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RINGY'S RAMBLINGS: Challenging the incoming figures
ISSUE 191 - 27 Nov 2009
ISSUE 191, November 26, 2009: Whenever she visits a remote community in the NT, Minister Macklin is apparently besieged by excited fans of welfare quarantining. But GRAHAM RING* notes the continued absence of hard evidence.
Here at Ramblings we prefer smarty-pants commentary to rigorous reviews of research methodology. But we know a crock when one gets tipped all over us. That's why we want to present the 2009 Rubbery Figures prize to Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin.
Her winning entry has the distinctly uninspiring title of Final Stores Post Licensing Monitoring Report.
We suspect that when bureaucrats burden their products with names like this, they don't particularly want them to be widely circulated.
Yet this sad little document is on the FaHCSIA website for all the world to see.
We reckon a title along the lines of Licking The Hand That Feeds You would not only have been a much snappier moniker, it would also have given readers a better sense of what they had stumbled onto. This is a decidedly dodgy document.
The report is the result of a series of phone interviews with the operators of community stores that are licensed for BasicsCard, meaning that people are able to spend income-quarantined funds in these locations.
Without this licence, business is going to be bleak.
What a surprise then, that 80 per cent of store operators who were interviewed agreed "the BasicsCard is a good thing for stores and communities".
Even Minister Macklin's boss, the likeable Kevin from Queensland, doesn't enjoy this kind of popularity.
However the document does feature some very serious looking bar-graphs, and statistical analyses that run to the decimal place.
But the truth is buried in the small print:
"The following analysis is based on the operators' subjective observations, perceptions and opinions of the situation within communities, and is not based on any examination of financial records or direct field reports."
Why on earth not? This flimsy folly invites readers to arrive at the conclusion that income management will save the world.
Yet no attempt has been made to gain objective data about the quantity or dollar value of fresh fruit and vegetables sold.
We simply learn that 68.2 per cent of operators reported an increase in fruit and vegetable sales. (We are also told that 19.7 percent of operators reported a decrease, although this alarming statistic is not illuminated.)
It's almost certain that sales of healthy food have increased, and this is undoubtedly a good thing.
Whether this encouraging development is a direct result of the magic of income management, or simply a reflection of the fact that these goods are now much more readily available, is not as clear.
Ramblings wonders if the Minister would like to assure the general public that the obvious wobbliness of this document is not characteristic of her department's broader reporting on the intervention.
Even the 'harder' statistical evidence cited in favour of income management warrants close examination.
The most recent Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) report states that 65.4 per cent of money had been allocated to food.
But it just may be that there's a liberal dose of "trust me, I'm from the government" about these friendly figures.
Ramblings hears that all purchases made on BasicsCard at large supermarkets - which could include DVDs, toys, Mars Bars and Twisties, as well as cans of tomato soup and bottles of orange juice - may have been counted in the 'food' column.
Similarly it's come to our notice that all purchases at K-Mart - a store which sells inexpensive and serviceable apparel along with a mountain of other junk - may be regarded for statistical purposes as "clothing".
An independent review conducted by Peter Yu's team after the first year of the Northern Territory Emergency Response found that "the intervention diminished its own effectiveness through its failure to engage constructively with the Aboriginal people it was intended to help".
The report was unambiguous about the compulsory, blanket nature of income quarantining:
"People who do not wish to participate should be free to leave the scheme. It should be available on a voluntary basis, and imposed only as a precise part of child protection measures, or where specified by statute, subject to independent review."
But the Prime Minister and Minister Macklin chose to plough on in the style of zealots, absolutely convinced of the wisdom of their path, and unwilling to take independent expert advice that their scheme had gone pear-shaped.
There's none so blind as those that will not see.
*ringy@nit.com.au
Graham Ring is a fortnightly NIT columnist and writer. He is based in Darwin after stints in Alice Springs and Melbourne.
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