Indigenous Peoples, Neoliberalism and the State : A Retreat from Rights to 'Responsibilisation' Via the Cashless Welfare Card

This chapter addresses the reduction of Indigenous peoples' rights in the context of cashless welfare transfers. It contributes to the arguments made in this collection by exploring how neoliberal interventions can adversely affect Indigenous peoples, diminishing their consumer choices and other rights, whilst simultaneously creating benefits for entrepreneurial interests via privatisation of social security payments. It questions the purpose of the government's recognition of the lower socio-economic status of Indigenous peoples and explores who benefits from such recognition. The chapter analyses how cashless welfare transfers operate along racialised contours and implement a neoliberal approach to governance of Indigenous peoples, fostering regulation by market principles that reward entrepreneurialism and self-reliance. The chapter highlights the increasingly precarious experience of Indigenous communities caused by insecure marketised funding arrangements with competitive processes. It progresses these themes by recommending the development of an alternative form of resource redistribution through an integrity tax based on reparation for colonial atrocities. The chapter contends that this approach is preferable to that of intensifying welfare conditionality via cashless welfare transfers