Who Cares?

Life on Welfare in Australia

Eve Vincent
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Who Cares?

Life on Welfare in Australia

Eve Vincent
The welfare state meets the 2020s in Australia
The twentieth-century Australian welfare state made the bold promise to care for its citizens. But since the 1990s, social security has become increasingly conditional and punitive in its provision of this so-called care. Who Cares? outlines the perspectives of people affected by two recent welfare measures, offering an urgent account of the implications of these reforms. Eve Vincent has interviewed people who were impacted by the controversial cashless debit card, which limited discretionary spending, as well as those looking after small children who are compulsory participants in the program ParentsNext. Vincent challenges the very category of 'welfare recipient', which defines people exclusively by their relationship to paid work. And she asks who bears the burden of looking after vulnerable people once the welfare state's duty of care is displaced by surveillance and punishment? Who Cares? offers a new and deeply humane account of life on welfare today.
The twentieth-century Australian welfare state made the bold promise to care for its citizens. But since the 1990s, social security has become increasingly conditional and punitive in its provision of this so-called care. Who Cares? outlines the perspectives of people affected by two recent welfare measures, offering an urgent account of the implications of these reforms. Eve Vincent has interviewed people who were impacted by the controversial cashless debit card, which limited discretionary spending, as well as those looking after small children who are compulsory participants in the program ParentsNext. Vincent challenges the very category of 'welfare recipient', which defines people exclusively by their relationship to paid work. And she asks who bears the burden of looking after vulnerable people once the welfare state's duty of care is displaced by surveillance and punishment? Who Cares? offers a new and deeply humane account of life on welfare today.

An urgent account … a fascinating read on a topic many know too little about.”
The Australian

It is timely … that Eve Vincent asks in her highly readable book, Who Cares? Vincent’s ethnographic accounts are important contrasts to the otherwise faceless, gargantuan welfare state, hungry for compliance and system ‘integrity’ for the benefit of taxpayers. As Vincent intends, these stories enable readers to get close to lives shaped by dispossession, poverty and unexpected interruptions to middle-class life courses. The stories reveal what it is like to survive under the punitive weight of the Australian welfare state.”
Arena

The voices of [Vincent’s] subjects—those who live in poverty while being subjected to strict (and sometimes nonsensical) conditions—are the book’s most vital and captivating features.”
Australian Book Review

This study of the changes that have taken place in welfare in Australia and the stigma of shame increasingly attached to those who receive it couldn’t be more relevant … Eve Vincent forensically dissects two aspects of contemporary welfare that are emblematic of the surveillance – sometimes Orwellian – that recipients are subject to … and gives the reader a boots-on-the-ground feel for what it is to be on welfare today.”
The Age

Eve Vincent dissects two particularly ugly elements of the Australian welfare state and reveals a greater truth. The shame felt by people on government support is engineered by the state and crucial to the neoliberal project. Calm, considered and razor-sharp, this is a work that ought to make a nation wince at the things done in its name.”
RICK MORTON

Eve Vincent

Eve Vincent

Eve Vincent is chair of Anthropology in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences. She is the author of Who Cares? Life on Welfare in Australia and ‘Against Native Title’: Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia. Her writing has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Overland and Inside Story.

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Paperback
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