By RAINER CHLANDA
Those who work in the social service sector in Alice Springs, as I do, know this fact intimately: there is an incredible amount of money funding our response to a community who have incredibly little.
Our system watches as desperate people stumble and waits for them to fall before extending a paternalistic hand or one gripped around a gavel. Only once crisis strikes comes a swath of expensive support services or an inhumane prison system.
We are building prisons before houses, funding health services but not health, and responding to trauma instead of preventing it.
I’ve worked in various therapeutic support services with “at risk” youth in touch with the justice system for the last nine years, which brings you up-close with our struggling underclass.
When doing this work, you become a member of a group of “stakeholders” from various services that form a “care team” for the young person. At the extreme but not uncommon end of the spectrum, a care team may include a Support Worker from a Youth Support Program at an NGO; a Community Corrections (NTG) Case Worker supervising their parole or bail; a Behaviour Support Practitioner; a non-mainstream school attempting daily at-home pickups; a multidisciplinary team of allied health professionals conducting assessments; a Disability Support Worker from the NDIS; a worker from a Diversion Program; and a Government Child Protection Practitioner who oversees all of this.
Dizzying amounts of money and resources swirl around a young person who survives on their portion of their caregiver’s $493 per week parenting-payment.
Cathy Alice at Whitegate by ROD MOSS
If the efforts of the team fail and the young person is incarcerated in a Youth Detention Centre, the tax-payer will cough up a further staggering approximate $900,000 a year, according to the NT News, to detain them in a system that has been proven to further criminalise young offenders (and increasingly so the younger they are).
The well-intentioned and often highly skilled care team will meet occasionally for updates and to finesse the care plan, but in many meetings I’ve attended, the bulk of the stakeholders have next to no traction with the young person and several will have never laid eyes on them.
Even if a Support Worker achieves regular contact with their clients, their engagement is unlikely to meaningfully resemble the work their respective programs set out to do, as the clients’ much more pressing need to survive takes precedence.
A Social Worker, working for an NGO on a good salary, is likely to find themselves supporting their client and their family to access, for example, an “emergency relief voucher.” This involves picking them up in the organisation’s leased vehicle, often taking them to a local org to have an ID card issued, on to Centrelink for an income statement (and a lengthy wait) and to the bank for a bank statement to evidence their need, then finally to an org that will hopefully issue a $60 food voucher that can be received once a fortnight.
The worker in this scenario has to try hard to avoid the realisation that what their client needs more than their specialised support, is a fraction of their salary.
Whilst “self-determination” is a central tenet in “trauma-informed practice”, the apparatus in place appears to reflect that we’ve decided our clients are incapable of managing daily living tasks and require highly paid professionals to take over.
This isn’t an argument to say that therapeutic programs have no value, but when they are delivered within the context of the constant stress of poverty their important work falls by the wayside, along with any hope of achieving sustainable change.
The issues that determine disadvantage which play out so clearly along racial lines here and throughout our country are stubbornly complex.
Supreme Court Building
The country’s recent answer of “No” to The Voice to Parliament referendum has left us bereft of an opportunity to better understand some of these complexities. However, not every facet of disadvantage is complicated, and there are voices on the ground that are heard but not answered.
The people I work with voice their needs constantly, saying: We need food, we need adequate housing, a working car, we need to get back on Centrelink. Only with basic needs met can people afford to turn their minds to further aspirations such as employment and education and meaningfully exercise self-determination.
The impediment to meeting these needs lies not with the difficulty of complicated policy design or a lack of evidence to inform them, but with weak social and political will to enact simple measures.
Policy makers could decide tomorrow that everyone who is entitled to a Centrelink payment receives it unconditionally, and that all payments are increased so that no one is in poverty.
Tasking someone with surviving with zero income is an absurd arrangement that the whole community suffers for. This obviously dictates either relying on one’s family for support or acquiring necessities illegally, thereby risking catalysing a cascade of legal processes and interventions which of course completely dwarf the cost of simply keeping that person on their humble income.
An unconditional payment would also save the taxpayer funding the cumbersome division of Centrelink that polices whether recipients meet their obligations. The big stick of this humiliating practice is ultimately futile as, provided English is your first language and you have relative stability and some digital literacy, satisfying the requirements is easily doctored.
Those who wish to “dole bludge” and are of relative privilege work the system and stay on payments whilst those who require the most support fall through the cracks and plunge further in to disadvantage.
The near doubling of Jobseeker Payments during Covid saw millions of people relieved from poverty around the country, and a positive social impact including a dramatic reduction in property crime in the Northern Territory (where residents were not subject to lockdowns) to the lowest in a decade (see graph).
Find details here and here and here.
The assumptions that an unconditional income will generate lazy people and increase anti-social behaviour have failed to materialise in countless experiments of a “Guaranteed Income” (GI) around the world since the 1960s. These experiments have produced a strong evidence base that a GI leads to better health outcomes (not surprising), increases in employment (perhaps surprising), lower crime rates, and increased school attendance amongst a swath of other improved measures of societal health.
The policy, often dismissed as fanciful or idealistic, is increasingly being considered by governments around the world, with the rise of AI and its threat to jobs contributing to its growing relevance. There are over 100 pilots of GI currently being delivered in the US, the ANC South Africa is promising to introduce it if re-elected, while the largest ever trial of it is underway currently in Kenya and showing promising results.
Beyond increasing cash flow to impoverished members of the community (not just to professionals surrounding them), any measure that directly improves the conditions in which the poor survive is the best form of early intervention.
Adequate funding could be allocated so that social housing provision meets the demand. In Alice Springs the estimated wait for social housing is in between six and 10 years with overcrowding in the NT being 43% higher than the national average.
Poker machines could be banned from pubs and clubs (as WA has done and achieved the lowest gambling losses per capita in the country). Better yet would be to eradicate them completely thus stopping the flow of upwards of $14m (figure not including the losses on machines at Lasseter’s Casino as this data is not made public) from the poorest members of our community to rich investors interstate like Iris Capital.
A landmark study of the effects of gambling on crime in NSW just found that increased spending on gambling is associated with increase in assaults, break and enter offences, and motor vehicle theft among other offences.
The gambling industry preys upon addiction and desperation and is unaccountable as its effects ricochet through the community.
Evidence-based offender rehabilitation and therapeutic programs need to be introduced to the prison. Currently there are none at Alice Springs Correctional Centre, and scarcely any training / work programs.
Persons who are incarcerated in Alice Springs sit on remand for an average of 293 days (statistics from January, 2024) in an understaffed overcrowded prison without air-conditioning.
Can we be surprised that several riots have occurred there during sweltering summer months? Gangs and violence fill the void and we wonder why the NT has the worst rate of recidivism in the country.
Basic measures to address obvious systemic failings stare us in the face whilst we elect a government who believe that the answer to crime lies with locking up ten-year-olds, bringing back spit hoods, and fining (even prosecuting!) parents whose kids miss school.
Ryders and Johnsons in camp. By ROD MOSS.
And, in an unbelievably callous decision announced this week in the CLP’s “Corrections Infrastructure Master Plan”, youth offenders in Alice Springs will be transferred to Darwin Youth Detention Centre to serve their sentences. This will see the most vulnerable members of our community taken 1,500 kms from their home communities, severing contact with their families and support services.
The CLP are also pledging to increase the capacity of the adult prisons across the NT by an extra 1000 beds – a clear indication that they are a government who see imprisonment as a solution, not a contingency.
These punitive measures capitalise on anger, appeal to our lowest common denominator, and have no evidence base whatsoever. Our humanity takes a blow, desperate people suffer further, and division is inflamed.
Support for these policies appears to reflect that we value our right to punish over our right to thrive together, that our thirst for retribution is so great we wish to satiate it in spite of ourselves. But these responses only find traction with inflammatory lies fed to a constituency desperate for relief from chronic crime.
To address disadvantage, the suffering it encompasses along with the chaos that spills out into the whole community, the “Hard on Crime” fallacy must be resisted and rational, evidence-based responses pursued.
Other reading:
100 GI experiments
Reduction in Crime due to increase payment
PAINTING at top by ROD MOSS, Akeyulerre Easter.
Thanks.
A very well researched, documented and thought out piece.
Now how do we get it through to our elected members?
Charlie Carter