indonesia in Cannington

Bad parents to lose welfare control under Rudd Government plan | National News | News.com.au

BAD parents will lose control of welfare payments under a radical plan to extend restrictions beyond indigenous communities to dysfunctional white families.

Welfare controls could be introduced across the country next year after the Rudd Government revealed it would adopt a national model from a choice of three systems currently under trial, The Australian reports.

Trials of the latest option will begin on Monday in Western Australia, where parents whose children are considered at risk - in white and black families - will have 70 per cent of their welfare payments controlled.

The federal Government has signed off on a plan with the West Australian Government that allows child protection authorities to begin the quarantining of welfare payments almost immediately.

Family and Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin said that by the middle of next year the Rudd Government would determine which of three welfare-control models was the most successful.

The three options include the new trial in Western Australia, the Cape York trial where a Family Relations Commission has the authority to haul welfare recipients before a hearing to decide how best tomanage their affairs, and the controversial mandatory 50 per cent quarantining system blanketing the Northern Territory.

"In the Northern Territory, we've said by this time next year we hope to have developed a compulsory income management arrangement that will not require the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, so we're commencing work on that right now," Ms Macklin said.

"The trial in Cape York is a four-year trial but we hope by this time next year to have some evidence about the nature of that arrangement and we also expect that given we will have the introduction of these arrangements in Western Australia ... by this time next year we have some good evidence of how that's proceeding," she said.

The West Australian trial of the income-management measure will start in the Kununurra community in the Kimberley region and the Cannington district of Perth, covering a number of suburbs and 200,000 people.

Cannington is a predominantly low-income area with a large migrant population, including a high percentage of British, Indonesian, Italian, Malaysian and New Zealand-born families.