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 women and children — 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 such as the cashless debit card.
When those in the sheltered towers of academe — such as Melbourne’s Elise Klein in a recent article — denounce the CDC, they are in effect attacking voiceless, marginalised Australian women and children, enduring a life alien to those in virtue-signalling metropolitan coffee claques.
To witness Labor now align itself with the Greens and backflip on its bipartisan support for the CDC being trialled further afield can be likened to watching it 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 with 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 addiction. Addicts expect their kin to fund their addictions without question. This is disastrous.
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 Malarndirri McCarthy and Patrick Dodson do understand this culture. So why, then, do these Labor politicians take advice from inner-city green academics who likely have 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 among it. Because I regularly talk to women affected by alcohol abuse and violence — and because they tell me the basics card and the CDC make their lives safer.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is an Alice Springs councillor and a research associate at the Centre for Independent Studies.
- EXCLUSIVEAustralia’s richest man Anthony Pratt is strengthening his ties with Donald Trump after a meeting in Florida yesterday.
- WORLD COMMENTARYIndia is the elephant on its own subcontinent, but China is challenging its dominance.
- Elation turns to despair as Wild Oats XI loses Sydney to Hobart yacht race line honours on protest.
- A union push to restrict casual employment will strangle small and medium-sized retailers, the industry warns.
- A former staff member at Oakden aged mental healthcare facility has been stood down pending a police investigation.
- EXCLUSIVEChinese spies or Russian agents of influence may soon have the Australian Federal Police knocking on their door.
Reader comments on this site are moderated before publication to promote lively and civil debate. We encourage your comments but submitting one does not guarantee publication. We publish hundreds of comments daily, and if a comment is rejected it is likely because it does not meet with our comment guidelines, which you can read here. No correspondence will be entered into if a comment is declined.
jmkgvjhf
Throwing more money at the problem isnt the answer.