme linking welfare payments to school attendance in Indigenous communities in Australia is that of a voluntary trial in Halls Creek in 2006. It found that the school attendance of the children did not improve over the course of the trial, noting three contributing factors: lack of parental insistence that children get to school in the morning, teacher quality, and bullying and teasing.

All parents that the evaluation team spoke to said they wanted their children to go to school, however, many of them felt quite powerless and helpless in enforcing this, particularly those with children over 12 years. The evaluation also found that poor attendance did not necessarily run in families - in one family with five school age children, attendance levels ranged from 14 to 88 per cent.

The evaluation report also noted that other programs at other schools have also had a significant impact, with the key to improvement being to create an education environment that students want to be part of. The main means for doing this was stated to be with high quality teachers and a strong leadership culture within the school.

These findings support the work of Chris Sarra in Queensland, whose research and experience highlights the crucial role of teachers and the school culture in assisting Indigenous children to reach their educational potential. Research also suggests that poor health and nutrition have a powerful impact on whether or not Indigenous children attend school and on their ability to learn and participate in school activities.

The evidence tells us that there are a range of reasons for low school attendance. Lack of parental engagement or support for education undoubtedly plays a significant role in truancy. However it is clearly not sufficient to focus on attempting to force parents to modify their behaviour.

As well as diverting focus from what is known about the contributing factors to poor school attendance - poor health, overcrowded housing, lack of employment prospects, etc - at a fundamental level this approach does not actually encourage responsibility in parents.

In fact it takes away responsibility from Indigenous people for managing finances and decision-making in the interest of families and places it back in the hands of administrators such as government officials and store managers. And it does so in the absence of sufficient strategies to provide information or support to people to enable them to overcome drug or alcohol addiction and to become better parents.

In the case of the blanket application in the Northern Territory, it actually punishes people who may have been spending their welfare payments in the interests of children. It attempts to modify behaviour through negative reinforcement on a group scale.

Bad psychology, never mind bad policy.

Despite all the rhetoric around mutual obligation in Indigenous policy, there has not necessarily been increased accountability on behalf of governments.

In fact, under the Northern Territory intervention, the operation of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and the right to appeal government decisions through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Social Security Appeals Tribunal was suspended. And an evaluation report commissioned by the previous Federal Government indicated that in 80 Shared Responsibility Agreements with Indigenous communities, it was governments rather than communities that were not meeting their commitments.

As the Australian Education Union have noted, lack of adequate resourcing remains the critical factor in Indigenous children missing out on education. We know there are thousands of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory who are missing out on schooling at least in part because of a lack of basic infrastructure.

And surely it is not just attendance we should be concerned about, but also quality of education.

There can be no doubt that revelations of shocking abuse and neglect of Indigenous children - any children - must be responded to by governments with urgency and sincerity. Their safety and wellbeing is a matter we should all be concerned with and vigilant about.

Surely then it is crucial that any measures introduced are subject to scrutiny to ensure that they are genuinely designed to address the endemic problems facing the communities and families those children live in.

Quarantining welfare payments is an extraordinarily expensive and inevitably ineffective shortcut to increasing Indigenous children's participation in education.

Most importantly, it is diverting attention from what is known about what actually does work in getting kids to want to stay at school and giving them opportunities in life that their parents didn't have.

Ruth McCausland is a Senior Researcher at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology Sydney.  A version of this article was first published in the National Indigenous Times on May 29, 2008.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.