I INTERVIEWED ELISABETH outside the bakery. As part of the research for my 2023 book, Who Cares? Life on Welfare in Australia, I was talking to people subject to the first trial of the cashless debit card. The card sequestered 80 per cent of social security payments onto a card that was linked to the EFTPOS system and could not be used to purchase alcohol or gambling products. The remaining 20 per cent of a recipient’s income support was paid into their bank account and could be withdrawn as cash. In Ceduna, South Australia, where I met Elisabeth, the card was introduced in 2016. This particular policy experiment in compulsory income management ended in 2022, after the election of the first Albanese government, but other forms of compulsory income management remain in place. 

Elisabeth talked of her childhood: her mum and dad were ‘always on the road, lookin’ for work, work, work’. They were, in effect, Aboriginal itinerant workers in the rural economy, a common experience of the 1960s and ’70s in this region. Elisabeth’s sisters ‘stepped upwards’, often taking care of her. Elisabeth told me the cashless debit card ‘caused [her] embarrassment’.