stupid

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Chapter 6 focused on a recent development of “income management,” a measure which aims at controlling over recipients of certain family and welfare payments by quarantining those payments and restricting their usage only for the “priority needs” including foods, clothing, housing, and education. Through this measure, Aboriginal parents in specific Indigenous communities and other non-indigenous “bad parents” have been partly excluded from the category of “deserving.” Since at least 2007, Australia has linked welfare and family payments with “socially responsible behaviour” of parents, particularly through income management. First introduced as a part of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) under the Howard Coalition Government, it was extended beyond the NT Intervention and was even represented as “a key tool” in the Rudd-Gillard Labor Government welfare reforms, indicating the importance of analysing it not just with respect to Indigenous Affairs but also in the context of welfare and family policies. Through the examinations of debates on income management measures, Chapter 6 illustrated the process through which governmental management of welfare payments has become a prominent feature of welfare reforms and revealed that parenthood has been the core element by connecting normative parental behaviour with provision of welfare and family payments. Much like the repetitive disputes over welfare reforms since the 1980s, the development of income management has been a process of problematising welfare dependency, and constructing and justifying income management as the requisite response. The Howard measure introduced as a part of the NTER was actually a scheme to advance the Government’s welfare reform based on the p... ... middle of paper ... ...deal parenthood and allowing the government to roll back the payments or make them conditional. To be called welfare dependent leads to the assumption of being irresponsible parents and to being excluded from sufficient state support. At the same time, the vagueness of the term “welfare dependency” itself as well as the ambiguity of those notions/categories used for welfare reform justification (e.g. parenthood) must have actually made them extremely useful for the governments. Furthermore, the close examination of the sole parent pensions and income management in particular revealed the possible importance of attributes such as family, gender, ethnicity, and class strata for the problematisation of welfare dependency. Reforms targeting specific welfare payments seem to result in calling the particular groups of people who receive those payments “welfare dependent.”

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