This report reviews the Cashless Debit Card Trial and evaluation focussing primarily on the Final Evaluation Report released by the Australian Government in September 2017. The Evaluation by Orima Research, is intended to evaluate the Trial in the first two trial sites of Ceduna, South Australia and in East Kimberley, Western Australia.

In 2011 the NZ government adopted from the Accident Compensation Corporation via the Welfare Working Group a programme of actuarially estimating the cost of someone staying long-term on a benefit and using that as the basis for defining the return from "investing" in action that deflected that person from a benefit into long-term work. The...

This review’s purpose was to identify how to make Australia’s welfare system fairer, more effective, coherent and sustainable and encourage people to work.

The competing principles framework for analysing Australian Indigenous affairs is revisited, starting with Rowse on 'the Coombs experiment'. Rowse rehabilitates this term from pejorative critics, arguing that all government policy in Indigenous affairs is experimental. The task becomes one of characterising changing patterns of government experiment since the Commonwealth became involved in Indigenous affairs on...

This evaluation assessed the Cape York Welfare Reform, aimed at reversing a deterioration of social and economic conditions in Cape York Indigenous communities. The evaluation points to a promising level of progress, particularly relating to subtle but fundamental shifts in participant behaviour, that if sustained could deliver significant positive results over the longer term.