Cashless Welfare Card contract awarded to company with LNP owners/donors and gambling interests.

[dbaarda]

You mention the Welfare card in a few places (54, 288, 294, 406) but I don't think you make it clear just how dodgey it is. It not only cost stupid amounts of money for something that is basically equivalent to a corporate debit-card with spending limits;

https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2017/05/02/cashless-welfare-card-trials-costing-189m-figures-reveal

The contract to provide the card was awarded to Indue under questionable circumstances. Indue was owned by Liberal and National Party members and donated to various Liberal and National Party branches around Australia;

https://web.archive.org/web/20170904003534/https://theaimn.com/lnp-welfare-card-true-facts-exposed-corruption-disguised-philanthropy/

It seems they made out like bandits while washing their hands of the obvious corruption and sold it to a Hong Kong corporation, Stargroup, who also has gambling interests, which is a bad look for something intended to prevent unemployed people from miss-using their welfare;

https://theaimn.com/astounding-stupidity-turnbull-liberals-award-contracts-anti-gambling-welfare-card-gambling-interests

It was introduced as part of the Intervention, which was started by Howard (the older Coalition Government) and was so blatantly racist it required suspension of the racial discrimination act. They "fixed" the racist part since then by not making it exclusively targeted at Aboriginals, but Indigenous people continue to be the majority affected by it. The whole Intervention is a horror story that started before this Government, but it has been re-branded and continued by this Government despite every review showing how much damage it is doing. I cover this and the "Basics Card" with links to articles here;

http://minkirri.apana.org.au/wiki/TheIntervention

I also can't see anything about how they completely rejected and ignored the Uluru statement from the Heart. This was something that the some of the wisest and greatest people in Australia (who also happened to be Indigenous) poured their heart and soul into, asking for so little (a voice) that many Aboriginal people complained that it didn't ask for enough. It was rejected so quickly and completely that I doubt they even read it.

I can file additional bugs for each separate thing if you like; Indue, Intervention, Uluru statement from the Heart, but they are all kinda related.

[mdavis-xyz]

Good points. Any idea why that 2nd link was taken down? Did the site retract it, or did it just expire?

As far as the Northern Territory intervention goes, yes it was horrendous, but that was a previous government, right? I'm trying to restrict the scope to the the Coalition government since Abbott. I have no hope of comprehensively documenting everything before then (children overboard lies, Iraq war etc)

[mdavis-xyz]

As far as the Uluru statement goes, do you mean this statement and this rejection?

The Government's argument seems valid (the conclusions follow from the premise). Is the premise true? Was the statement really asking for a third house of parliament, which excludes most Australians using an unspecified criteria? Or did the government misunderstand what the statement was asking for?

[dbaarda]

I have no idea why the second link was taken down. I had a link to the original article and when it vanished I searched for it and the only thing I found was another article on theaimn.com talking about how that article was their most popular article when initially released, and suddenly became their most popular again a couple years later. I could find no mention of any sort of takedown or retraction, even though I did find takedown/retractions on theaimn.com for other articles. I'm also not sure it expired, because I could also find even older articles on theaimn.com that were still up. It's possible someone decided it was no longer relevant after the LNP members sold their interests to Stargroup. I bet if you dig there are also links between LNP members and Stargroup.

Although the NT intervention was started by a previous government, it is still being perpetuated by the current government (and by the Labour government that was in the interim). It's just been re-badged several times as "Closing the Gap", then "Stronger Futures", with the last big modification in the 2015 budget. A pretty good summary is here, but yeah, it could be classified as before this government;

• https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/our-areas-of-work/indigenous/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention

The Uluru statement rejection was described as "Elaborately dishonest" and "mean-spirited bastardry".

• https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/12/indigenous-voice-malcolm-turnbull-remarks-anger
• https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/oct/26/turnbulls-uluru-statement-rejection-mean-spirited-bastardry-legal-expert

But the best argument of why the rejection was wrong I've seen is this;

• https://theconversation.com/why-the-government-was-wrong-to-reject-an-indigenous-voice-to-parliament-86408

[mdavis-xyz]

What's the status of the statement of the heart these days?
It seems the Coalition set aside funding for a referendum?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/11/the-time-is-now-right-parties-urged-to-make-indigenous-voice-an-election-issue-and-set-referendum-date