Poverty and Punishment in Australian Welfare Policy: From the Cashless Debit Card to ParentsNext

Throughout the past 25 years, Australian governments have developed increasingly punitive and coercive approaches to welfare policy. Punitive welfare policy, underpinned by concepts such as mutual obligation and welfare conditionality, obscures the structural changes that have created joblessness and underemployment. This policy shift has transferred blame and responsibility towards people who are not in paid work. This chapter highlights policy discourses that construct welfare as a burden to society and cost to taxpayers, while framing ‘welfare dependency’ as a consequence of poor choices, morals and behaviours. Conversely, participation in paid work is framed as a reflection of ‘good citizenship’, whereas policy discourses interpret unemployment and underemployment as a reflection of the apparent deficiencies of population groups who are most represented in these categories. This chapter highlights programs such as the Cashless debit card, Enhanced Income Management (eIM) and ParentsNext, as examples which coerce and penalise population groups which government perceives to be recalcitrant. I also show how the Australian Government’s Target Compliance Framework is implemented to track non-compliance with mutual obligations and justify penalties, which are disproportionately handed to people from the most marginalised backgrounds.