Paper short abstract:

Conditional welfare regimes command activity, which is compelled by illiberal instruments. This activity is in turn digitally surveyed; failure to render it visible via reporting apps results in financial penalties. What counts as legitimate activity, and what does this tell us about the present?

Paper long abstract:

The receipt of social security in Australia has become more conditional over recent decades as well as more punitive, in concert with a broader global transition. Indeed, Australia embarked on the privatisation of social security delivery earlier and more systematically than comparative polities. I have been interviewing women impacted by a specific welfare measure emblematic of these broader trends towards conditionality, financial sanctions and privatisation — a preemployment program called ParentsNext. This welfare reform measure exemplifies the widening net of conditionality, as single mothers with young babies, who are in receipt of Parenting Payment, are subject to compulsory participation. Participants are compelled to sign a ‘Participation Plan’, an illiberal instrument that commands participants to undertake often-absurd approved activities. Inquiring closely into what counts as legitimate activity, I argue that this program provides a window onto the post-Fordist welfare state and the contemporary sexual contract. Whereas the Fordist welfare state rested on the figure of the white male ‘breadwinner’ and his dependents, the post-Fordist sexual contract deems parenting as non-productive and regards all forms of dependency as pathological. Caring is delegitimised as inactivity, while parents are recast as ‘unemployed’, and exposed to forms of chaotic and arbitrary governance of their circumstances. This in turn prepares them for a world of precarious, feminised and under-valued work.