Hasan, a Pakistani father and husband and self-described family man, steadfastly refused to reach out for assistance with day-to-day living despite the pressure his family was under while awaiting the verdict of their asylum application. He expressed his unwillingness to claim support as a refusal despite his lack of entitlement to social security, which he dismissively lumped together with charity: ‘I would rather die than I will go to a charity thing or help or grant or anything’, Hasan told me.

Kat, an Aboriginal woman on the Disability Support Pension (DSP), described her growing confidence dealing with welfare agencies as a strength, because ‘Aboriginal people can feel more intimidated’ in those situations. She was determined to impart to her teenage children a willingness to ask for help and not suffer alone: ‘I think it’s okay to ask for help and then that’s how you learn to help yourself. I’ve always told the boys, “Don’t ever be afraid to ask for anything”.’

Jasmin, a single parent who was raised in Hong Kong, avoided telling people she received the Parenting Payment (PP), but accepted it with a stoical complacency – she’d take it if it were available, but if not, bad luck: ‘If they gave me [welfare] it’s a bonus, if they don’t give me, that’s life. That’s what support should be like.’

Hasan, Kat and Jasmin (whose names have been fictionalised to protect their anonymity) were all conscious of stereotypes about asylum-seekers, Aboriginal people and single mothers as opportunistic parasites on the welfare system. And they were all struggling, albeit to different degrees, to make ends meet. Navigating the welfare system involved walking a tightrope between principles and pragmatics.

This book is about how people living at the sharp end of Australia’s welfare system, like Hasan, Kat and Jasmin, negotiate the cultural assumptions and practical hurdles of contemporary social support. This is a context in which social security payments are deliberately meagre and come with strings attached and hoops to jump through; where the reigning cultural tropes of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘personal responsibility’ compel those in need to perform a balance of deference and dependence, resilience and resolve.