Here here. The money is better spend on job creation initiatives like the CEP scheme of 1982 which gave people a job for a year at award wages doing construction in National Parks etc. It was a great confidence and competence building program.

Paul McDonald fails to acknowledge (wilfully ignores?) the huge amount of work carried out by Centrelink staff in personal counselling of clients who are under Income Management; plus the referral to other services and the budgetting/financial training which is at the core of the Income Management project. Centrelink staff have done an excellent job with these aspects of the program in the NT communities where IM has been operating for three years. This explains why, against all expectations, the IM has become quite popular with clients, and why things are improving greatly for children in their families, which is the basic aim of the program.

safety net not a comfort cusion.

Well said Kenny.

I'm fully in favour of people managing their own income.

I want total oversight of the management of their hand out.

nohj,
I presume you meant CDEP ? I have worked with this scheme & my feeling about it is that it was one of the more evil schemes ever imposed upon our society. Why ? Because all it did was to create thousands of new bureaucratic positions & the people on CDEP weren't afforded any dignity nor opportunity to build up their communities. It's time we got rid of this Govt fed monster.

The proposals for stricter regimes for welfare recipients is just a populist political fix beloved of the Liblabs, they rarely provide decent evidence for such policies. We might as well propose that all rich rorters of taxes be similarly managed.