Greg, an Anglo man in his 60s, shoplifted daily. After a trip to the supermarket, Greg would neatly lay out his illicit haul on the kitchen table before stowing it away for future use. His mischievous smile told me he was showing off as well as taking stock. He only stole from the big corporate supermarkets, he assured me, never small businesses. He’d recently curbed his activity when he had been caught and banned from the supermarket. Greg had come of age during the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and had rejected the Protestant work ethic of his lower middle-class parents. He had shifted between family and unemployment benefits for the best part of three decades, interspersed with short stints of cash-in-hand work since he lost his full-time administrative job almost 30 years ago. When we met, he had recently moved on to the comparatively more generous Age Pension and had been relieved of the job search requirements attached to unemployment benefits.

Much of what Greg shoplifted was not strictly necessary for getting by. He accumulated expensive toiletries which he regularly brought home as offerings for his wife. He stole moisturiser, socks and underwear to gift on birthdays and Christmas. Greg’s home displayed the clutter of a compulsive collector. He proudly showed off his DVDs while his wife complained he never watched them. Piles of second-hand books lined the walls and dated magazines over-flowed from cardboard boxes. Greg regularly stole small plastic figurines that he saved up to give to his nieces as a full set. He smuggled specialist magazines to present to his teenage son. His lifted gifts were imperfect gestures of care to the people he loved.

Greg’s story is a striking example of the sometimes creative and surreptitious ways people find of navigating life on social security payments. It’s not hard to imagine critics using Greg’s story to bemoan the corrupting influence of permissive public welfare and defenders celebrating it as a heroic act of defiance. But Greg’s actions defy neat classification as strategic survival, responsible caretaking or dysfunctional ‘acting out’ that often seems to characterise accounts of poor people’s actions. His lifted gifts illustrate something more modest but nonetheless important.