A leading health agency says its ethics committee has serious concerns about the way the government collected data on the effectiveness of income management in the Northern Territory.
Quarantining welfare payments is one of the more controversial aspects of the commonwealth's intervention into remote Aboriginal communities.
In mid-December, the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) released a report which stated two-thirds of people being income-managed "had a positive view" of the program.
At the time, the Australian Greens said the report was a joke because it didn't rely on sound evidence.
On Tuesday, the agency contracted to analyse the data collected by FaHCSIA, said it would not do similar work again.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) director Penny Allbon said her agency initially discussed being involved in the actual data collection but refused for ethical reasons.
The proposal went to the institute's ethics committee because it involved privacy issues and the committee reported "a number of concerns" after speaking to indigenous people.
"In our report we made strong comments about the limitations of the evidence," Dr Allbon told a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday.
Indeed, the report states the research would "sit towards the bottom of an evidence hierarchy".
"There was a limited amount of quantitative data on which to base the evaluation findings ... (and) client interviews included only a relatively small number of clients (76), from four locations, who were not randomly selected".
On Wednesday, Dr Allbon admitted analysing data collected by FaHCSIA was an "unusual piece of work" for the AIHW to undertake.
She said her agency wasn't initially aware the report would be made public by the department "(but) under the contract we had no right to stop its public release".
In December, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin claimed the report added "to existing evidence that demonstrates that income management is meeting the government's objectives of ensuring payments intended to benefit children are being used for that purpose".
On Wednesday, Greens indigenous affairs spokeswoman Rachel Siewert asked Dr Allbon if it was possible to make that claim based on the report. The agency's director refused to comment.
Senator Siewert also came up empty handed when she asked whether the institute was concerned the report had been misused.
But she had more luck with her final question.
"Would the institute take on this kind of work again?" Senator Siewert asked.
"We have had considerable internal discussions about that," Dr Allbon told the estimates hearing.
"Blanket I would say 'no', but there may also be on a case-by-case basis examples where we thought we could add value."
The Rudd government plans to extend compulsory income management to all disadvantaged NT communities this year, ahead of a national rollout.
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