This article was originally published in December 2017.
Life Course Centre Fellow Associate Professor Stefanie Schurer recently released two new working papers on income management and the quarantining of welfare payments using a cashless welfare card in the Northern Territory. Schurer and her coauthors (see below) say, ‘One of the stated goals of income management was to improve child outcomes by increasing the share of household income spent on food and other household essentials, and reducing the amount spent on potentially harmful goods such as alcohol and tobacco’. However, their research findings do not support this.
On child health outcomes, the authors say: ‘The findings of our study suggest that income management did not improve one measure of child health outcomes, and, by extension, that income management does not appear to have produced the desired change in household consumption patterns, at least for households with pregnant women. In fact, income management may have had a negative impact on newborn health …’
Regarding the issue of income management as it relates to school attendance: ‘In contrast to the policy’s objectives, we find no evidence that school attendance increased after the introduction of income management. In fact, we estimate that attendance fell by 2.7 percentage points on average in the short-run.’
Find the two working papers, here:
- Do Welfare Restrictions Improve Child Health? Estimating the Causal Impact of Income Management in the Northern Territory, coauthored with Mary Alice Doyle and Sven Silburn.
- The Effect of Quarantining Welfare on School Attendance in Indigenous Communities, coauthored with Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Nathan Kettlewell and Sven Silburn.
The Guardian, 8 December 2017, reported on these papers in the following article:
Drop in birth weights and school attendance could be linked to NT welfare restrictions
School attendance and birth weights fell in the months immediately following the introduction of income management measures as part of the Northern Territory intervention, two new studies have found.
The research by the University of Sydney and the Menzies School of Health Research found that rates of school attendance fell an average of 2.5 percentage points, or 4 per cent, across the 73 remote Aboriginal communities and 10 town camps put under compulsory income management in the 13 months from September 2007 and October 2008.
The average birth weights of babies who were in utero in the same period fell by 100 grams, and the probability that babies would be born with a low birthweight – less than 2.5 kg – increased. Read more.