Jobs Guarantees are used to condition welfare assistances and worsening settler colonialism.

There are two specific policies that, as this article goes to press, together further the ongoing injustices of settler colonialism, particularly in remote regions of the country. The first is the Cashless Debit Card. The Cashless Debit Card is a type of income management that quarantines 80 per cent of state benefits received by working-age people, and is justified on the basis of restricting alcohol and gambling purchases. It limits the amount of cash that can be withdrawn to 20 per cent of the total money recipients receive. A high proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are put on the Card, and have reported that the Card makes the use and management of their meagre social security payments challenging, causing further financial difficulty and stress (Klein and Razi, 2018). Second, and intersecting with the Card, is the remote work-for-the-dole programme called the Community Development Program or CDP. It requires the same cohort of working-age participants, who are almost all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and receive a state payment, to attend manufactured ‘work-like’ initiatives for up to 20 hours a week for a payment well below minimum wage (Altman, 2015; Commonwealth of Australia, 2019). The requirements for CDP are harsher than the government’s non-remote and mainly non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Jobactive workfare programme, because of its rules and because of the remote setting. This has resulted in CDP rates of non-compliance and non-attendance 30 to 40 times higher than in the Jobactive programme (Fowkes, 2016). People who do not attend what some in the programme term ‘make-work’ or ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber, 2019) lose their welfare money, and families go without. Both of these policies further settler colonialism. While the programmes focus on behavioural deficiencies of the unemployed, the key cause of unemployment in the remote and regional areas such as the East Kimberley is the absence of formal jobs (KDC, 2013), and so the programmes are superfluous to their own stated policy objectives. These programmes also support the expansion of private and largely White capital, thus transforming Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander subjectivities into sites of accumulation by dispossession. For example, the private company which provides the Cashless Debit Card profits from the project. Finally, underpinning these job-creation initiatives are specific (Western) norms as to how work is defined. While many Aboriginal peoples in and around Kununurra engage in productive work ‘on country’, undertaking customary (non-market) work for livelihood, this is not recognized or valued by the state. Such productive work activities have endured over a decade of critique by politicians, business leaders, policy makers and some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elite, who frame this work as being outside the ‘real economy’, and as promoting narratives about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander passivity, dysfunction and non-participation in work (Altman, 2014). Such discourse also ignores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ engagement in other productive and socially reproductive activities such as unpaid care work and care of country. These types of work are overlooked, and bodies passed off as unproductive and unemployed are subsequently compulsorily forced onto punitive and conditional welfare schemes (Altman, 2019). People on these programmes know what they are about. In the East Kimberley, the Cashless Debit Card is called the White card, as it is, in the words of one participant, ‘taking us back to the ration days’ (Klein and Razi, 2017: 7). Patty Gibson has framed this imposition and control of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ welfare expenditure by the Australian state as the ‘re-imposition of colonial forms of governance’ when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, prior to the 1970s, ‘were not entitled to handle cash like other citizens and rationing regimes were used to control Aboriginal movement and labour, as well as to try and discipline people out of “Aboriginal” behaviours’ (Gibson, 2012: 63). Klein and Razi (2018) link the polices of the Cashless Debit Card and CDP workfare to broader settler colonial processes in the East Kimberley region. For instance, Kununurra itself is a town created through the damming of the Ord River, which flooded over half of Miriuwung country, including important Miriuwung songlines — significant knowledge networks carried through generations about Miriuwung culture and land. This dramatic dispossession for accumulation has not benefited Aboriginal peoples; the scheme has resulted in only 260 (predominately non-Aboriginal) jobs (Grudnoff and Campbell, 2017). And as documented in the Senate Inquiry into Indigenous Stolen Wages (Parliament of Australia, 2006), indentured and unpaid Aboriginal labour built the pastoral industries of the East Kimberley. Finally, many families suffered through Stolen Generation policies whereby their children were taken from them and used as slave or indentured domestic labour in settler households. In line with this history, people are now put on work for the dole — another form of indentured state labour programmes and income management.