The phrase ‘a hand up, not a handout’ has long been used to sum up a model of welfare that aims to curb social spending and cultivate hard-working citizens who can take care of themselves. In 2019, former Australian coalition prime minister, Scott Morrison, wheeled out the phrase to celebrate the success of more than two decades of welfare-to-work policy in Australia (Curtis, 2019). He pointed to evidence not of poor Australians living better lives, but of the number of people who had dropped off the welfare rolls and the number of penalties that had been issued by welfare agencies. The country’s lowest payments, Newstart Allowance (NSA) and Youth Allowance (YA), had not increased in real terms in over 20 years. But the requirements and sanctions attached to payments had become more farreaching and stringent over this time. The Morrison government seemed more committed to doling out moral and monetary punishment than lifting people out of poverty.

Two decades earlier, British prime minister at the time, Tony Blair, used the phrase to sum up a different way of doing welfare that promoted individual responsibility and opportunity above rights and protection (White, 1999). This was sold as a ‘third way’ between the post-war protective welfare state and a hands-off neoliberal approach (Giddens, 1998). The aim of social welfare thus shifts from expensive redistribution to productive investment in the capacities of citizens, transforming welfare states from ‘safety nets into springboards’ (Best, 2013: 110). Poverty is reimagined as vulnerability and multifaceted exclusion from the mainstream; complex problems are said to require dynamic and pro-active interventions that provide short-term relief and change individual behaviour to make citizens more resilient in the long term. In this context, community is positioned as better suited to respond to the diverse needs and preferences of individuals without the State stifling their independence.

The idea that public benefits and services should come with strings attached to mould the behaviour of recipients has taken hold across the global North and South, although the tone and shape of policies varies across time and place (Dwyer, 2019). In high-income, predominantly English-speaking countries with advanced welfare states, these ideas are tied to the argument that ‘passive’ welfare breeds inactivity and irresponsibility and entrenches welfare dependency.