Care as concept

A binding force revealed

Shannon Burns

Who Cares? Life on welfare in Australia

by Eve Vincent Melbourne University Press

$33 pb, 170 pp

According to its author, Who Cares? offers ‘an up-close, humane and grounded ethnographic account of life on welfare’. Eve Vincent foregrounds the perspectives of people who are subjected to ‘an endlessly reforming welfare system’. Vincent spent substantial time in the field, building relationships with her subjects, and while the history of welfare in Australia is neatly sketched and the social and political theories underpinning the study are worthy of interest, the voices of her subjects – those who live in poverty while being subjected to strict (and sometimes nonsensical) conditions – are the book’s most vital and captivating features.

The publication of Who Cares? coincides with testimonies given to the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, which have further demonstrated that the harms inflicted by the unlawful debt recovery scheme were a product of malicious pigheadedness on the part of the federal ministers and high-ranking public servants who oversaw it. The revelations are entirely consistent with Vincent’s analysis of how welfare is administered in Australia. Vincent – Chair of Anthropology in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences - notes that social security became ‘increasingly conditional and punitive’ in the 1990s, and that the trend has persisted in this century. To be unemployed is to ‘subsist in crushing poverty, especially in major Australian cities where housing costs are steep’, but pleas to increase rates and expand access to essential resources are continually rejected.

Who Cares? focuses on people who are ‘affected by two significant recent welfare measures: the cashless debit card and a pre-employment program called ParentsNext’. In both instances, welfare assistance ‘comes with complex conditions attached, and there are financial sanctions associated with non-adherence, or alleged non-adherence’. The cashless debit card trials were introduced in Ceduna, in March 2016, and were abolished by the Labor government last year. The card ‘quarantined 80 per cent of all income support payments’ and initially targeted First Nations people disproportionately. The aim was to prevent the purchase of alcohol and drugs, to limit spending on gambling and pornography, and to thereby reduce violence and other destructive behaviours. However, its impact could not be measured because necessary data was not captured before the trial. The cashless debit card was a shoddy social experiment run by people who failed to do the basics.

ParentsNext is a compulsory program for parents of young children who receive income support, obliging them to participate in various parenting and work-ready activities that are designed to push them towards employment. According to Vincent, ‘the Australian welfare system positions working women as ideal mothers’, and ParentsNext is underpinned by the belief that ‘impoverished women who stay home to raise their children’ need to be moulded into workers. She argues that ‘Caring is delegitimised as activity, while the parents of infants are recast as essentially unemployed.’

ParentsNext has also been plagued by mismanagement. Vincent provides confounding statistics, like: ‘85 per cent of parents on ParentsNext who had their income support temporarily cut off in the 2018–19 financial year were found not to have been at fault’. Alongside the threat of wrongful loss of income support, the program is partly implemented by low-wage, under-qualified employees of multinational conglomerates, who are prone to confusion and basic errors.

Imagine being a single parent who relies on everything going right in order to manage meagre funds and care for a small child, only to be informed that your payment has been suspended just as the bills are due. Will you have to beg someone for money? Will you be able to feed your child? Will you have somewhere safe to sleep if the decision isn’t reversed in time? Will the people who help you during this crisis do it willingly or grudgingly? How can your children thrive while you are under this kind of strain? The difficulties that carers have endured under ParentsNext suggests that the government is more concerned with extracting additional labour from impoverished mothers than with the welfare of their children.

The good news is that ParentsNext may soon be scrapped as well, a parliamentary committee having found that it does too much harm and recommending substantial changes. Vincent has captured two slices of Australian welfare history just as they begin to fade into history, but there is no evidence that the underlying principles that produced both programs have been abandoned.

According to Vincent, many people on welfare experience life as a series of encounters with uncontrolled and uncontrollable events, and ‘the card and ParentsNext often represented one more such interruption’, compounding those difficulties instead of alleviating them. Vincent sees a hidden purpose behind welfare’s anxietyinducing conditions: recipients are being prepared for ‘lowwage, unpredictable and casualised work’. Insecurity and poverty are features of contemporary employment as well as unemployment.

Care and caregiving are central concepts for this book. Vincent wants to give them primacy in our political and personal dealings, to assert the value of caring both as work and as a binding social force, a testament to our interdependence. Caregivers are workers, she argues, and caring for the most vulnerable is a core function of decent societies and their governments. In contrast with this ideal, Who Cares? documents a period where the Australian welfare state extended ‘its transition to a more disciplinarian guise, marking an ever-diminishing offer of care to those in need’. Vincent avoids nostalgia for twentieth-century welfare programs, however, noting that they excluded and punished segments of the population due to biases around race, gender, and sexuality. Instead, she pleads for a new system of welfare underpinned by an expansive conception of care.