Introduction

This chapter examines multiple barriers to the effective implementation of CIM programmes in Australia and New Zealand. Drawing on the views of Australian CIM participants and community stakeholders, this chapter argues that these implementation problems resulted from design and process flaws that could have been avoided if governments had given themselves genuine opportunities to listen to the needs of those individuals and communities impacted by CIM and had learned from research evidence. The first part of this chapter examines the impact of the top-down imposition of CIM on local communities in Australia. A major source of contention in trial sites has been the poor application of the chosen technology (whether the BasicsCard or Cashless Debit Card) without adequate regard to the needs or concerns of participants. Another source of conflict has been that so-called ‘consultation’ in specific geographical areas has been done with at best limited input from and consent of local communities, including IM participants. The limitations of government community consultation processes have had an adverse effect on community cohesion.

The second part of the chapter turns to New Zealand, where there was never any question that CIM was a top-down policy but where Youth Service mentors are meant to empower young people while at the same time tracking and surveilling their behaviour. This policy design causes considerable role confusion and frustration. Systems failures also mean the process of decision-making is lengthy and inconsistent, while technological failures created problems for both Youth Service providers and YP/ YPP recipients.

The third part discusses how things would have looked had co-design processes been employed to further community and youth development goals. The chapter concludes that the evidence around implementation furthers the argument that the introduction of CIM was ideologically driven.

Implementation problems in Australia

Application of technology without consumer input

As noted in Chapter 2, the Australian Government introduced CIM via two forms of debit card: the BasicsCard, introduced in the Northern Territory and then in multiple sites across Australia, including Playford and Greater Shepparton, where data were collected; and the Cashless Debit Card (CDC), later introduced in four sites for use at all stores.

Introduction

This chapter presents a sociolegal analysis of cashless welfare cards, considering the content of CIM laws and policies in Australia and New Zealand and how these are experienced in everyday life by cardholders. This study reveals a gap between official (idealised) narratives about how compulsory IM schemes function and about government income support recipient's everyday experiences. This reflects a long-held tradition in law and society scholarship of focusing on the distance ‘between the law-on-the-books … and the-law-in-action’ (Calavita, 2016, p 109). To make these gaps apparent, the legal framework governing IM programmes must be set out. Scholars working within critical social policy are also concerned with gaps between what is represented by policy frameworks and how this translates into people's lived experiences (Bacchi, 2009, pp xviii– xix).

The research for this book found that the autonomy of IM cardholders was adversely affected with respect to purchases of a range of everyday items that extended beyond those officially prohibited (Marston et al, 2020; Humpage et al, 2020a). Payment problems created by IM cards often caused people to be unable to acquire goods and services when these were needed, and rendered IM cardholders in Australia unable to pay a range of bills. As will be discussed in this chapter, this undermined long-valued consumer rights and contractual freedoms. This chapter also examines procedural rights for cardholders to exit or make complaints about IM schemes, and how these processes are experienced by those who have to use them.

This study shows that IM exit and exemption processes raise significant access to justice issues. For example, not only were there protracted timeframes for determining exit and exemption requests under the Australian CDC scheme, but cardholders also needed to acquire documentation from third parties at their own expense to submit their applications. The number of people who have been able to regain their autonomy through the legal frameworks governing IM exits and exemptions in Australia has been small (Australian Government, 2021c; 2021e). In New Zealand, exit from the Money Management programme typically occurs through participants aging out of the scheme, though IM has reportedly led some young people to withdraw from the social security system altogether or, tragically, take their own lives rather than be subject to the programme (Humpage et al, 2020a, p 13).

Introduction

The focus of this book is on social security and the lived effects of welfare conditionality in Australia and New Zealand. Our choice of terminology is deliberate. In normative terms, social security systems should facilitate a basic level of economic security by providing a source of income for individual citizens, regardless of their labour market status. In this sense, a social security system is a collective means of risk pooling and an expression of social citizenship in a modern welfare state. It is important to outline the normative basis for social security up front, particularly when public discourse about those who at some point in their lives depend on state income support is frequently derogatory. Terms like ‘dole bludger’ or ‘scrounger’ give contemporary expression to much older moral divisions between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. These labels also have deep and lasting effects for those who are subject to them. Stigma, shame and the internalisation of negative messages about so-called ‘welfare dependency’ damage social security recipients’ sense of self and contribute to feelings of exclusion from society (Patrick, 2017). Discourses about social security and welfare reflect various changes in social security policy goals.

One of the key changes in social security systems in the Anglophone world has been a shift away from poverty relief and towards labour force participation as a central policy aim. Related to this shift, work activation requirements and associated welfare conditionality (behavioural conditions attached to the receipt of payment) have increased in many countries over the past two to three decades (Clasen and Siegel, 2007; Patrick, 2017). Understanding this change entails acknowledging that the means and the ends of social security systems serve competing constituents and interests. Increased behavioural conditionality attached to the receipt of payments, for example, can receive popular support from the broader public, who have come to accept the conventional wisdom that ‘getting tough’ on social security recipients is both morally justifiable and ultimately beneficial for recipients. This belief persists despite a lack of research evidence to support or substantiate it. As is outlined in the chapters of this book, evidence about the costs and benefits of conditionality has had very little bearing on social security policy settings in Australia and New Zealand.

Introduction

So far, this book has shed light on the experiences of people impacted by CIM. It has shown that CIM disempowers welfare recipients, denying them control over their finances, corroding their rights, and ultimately damaging both their wellbeing and their capacity to participate in community life. Against this backdrop, this chapter considers cardholder resistance – understood in this context to mean refusal to accept the material conditions of ‘being on the card’ and/ or the devalued social status attached to being arbitrarily categorised as ‘irresponsible’.

Understanding dissent in social policy research is necessary for at least two reasons. First, on a theoretical level, it is important because power and resistance have been influentially conceptualised – most notably by Foucault (1978) – as mutually constitutive. From this viewpoint, any study of power that does not also consider resistance risks oversimplification and, indeed, misrepresentation. Second, on an ethico-political level, accounting for dissent ensures that the agency of those in question is recognised. To represent welfare recipients as the two-dimensional victims of a malevolent state would be to ignore their complexity and capabilities, and thus inadvertently contribute to their denigration in public discourse.

This chapter has six parts. First, it provides a brief overview of resistance as a sociological concept and, in doing so, constructs a theoretical scaffolding for the chapter. Second, it explores how the sociopolitical context of CIM in Australia and New Zealand thwarts overt forms of resistance and pushes cardholders towards more covert means of dissent. In parts three and four, it describes these ‘everyday’ forms of resistance, focusing, respectively, on cardholder efforts to circumvent restrictions, and cardholder attempts to contest the policy's framing. Part five then turns to open public protest in Australia, exploring the interplay between everyday and public resistance, and why a similar movement has not emerged in New Zealand. The chapter concludes by situating these examples of resistance within our growing understanding of CIM as an instrument of power.

Introduction

A central conclusion of this comparative empirical study is that IM in Australia and New Zealand does more harm than good. Being placed on IM has made many feel infantilised, having been compelled into a system that was not of their choosing and which exacerbates rather than alleviates economic insecurity. Nevertheless, despite uncovering a general and strong aversion to compulsory IM schemes, this research has also found some support for voluntary IM. Some IM participants and community stakeholders in both countries saw voluntary IM as having potential to return an important sense of agency to welfare recipients while offering an avenue of support for those who find IM useful for budgeting. Nevertheless, many of the research participants also held the view that different approaches were needed to build financial capability and address poverty; that IM alone could not achieve this objective. Many touched on the need to raise the base rate of unemployment benefits to an amount that would alleviate (rather than create or exacerbate) poverty. Others described the potential benefit of financial counselling and education, which would align with the IM objectives of strengthening financial knowledge and behaviours while avoiding the hard paternalism associated with compulsory IM schemes.

In this chapter, the focus turns towards the possibility of voluntary IM and financial education as alternatives to compulsory IM. This discussion is placed in the foreground by drawing on public health literature to explore links between economic insecurity and mental and physical health and wellbeing, briefly reviewing the findings in relation to the impacts of compulsory IM on economic insecurity. A critical discussion of the question of voluntary IM follows, in which the empirical data are drawn on to consider the possible strengths and weaknesses of an entirely voluntary IM scheme. The latter part of the chapter explores other evidence-based means of building financial management skills, which could work alongside voluntary IM or alone. In particular, insights are drawn from the research literature on poverty reduction to assess the possible efficacy of financial education, before its use alongside IM is critically discussed

Introduction

This chapter explains how the Australian and New Zealand governments both arrived at a moment where IM was considered a viable policy idea, then implemented and extended it over time. Drawing on parliamentary debates, policy documents and interviews with politicians and policymakers, the policy process in both countries is traced, drawing particular attention to the political discourses used to frame IM. This reveals what political ‘problem’ each government identified. In Australia, where discourse was highly racialised, existing tropes around the need to ‘save the children’ and reduce ‘criminality’ within Indigenous communities were dominant. In New Zealand, a broader welfare conditionality discourse aimed to ‘save’ the young people subject to CIM, largely from their parents but sometimes from the state; but this was less explicitly racialised, even though Indigenous peoples – along with sole parents and disabled persons – are disproportionately more likely to receive social security payments and thus be under IM administration. Distorted representations of community crime and crime reduction were also not a prominent feature of the policy justification for IM, as in Australia. To explain these differences, the chapter indicates how international trends in welfare conditionality intersected with and were mediated by existing political discourses, interests and institutions to embed CIM policy into both countries’ social security systems.

Analysing Income Management within the broader policy field

As Chapter 1 highlighted, IM emerged from an international context in which forms of welfare conditionality are increasingly framed as not only appropriate but necessary to address the ‘welfare dependency’ associated with social security recipients. The ideational dimension of policy change and social problem framing is always political because to evoke the origin of a social problem is to assign blame and praise (Edelman, 1988; Bacchi, 2009). ‘Welfare dependency’ situates dependency on the state for income support as negative and corrosive (Fraser and Gordon, 1994; Jensen, 2014) while other forms, such as dependency on markets, are regarded as natural and virtuous. The valorisation of a (paid) ‘work ethic’ as the solution in Anglophone countries thus both narrows understandings of welfare to a form of cash transfers and suggests solutions located in both market participation and individualism.

Introduction

CIM 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, CIM can have contradictory and even counterproductive effects. As the previous chapter showed, CIM introduces new financial pressure into many participants’ lives. This is particularly true in Australia, where welfare recipients in (CDC) trial sites have struggled to make basic purchases and pay essential bills. Building on this picture of financial difficulty and deprivation, this chapter explores the impact of CIM on participants’ wellbeing and sense of self. It shows that while financial stress and reduced financial control are key concerns for many participants, the infantilisation and stigmatisation that CIM involves are also powerful stressors. Together, these factors can contribute to significant reductions in participant wellbeing, harming cardholders, their families and their communities.

This chapter has five parts. First, key insights regarding the influence of financial deprivation on physical and psychological wellbeing are reviewed, underlining the importance of available funds, personal autonomy and social connectedness for good health. Second, it is shown how CIM infantilises and disempowers participants. Third, participant experiences of social stigma are explored, underlining the role of public discourses in shaping these experiences. Fourth, it is revealed that (as the extant scholarship would predict) this combination of financial deprivation, infantilisation and stigmatisation has profound negative impacts, corroding participants’ social and emotional wellbeing and inflicting radiating harms. The chapter concludes that – while a minority of individuals experience improved financial and material stability under CIM – the social and emotional impacts of the policy have been largely negative.

Introduction

As social uncertainty and economic precarity grow, it is time to rethink the obligations of governments, particularly in regard to the ends and means of social security policy and meaningful employment. The global COVID-19 pandemic has given impetus to the ‘utopian demand’ (Weeks, 2011) for a fundamental reset of societal and economic goals. Addressing the inadequacy of income support payments, ensuring decent employment and training opportunities, valuing all forms of work, and ensuring affordable housing and accessible social services is arguably a better starting point for cultivating healthy and economically secure communities than persisting with punitive conditionality.

The final chapter in the book has three key aims. First, the chapter emphasises the key lessons from the rollout of CIM in Australia and New Zealand, from both an empirical and ethical point of view. Second, the chapter connects these findings with the broader social, economic and environmental context that is providing the catalyst for a reset of social security policy and practice. Third, the chapter points a way forward on social security policy, based on first principles, which would help reorientate policy settings and the public discourse around income security and the markers of social citizenship.

Bottom-up perspectives on the conditionality narrative

There are strong views on all sides of the CIM policy debate in Australia and New Zealand. There is little disagreement across the political spectrum about having a social security system focused on alleviating poverty and promoting participation in social and economic activities. There is, however, a great deal of disagreement about the best ways to achieve this goal. The extent to which the state should intervene to limit the freedoms of its citizenry is particularly contentious – especially if those limitations are not universally applied, if the reported benefits are contested, or where there is clear evidence that the policies are in fact causing material and psycho-social harm.

Chapters 4 to 7 of this book have illustrated that the evidence in support of continuing with CIM is weak. The research presented in this book is certainly not the first to suggest that this set of policy measures requires a fundamental rethink.