(Image: Private Media)

Another auditor-general review of the Coalition’s Cashless Debit Card (CDC) trial has revealed the lack of any useful evaluation of the trial within the Morrison government and an apparent indifference to establishing whether the card delivered any of its claimed benefits.

A new Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) examination of the trial — the second since it commenced in 2016 — details how most aspects of the implementation and administration of the card trial were competently carried out by the Department of Social Services (DSS) and Services Australia, but there was seemingly little interest in monitoring the trial and evaluating its outcomes.

The ANAO’s earlier report, in 2019, found that DSS’ “approach to monitoring and evaluation was inadequate” and made specific recommendations about fixing that. This follow-up report reveals virtually no useable evaluation was ever carried out, despite the trial being expanded and extended.

The ANAO’s summary reads like a checklist of failure on any effort to determine if the trial achieved anything. “Internal performance measurement and monitoring processes for the CDC program are not effective. Monitoring data exists, but it is not used to provide a clear view of program performance … The CDC program extension and expansion was not informed by an effective second impact evaluation, cost–benefit analysis or post-implementation review.”

The auditor-general went on:

“Although DSS evaluated the CDC Trial, a second impact evaluation was delivered late in the implementation of the CDC program, had similar methodological limitations to the first impact evaluation and was not independently reviewed. A cost-benefit analysis and post-implementation review on the CDC program were undertaken but not used. The recommendations from Auditor-General Report No.1 2018–19 relating to evaluation, cost-benefit analysis and post-implementation review were not effectively implemented.”

DSS did make some efforts to undertake some form of evaluation. There was data collected for internal monitoring, but its value was limited because there were no targets or performance indicators developed. When DSS did develop performance indicators, one of them wasn’t properly measurable. A second attempt to evaluate the trial, by the University of Adelaide — whose researchers warned DSS of methodology problems — was 18 months late, didn’t fix problems identified in the first evaluation, and was never used in any policy development or advice.

When the trial was expanded in 2018, the legislation implementing it specifically required that evaluations of the trial be themselves subject to independent review, which would be tabled in Parliament — thereby giving the impression there would be some rigour to the evaluation process. Even though its contract with Adelaide Uni indicated there’d be an independent review, and even after the DSS executive approved a review in February last year, DSS simply decided to ignore the legislation:

DSS subsequently decided that it was not required to undertake the review because the evaluation was commissioned in November 2018 prior to the commencement of section 124PS of the SSA Act in December 2018.To date, no independent review has taken place.

The Morrison government also agreed to implement a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of the trial. DSS hadn’t bothered to carry out a CBA when the ANAO first looked at the trial. Eventually, after repeated delays, DSS got around to it in 2020, and last year a consultant furnished an analysis that noted extensive methodological difficulties but suggested the benefits outweighed the negatives. But DSS decided there was simply not enough robust data for the analysis, and declared it “of very limited value”.

There was also supposed to be a “post-implementation review” but that, too, suffered endless delays and has never been finalised.

Throughout it all, despite the complete lack of any evidence about the outcomes of the trial, its benefits, or how it was implemented, the Morrison government proudly announced extensions and expansions of the trial, making unfounded claims such as “evidence shows that the Cashless Debit Card works” when no such evidence existed.

What’s noteworthy about the CDC experience is the extent to which both the Coalition and its bureaucrats in DSS went out of their way to give a gloss of evidence-based policymaking to a policy primarily aimed at Indigenous Australians — calling it a “trial”, legislating for independent reviews of evaluations, claiming that expansions were backed by evidence. The ANAO, instead, has revealed at best indifference to the idea of establishing a rigorous evidence base and, in the deliberate evasion of legislative requirements, perhaps something more sinister.

It’s another example of both the politicisation of the public service and a hollowing out of its policy capacity. Glyn Davis has a monumental task to fix what used to be a respected public service.