Conditionality fails – australia proves

Despite numerous critiques of neoliberal economic policies (Peck 2010) and strong paternalism in social security policy in Australia (Carney 2019), the overall direction of income support and labour market policies remains largely unchanged. Indeed, in recent decades Australian governments have introduced new forms of conditionality, including CIM policies. Income management policies see a portion of affected benefit recipients social security payments placed on an issued debit card which limits where, and on what, these funds can be spent. This approach represents both a continuation and escalation of the activation agenda, extending the imposition of conditions such that individuals are not only required to meet rigorous eligibility and compliance obligations in order to receive funds, but are also denied autonomy over these funds (Mendes 2015; Peterie et al. 2019a). These policies were initially trialled on Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory, but have since been rolled out across other sites over Australia. Australian legal scholars such as Shelley Bielefeld (2014, 2018) have consistently drawn attention to the racist and punitive aspects of these sets of policies. A key justification of recent iterations of these policies has been the perceived need to help benefit recipients to overcome (assumed) substance abuse and rejoin the workforce (Lovell 2016).The relentless moralisation of work through income support policy settings is confining policy communities to predictable circuits of thought. As Frayne (2015: 15) states, In a context where those who resist work are so readily disparaged, reviled and feared it becomes increasingly difficult to foster an open-minded and intelligent debate on the future of work . We live in a time when political slogans like the best form of welfare is a job (Liberal Party of Australia 2019) are substituting for policy action, while concerns about adequacy of social security payments continue to fall on deaf ears. Governments have ramped up punitive policies towards those on social security benefits rather than address demand side problems in the labour market. Activity for activity s sake has become normal, along with a populist dose of what the Canadian writer Jean Swanson (2001) aptly refers to as poor bashing in mass media representations of low-income Australians. On the other side of the equation, the operational arm of conditional welfare to work programs, the marketised employment services model of non-profit and for-profit providers, is financially incentivised for short term placements, with few resources to address non-vocational barriers to employment. The front-line workers of these employment services have found their job satisfaction and working conditions deteriorating in the face of an unrealistic contractual and performance management regime (Considine et al. 2015; Murphy et al. 2011). The end result has been a human service enterprise that has lost its most experienced and skilled workers, precisely at the same time when the front-line of welfare to work has become more complex and demanding, as more groups are cajoled into meeting participation requirements that should lead somewhere, but frequently lead nowhere (Murphy et al. 2011). This is not good policy or good practice, and yet successive governments persist with the model. The lock-in effects of the program logic have become opaque and solidified and policy makers now find it hard to imagine other possibilities (Standing 2019). Certainly, there are cracks and fissures in the workfare policy edifice and some refusals by non-profits to refer people for sanctions in the early 2000s resulting in a softening of some harsh measures (Wright et al. 2011). However, these temporary victories have not been enough to disrupt the policy logic in the long-term. The challenge to alter path dependency in social security policy is both cultural and economic. We are confronted by a perverse situation in which the highest-ranking workers work long hours, whilst growing numbers of people find their labour power is no longer useful for the generation of profit, with the obvious consequences of increasing unemployment and underemployment. But the unemployed are not free from work in any meaningful sense. They exist in a dead-zone , degraded by social isolation, social security sanctions, and financial worries and controls. As Bertrand Russell (1932) proclaimed in his famous essay on the virtues of idleness and intelligent leisure, unavoidable leisure time has been turned into a universal source of unhappiness in late modernity. In cultural terms, we have become a society of people who are financially and psychologically dependent on an activity that is becoming more unevenly distributed with a less clear cost benefit analysis between sacrifice and rewards (Frayne 2015).