Shelley Bielefeld

• Fellow at Australian National University

Globally, women experience poverty at disproportionate rates to men, with the situation being worse for Indigenous women and women of colour. Social security systems are one avenue for income redistribution that can alleviate poverty. However, such systems are themselves embedded within and produced by unequal social relations, meaning they can als...

Digitalisation of the welfare state has intensified in recent years, with burdens unevenly distributed between technology advocates and those receiving government income support. Putting in place processes where people needing social security must meet mandatory requirements of digital literacy and divert a significant amount of their small incomes...

The final chapter takes a global perspective on economic and social security and considers new and emerging risks that income support systems must respond to in the twenty-first century, which include shifting demographics in terms of age and household formation, increased geographical mobility, new forms of precarious labour associated with change...

The basic question this chapter seeks to answer is, how did Australia and New Zealand arrive at a moment where they felt it was necessary to introduce policy changes that are quite unique compared with other countries. The focus of the discussion centres around notions of welfare and income support recipient subjectivities, noting the differences a...

The chapter highlights individual and collective resistance to the material restrictions associated with ‘being on the card’. Resistance can occur through formal and informal channels, and it can be overt or covert as the participant interviews highlight. The sense of shame of ‘being on the card’ sometimes resulted in avoidance of public spaces and...

The first chapter places the Australian and New Zealand cases of conditional welfare in an historical and comparative global context. The chapter traces the intellectual and political foundations of welfare conditionality, and its various manifestations in a range of countries, particularly the Anglosphere welfare states that have a high degree of...

Compulsory income management has been touted as a measure to bring financial stability to welfare recipients’ lives, improving the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities in the process. In reality, however, compulsory income management can have contradictory and even counterproductive effects. This chapter explores the impact of compul...

The chapter examines social policy and the law, both in terms of social security law that facilitates income management and administrative law as it pertains to citizen redress and review. Analysis of the legal restrictions imposed through compulsory income management in Australia and New Zealand is needed to ascertain the extent to which the auton...

The details of how a voluntary income management programme might work is outlined in the chapter. The chapter also explores other means of building financial capability, using developmental and educational models and insights from the research literature on poverty reduction. In considering alternatives to punitive forms of welfare conditionality,...

The chapter examines policy implementation of compulsory income management, with consideration given to the limits of the consultation approaches used by government, the mixed economy of welfare in the delivery of compulsory income management, and the role of intermediaries such as front-line social services and for-profit companies that provide th...

More than a decade on from their conception, this book reflects on the consequences of income management policies in Australia and Zealand. Drawing on a three-year study, it explores the lived experience of those for whom core welfare benefits and services are dependent on government conceptions of ‘responsible’ behaviour. It analyses whether offic...

Drawing on first-hand accounts from those living under the systems, this novel study explores the impact of Australia and New Zealand’s income management policies and asks whether they have caused more harm than good.

New Zealand recipients of the Youth Payment and Young Parent Payment, who are disproportionally Indigenous Māori and sole mothers, must participate in ‘Money Management’. This form of income management restricts spending, monitors financial transactions and requires compulsory budgeting education. Drawing on interviews with Money Management partici...

Welfare reforms have swept across most liberal-democratic nations over recent decades, carried by a deep neoliberal faith in market rationality and an intensive focus on the individual as a key site of disciplinary intervention. These reforms have been accompanied by discourses within which welfare, deviance and crime are interwoven tightly. Austra...

The Australian Federal Government claims that the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) is a necessary ‘support’ that generates positive outcomes. Despite contrary evidence revealed through independent research and problems with the scheme also apparent in government-commissioned research, the dominant political narrative accompanying the CDC remains intractab...

In light of concerns that the technologies employed by the digital welfare state exacerbate inequality and oppression, this article considers contemporary shifts in the administration of social assistance. Specifically, it examines the surveillance of recipients of government income support focusing on marginalized peoples in two jurisdictions: soc...

Conditional welfare, a social policy mechanism in which disadvantaged groups are required to conform to behavioural changes to receive income support, has become an influential policy mechanism in recent decades. Conditional welfare in Australia involves compulsory income management (CIM), comprising the quarantining of between 50 and 90 per cent o...

Although Western nations have long placed conditions on access to social security payments, many of the more recent conditions utilising technological tools have intensified surveillance and control of the poor and imposed weighty administrative burdens on social security recipients as they attempt to navigate these systems. The Cashless Debit Card...

Conditional welfare policies are frequently underpinned by pejorative representations of those they target. Vulnerable children, under physical or moral threat from their welfare-dependent parents, are a mainstay of these constructions, yet the nuances of this trope have received little focused attention. Through a discourse analysis of parliamenta...

Welfare conditionality, whereby eligibility for income support payments is linked to prescribed forms of behaviour or values, is intended to encourage responsible behaviour in marginalised populations. However in practice, it may have consequences that worsen rather than improve their life chances. One of the most invasive forms of conditional welf...

Conditional welfare has become a prominent policy tool in recent years. One of the harshest forms of conditional welfare in Australia is arguably compulsory income management (CIM) which involves the quarantining of between 50 and 90 per cent of a participant’s benefit payment for spending on food, rent and other essential items. A leading aim of a...

Full article available at https://ejaustralia.org.au/social-security-rights-review/the-hidden-costs-of-compulsory-income-management/ Changing course in social policy is never easy, particularly when populism and politics trump a balanced assessment of program costs and benefits. But a growing body of research shows that CIM does not work. These bl...

New Zealand and Australia have both adopted compulsory income management and an actuarially-based “social investment” approach since 2012, suggesting the two countries engaged in “policy transfer” and that their policy settings have converged over the past decade. Focusing on four of the six types of policy convergence identified by Hay [Hay, C. 20...

Article published in 'The Power to Pursuade'. Available at http://www.powertopersuade.org.au/blog/compulsory-cashless-welfare-programs-harm-women-and-children/3/3/2020

Restricting where and on what social security payments can be spent does more harm than good, according to the first independent, multisite study into Compulsory Income Management policies (Cashless Debit Card and BasicsCard) in Australia.

This report summarises findings from a comparative study of compulsory income management policies in Australia and New Zealand.

Compulsory Income Management (CIM) is a form of conditional welfare that involves the mandatory quarantining of a portion of welfare recipients’ social security payments. Quarantined funds are accessible via a government‐issued debit card, with restrictions surrounding where and on what funds can be spent. Official justifications of CIM have framed...

The Cashless Debit Card (CDC) was triggered by a recommendation in the 2014 Forrest Review, ostensibly to address substance abuse and gambling issues. The CDC applies to a broad range of social security payments, defined as ‘trigger’ payments, including a Disability Support Pension (DSP). This article contends that people with disabilities are like...

This article aims to contribute to literature on the conceptualisation of ‘vulnerability’ and its use by neo-liberal welfare regimes to demean, stigmatize and responsibilize welfare recipients. Several conceptions of ‘vulnerability’ will be explored and utilised in the context of welfare reforms that purport to regulate social security recipients a...

Many governments have intensified conditions on social security payments, implementing new paternalist and neoliberal policy ideals that individualise responsibility for overcoming poverty. This article explores how such policy ideals can operate with a racialised impact in the context of income management, a type of welfare conditionality in Austr...

This paper explores contemporary contradictions and tensions in Australian social policy principles and governmental practices that are being used to drive behavioural change, such as compulsory income management. By means of compulsory income management the Australian Government determines how certain categories of income support recipients can sp...

Australian policy has been motivated by paternalism towards Indigenous peoples for the better part of Australia's colonial history. Contemporary forms of income management that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples extend a paternalistic approach. The paternalism embedded within the income management discourse draws heavily upon the framewor...

This article maintains that the dominant discourse in the history wars set the tone for the 2007 Intervention laws, and the 2012 Stronger Futures laws that extended the Intervention approach. The dominant discourse in the history wars is founded upon negative colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal peoples. Contrary to calls for self-determination, such...

The ideological chasm between environmentalism and a profit driven corporate agenda at times seems insurmountable. Environmental regulation at present is highly reliant upon statutory regulation and governmental intervention whilst corporations law is based to the greatest extent possible on an ideology of non-interventionist, free-market, profit d...

Environmental law in its current form provides limited scope for individuals to achieve goals of conservation and ecologically sustainable development1 in relation to the activities of large public corporations. It has thus far been contained within public law models of criminal law or at least quasicriminal regulation2 or through planning regimes...

Traditional punishments are still common amongst traditional indigenous communities in Australia - administration of traditional punishments raises the issues of whether those involved in the process should be charged under Anglo-Australian law - it is recommended that the criminal law of assault should be developed to accommodate traditional punis...

My thesis explores numerous issues ranging from justice, ethics, law, truth telling and responsibility. These issues are significant in light of the llegitimate foundations of the Australian nation and the subsequent genocide perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. The colonial quest for white supremacy, racial purity and accumulation of property h...