The trope of the vulnerable child in conditional welfare discourses: An Australian case study

Abstract

Conditional welfare policies are frequently underpinned by pejorative representations of those they target. Vulnerable children, under physical or moral threat from their welfare-dependent parents, are a mainstay of these constructions, yet the nuances of this trope have received little focused attention. Through a discourse analysis of parliamentary debates at the introduction of compulsory income management (CIM) to Australia, this article explores the complexities of the vulnerable child trope. It shows how the figure of the child was leveraged to justify hard-line welfare reforms in Australia, and offers a deeper and more intersectional understanding of how social and economic marginalisation is reproduced through welfare discourse.

Keywords

activation age groups Australia children compulsory income management conditional welfare discourse social security welfare

Welfare conditionality is an approach to social security provision that sees behavioural conditions attached to the receipt of income support payments. Broad restrictions have always determined who is eligible for social security benefits (Marston and Peterie, 2020; Taylor et al., 2016), but ‘new conditionality’ measures require benefit recipients to demonstrate their deservingness for income support by engaging in prescribed activities such as reaching job search quotas or participating in education, training or workfare schemes (Dwyer, 2016; Immervoll and Scarpetta, 2012; Taylor et al., 2016; Watts and Fitzpatrick, 2018). Individuals who fail to meet these requirements risk losing their payments. In Australia, the logic of welfare conditionality has been taken even further, with some benefit recipients not only required to meet behavioural obligations in order to retain benefits but also restricted in how and where their payments can be spent under compulsory income management (CIM) schemes.

A common theme in the welfare conditionality literature concerns the denigrating representations that help justify these punitive policies. So-called ‘welfare dependency’ has been construed as evidence of laziness and bad character (Peterie et al., 2019). Insofar as these policies have targeted parents, governments have also suggested that welfare recipients pose a threat to their children (Lovell, 2012, 2016; Rich, 2016; Schram, 2012). Yet while much has been said about disparaging portrayals of welfare recipients, we know less about how children are represented in these discourses and who these representations serve. Through an illustrative case study of parliamentary debate surrounding the introduction of CIM to Australia, this article speaks to this gap in the scholarship – subjecting the trope of the vulnerable child to methodical scrutiny.

This article is structured in six parts. The first section provides a brief introduction to the extant research on conditional welfare discourses, noting that representations of children have been regularly mentioned but rarely subject to focused attention within this work. The second section describes Australia’s policy of CIM, observing that the centrality of children to the policy’s justification make it an ideal case study for examining representations of children in welfare conditionality discourses. The third section reviews key insights from the sociology of childhood to offer a scaffolding for conceptualising these representations. The fourth section then describes the study’s methodology, after which the findings are presented in the fifth section. The article concludes by positing that political discourse in general and vulnerable child tropes in particular warrant greater attention in sociological research.

Welfare dependency and conditionality

Welfare ideologies

In recent decades, governments around the world have introduced stringent welfare conditionality measures (Dwyer, 2019). These policies purport to encourage benefit recipients to become financially independent by making benefit receipt conditional on the fulfilment of behavioural obligations, such as meeting job search quotas and participating in education and training (Immervoll and Scarpetta, 2012; Molander and Torsvik, 2015). To use Clasen and Clegg’s (2007) terminology, these are ‘conditions of conduct’, as distinct from more traditional ‘conditions of category’ (where groups such as students may be included or excluded from receipt of a particular benefit) and ‘conditions of circumstance’ (where benefit recipients are required to meet specific eligibility criteria, such as demonstrating financial need). While many of these new conditionality measures initially targeted mainstream unemployed ‘job seekers’, ever-expanding groups of welfare recipients, including single parents, are now targeted by these policies and compelled to pursue paid employment as an alternative to ‘welfare dependency’ (Chunn and Gavigan, 2004).

Conditional welfare policies are based on a mix of paternalistic and neoliberal ideologies. Welfare paternalism is best summarised in the phrase ‘hassle and help’, coined by Lawrence Mead (1997) in his influential book New Paternalism. Mead’s book and others like it became the inspiration for a range of conditional welfare schemes that have been rolled out across Anglophone welfare states during the past three decades. Taking a paternalistic ethos as their cue, politicians of various ideological persuasions have proclaimed that they will ‘end welfare as we know it’ (Bill Clinton, US) (Carcasson, 2006); end ‘the age of entitlement’ (Joe Hockey, Australia) (Hockey, 2012); or design social security systems that provide ‘a hand up not a hand out’ (associated with Lyndon Johnson and Robert Shriver Jr, US), and widely adopted in Australia around the introduction of CIM (Gillette, 2010; Cape York Institute, 2007; Senate Community Affairs References Committee, 2004). What is implied by these statements is that people need both ‘sticks’ and ’carrots’ to incentivise them to remain connected to mainstream values that centre paid employment, home ownership and the traditional family as key markers of the good life and the ‘good society’.

Mead (1997: 133) argued that, in the absence of prohibitive barriers to employment and other market-based goods and services, ‘the question of the personality of the poor emerges as the key to understanding and overcoming poverty’. In this policy paradigm, cognitive behavioural psychology becomes central to diagnosing and acting on poverty and disadvantage, hence the desire of governments to ‘nudge’ and cajole people towards pre-determined means and ends (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). The effect of this behavioural discourse is to de-politicise the problem of poverty and unemployment, taking the relationship between work and welfare outside the realm of social interactions and institutional forces, and legitimising the efforts of state authorities to change people’s attitudes and behaviours.

This paternalistic turn in welfare policy has intersected with the rise of neoliberalism as a political project. Neoliberalism is premised on the belief that human wellbeing is best served when market principles govern all spheres of human life (Grady and Harvie, 2011). In the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalism involved the weakening of state regulations, including the dismantling of the welfare state (Soss et al., 2011). As Soss and colleagues (2011: 6) argue, however, this commitment to small government has not been complete, and more recent neoliberal reformers have had no qualms about harnessing the state’s capacity to serve market interests:

[N]eoliberals have not dismantled the activist state; they have embraced its authority while working to redirect and transform it. In many respects, the neoliberal state is marked by more ambitious economic involvements and by expansions of social programs that target the poor.

The post-Second World War welfare state – which provided benefits to individuals as either an entitlement as part of the social contract (Taylor et al., 2016) or as a form of poverty alleviation in the face of structural unemployment (Mendes, 2013) – has been largely abandoned, but state intervention in the lives of the poor has not. The combination of paternalistic and neoliberal principles has instead resulted in a welfare system that purports to advance individual and societal wellbeing by shifting emphasis away from the provision of income support, and towards the creation of ‘job ready’ citizens who will contribute to the economy through participation in the labour market. Indeed, a key claim of conditional welfare policies is that they help individual welfare recipients by shepherding them towards the dignity and independence of employment, while delivering social and economic benefits by reducing the number of long-term income support recipients (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). From this perspective, the provision of unconditional welfare payments is in fact an unkindness, insofar as it makes welfare dependency a rational financial choice (Murray, 1984).

The idea that employment is good for the individual is not without basis. Research in the social sciences has long highlighted the personal benefits derived from paid work and the stresses associated with being unemployed (Curtin, 2016; Heyes et al., 2017). On average, employed people have higher wellbeing and better mental health than their unemployed counterparts (Heyes et al., 2017; Kamerade amd Bennett, 2017). The unemployed are more likely to experience negative emotions such as fear, frustration, anger and loneliness (Curtin, 2016; Feuls et al., 2014), and unemployment has been causally implicated in mental health problems including depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation (Kokko et al., 2000; Wanberg, 2012). While some of these difficulties derive from the material consequences of unemployment – that is, from insufficient finances to pay for life necessities – scholars have also drawn attention to the latent benefits of decent paid work. Indeed, scholars from Jahoda et al. (1972) onwards have argued that employment provides workers with purpose, time structure and professional identity, as well as regular activity and spontaneous opportunities for social interaction (Cole, 2007, 2008; Wanberg, 2012).

What this literature and associated policy justifications have often failed to recognise, however, is that paid work affords many of these benefits because of the meaning and value society has ascribed to employment. The latent benefits of paid work are real, but they derive from society’s valorisation of employment as much as they do from any inherent value implicit to employment. As Cole (2007: 1135) notes, scholarship of this type fails to consider the possibility that the suffering associated with unemployment might be the consequence of ‘an historically contingent construction of (male) identities in relation to a particular form of paid work’. Put differently, society’s glorification of work – and the stigma that unemployed people experience as a consequence of this valorisation – may itself contribute to these negative outcomes (Peterie et al., 2019). Government efforts to curb ‘welfare dependency’ also fail to problematise the labour market, its exclusionary and discriminatory features, its uneven rewards, and its increasingly bifurcated nature. There is a range of studies, for example, that indicate that having a ‘bad job’ may be worse for someone’s mental health than having no job at all (Butterworth et al., 2011). As discourse analysts have long argued, it is important to draw attention to these silences in public narratives regarding welfare policy (Marston, 2000), rather than simply following the direction of the gaze set by the political and media ‘elite’ (van Dijk 1993).

Welfare discourses

Discourse analysts have added considerable detail to our understandings of conditional welfare policies and how they have been justified in public debate. Building on broader observations regarding the paternalistic and neoliberal underpinnings of these policies, these scholars have highlighted well-worn distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, and revealed their expansion under neoliberal paternalism. Schram (2012: 236), for example, observes that a ‘deep semiotic structure of deservingness’ is embedded within welfare policy discourse, whereby a ‘top tier’ of benefit recipients are seen to who have ‘earned’ their payments (most obviously old-age pensioners), while other claimants (particularly able-bodied individuals of working age) are maligned as lazy and undeserving. Chunn and Gavigan (2004: 231) similarly explain that there ‘has been a huge expansion in the category of undeserving poor’, such that few are considered ‘deserving’ of long-term support, and almost all welfare recipients must demonstrate their willingness to work. Indeed, even single mothers ‘who historically were more likely to be deemed “deserving” than were childless men and women’ (Chunn and Gavigan, 2004: 231–2) are now expected to pursue employment.

In studying these discourses, scholars have revealed important intersections between constructions of non-deservingness and race, class and gender stereotypes. In the US, for example, scholars such as Harris-Perry (2011), Schram (2006) and Rich (2016) have highlighted the racialisation of poor, female welfare recipients and their disparaging portrayal as ‘welfare queens’ – women who are ‘deviants not like “normal”, white middle-class mothers’ (Schram, 2006: xv). In the European context, scholars have similarly drawn attention to disparaging constructions of ethnic minority communities such as Roma, and their associated targeting under punitive conditionality policies (Barany, 2002; Martin et al., 2017). These analyses remind us of the role that discourse can play not only in justifying social policies, but also in reproducing and naturalising the stigmatisation and subordination of the socially and economically disadvantaged (Edelman, 1977, 1988; Gring-Pemble, 2003; Schram, 2006, 2012).

In presenting these analyses, scholars have observed that children play an important role in these constructions. Most obviously, racialised representations of black female welfare recipients as unfit mothers have worked to justify policies that reflect what Barany (2018: 26) describes as ‘white, patriarchal concerns for maintaining control and privilege’. Indeed, with the expansion of conditional welfare policies to target single parents (the majority of whom are women), welfare-dependent mothers have been expected to model ‘responsible citizenship’ to their children through participation in the workforce, and deemed a bad influence if they fail to do so (Cortis and Meagher, 2009; Gazso and McDaniel, 2010). Unpaid parenting and care responsibilities, which disproportionately fall to women, have not been recognised as equally valuable. This discursive construction of welfare-dependent mothers as problem citizens perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of dependency has packed an economic punch, ‘prevent[ing] anyone from suggesting that paying poor mothers to stay home with their children is a realistic or positive goal’ (Rich, 2016: 267–8). Equally, orientalist constructions of black men as a danger to women and children have played into disparaging constructions of welfare-dependent men as a threat to both their families and the broader social fabric (Lovell, 2012).

Despite the important role that children thus play in contemporary welfare discourses (Lister, 2006), scholarly analysis has typically focused on representations of welfare recipient parents rather than their children. While this emphasis is understandable (welfare policies typically target adults), understanding who these children are represented to be and in what ways they are considered vulnerable promises to add additional depth to our understandings of these discourses and who they ultimately serve.

Compulsory income management

Australia has been aggressive in reforming its welfare systems in line with neoliberal imperatives (Mays et al., 2016) and has increasingly expanded these measures to target young people and parents. The introduction of CIM is part of this policy story. It represents both a continuation of the activation paradigm and a significant escalation of its disciplinary approach.

CIM was likely influenced by policies such as food stamps in the US (Haveman et al., 2015), conditional cash transfers to reward desired parenting behaviours in Latin America (Rawlings, 2005), and the use of voucher schemes (Brown, 2000) and Azure cards to deliver payments to asylum seekers in the UK (Coddington, 2019). Under CIM, income support recipients are not only required to meet strict behavioural obligations to receive benefits but are also surveilled and constrained in their use of these funds.

CIM was first introduced to Australia in 2007, after the release of the Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle or Little Children Are Sacred report. The report highlighted examples of child abuse in some remote Indigenous communities and prompted the introduction of a suite of ‘emergency’ measures – facilitated by the suspension of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act – in what became known as the ‘Northern Territory Emergency Response’ or ‘the Intervention’. Intervention measures included welfare payment quarantining, as well as the mandatory leasing of 73 townships without the consent of (predominantly Indigenous) legal owners, medical examinations of all children under 16 years old, the introduction of alcohol and pornography restrictions in some jurisdictions, and the provision of additional powers to law enforcement agencies (Altman and Russell, 2012). All measures were ostensibly designed to protect Indigenous children from abuse and neglect (Altman and Russell, 2012) but were seen by some as the continuation of a longer history of colonial domination (Bielefeld, 2012, 2016). The Intervention’s militarised execution – whereby uniformed members of Australia’s defence force were deployed into the affected communities – only added to this perception.

CIM saw welfare recipients in 73 remote communities (including nearby outstations) in the Northern Territory mandatorily subjected to welfare quarantining, while those beyond these communities could also be placed on CIM at the discretion of staff at Centrelink, Australia’s welfare agency. Affected individuals had 50 per cent of their income support payments quarantined. These funds were placed on a government-issued electronic debit card called a BasicsCard and could only be spent at approved retailers on priority goods. ‘Priority needs’ were defined in law and included food, clothing and accommodation; some goods and services were also expressly prohibited, most notably alcohol, pornography, tobacco products and gambling services (Dee, 2013). Income managed welfare recipients were also expected to meet behavioural obligations surrounding their payments. These included ensuring their children attended school, ensuring their children were not abused or neglected, and not engaging in gambling and substance abuse (Mendes, 2013).

The BasicsCard had a clear disciplinary function and carried significant social stigma (Dee, 2013). Many affected individuals reported feeling ‘degraded and disempowered’ (Bielefeld, 2012: 552), and the BasicsCard’s distinctive appearance (green with prominent banding) compounded embarrassment as cardholders were ‘clearly identifiable as those deemed by the government to be financially incompetent’ (Bielefeld, 2015/16: 106).

Further, CIM’s framing as a response to the Little Children Are Sacred report implicitly cast BasicsCard holders as a threat to children (Altman, 2016; Humpage, 2016). In one of the few comprehensive discourse analyses to have been conducted regarding the Intervention, Lovell (2012: 302) examined political speeches from the period and found that ‘the protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse was the most frequently stated justification for the Intervention’. While Lovell’s study considered the Intervention in its entirety and did not specifically focus on CIM, her research suggests that policy narratives surrounding CIM’s introduction drew heavily on arguments regarding children ‘at risk’. Lovell’s subsequent study of parliamentary debates regarding CIM during 2007 and 2009–10 added to this picture, highlighting enduring references to child welfare even as Australia’s policy narrative shifted away from CIM as an ‘emergency’ measure to combat child abuse and towards a new conception of CIM as a ‘potentially mainstream social policy option’ (Lovell, 2016: 433).

These analyses suggest that Australia’s parliamentary debates concerning CIM constitute a rich case study for exploring the function and significance of representations of children within conditional welfare policy debates. Indeed, the Australian case study is particularly instructive given the recent expansion of the program, despite growing evidence that CIM has been largely ineffective in addressing child welfare issues (Bray, 2020; Bray et al., 2014; Doyle et al., 2017; Hand et al., 2016). Available evidence suggests the scheme may have created additional problems by compounding social and economic hardship in already disadvantaged communities (Marston et al., 2020). This enduring political commitment to a policy that has failed to achieve its objectives highlights the role of ideology in welfare reform, and the ultimate expediency of policy narratives regarding child welfare.

Social constructions of childhood

Theoretical work regarding the place of children in modern society offers a useful vocabulary for understanding and identifying representations of children and young people in CIM discourse. Social scientists observe that the notion of ‘childhood’ is often defined in relation to that of ‘adulthood’, such that young people’s present lives are primarily seen as preparation for their futures (Lee, 2001). This dominant view of childhood accords with research from disciplines such as developmental psychology, which emphasise childhood and adolescence as periods of transition and growth (Qvortrup, 2009).

Socio-historical accounts of childhood, however, underline the socially constructed nature of this narrative, showing that childhood is not ‘a “fixed” ontological category’ (Stryker and Yngvesson, 2013: 304), but has been viewed differently during different historical periods. Research from the US and the UK shows that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries society underwent a ‘radical transformation’ with respect to its view of childhood. Where children had previously been seen as ‘economic actor[s] who play[ed] an important part in both family and “real” economies’ (Redmond, 2010: 474), they were now conceived as vulnerable, priceless and deserving of protection. This shift was associated with broader social change, including the introduction of new child labour laws (Adams, 2013), and was thus celebrated for its emancipatory impact.

The contemporary view of childhood as a time of innocence and formation, however, has also been subject to critique. The key concern surrounds the modern tendency to view young people as ‘adults in the making’ and, in doing so, to overlook their present capabilities and agential capacities (Roche, 2019; Stryker and Yngvesson, 2013; Woodman and Wyn, 2013). Put differently, contemporary understandings of childhood prioritise adulthood as ‘some kind of end point’ in the child’s journey (James, 2009: 35), such that children are not viewed as full ‘human beings’ but as ‘human becomings’ (Qvortrup, 2009). Despite these critiques, however, the view of children as vulnerable ‘human becomings’ remains popular in society and – as will be shown – in welfare policy discourse.

Methodology

This article presents findings from a discourse analysis of Australian parliamentary debates surrounding the introduction of CIM, focusing on the arguments employed to justify the scheme. It is grounded in a view of language that sees talk and text not only as instruments to represent the world, but as ways of actively shaping social reality and (re)producing social and economic dominance (Fairclough, 2013; Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012; van Dijk 1993). Put differently, this understanding of language as ‘deeply social’ (Wodak 1999: 186) recognises that discourse can have a hegemonic effect – reinforcing dominant ideologies and power relations and, in doing so, sustaining social inequalities and injustices (Edelman 1977, 1988; Gring-Pemble, 2003).

This socio-political sensibility is a defining element of critical discourse analysis (CDA) – a form of discourse analysis grounded in the sociological tradition of critical theory. CDA uses language-focused analytical techniques to challenge oppression by exposing relationships between social actors and representations in the discursive field. Since CDA is fundamentally a research program rather than a defined research method, the specific linguistic tools employed can vary (Wodak 1999). This article follows in the CDA tradition, exploring the social meanings and messages encoded in the political use of vulnerable child tropes. More specifically, it draws on an Australian case study to investigate how these portrayals are implicated in the (re)production of the current socio-economic order.

To capture the expressed intent of the policies in question, analysis focused on parliamentary debate regarding the CIM legislation. In Australia, bills are read to the parliament three times and the bulk of debate occurs after the second reading (Parliament of Australia, 2020). The corpus of data therefore included all second reading speeches regarding the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Payment Reform) Bill 2007, as recorded in the Parliament of Australia’s online Hansard (https://www.aph.gov.au/hansard), including those made in the House of Representatives (n = 16; 7 August 2007) and the Senate (n = 31; 8, 13–14 August 2007). A total of 47 speeches were therefore studied. In keeping with the study’s interest in the use of children tropes to justify welfare conditionality measures, however, analysis focused on speeches supporting the bill.

To facilitate analysis of how children were constructed within the speeches, the data were initially subject to inductive coding using qualitative data analysis software NVivo. Coding was thematic in nature, but paid particular attention to ‘patterns, tropes, metaphors and other “interpretive repertoires” that seem[ed] to be drawn upon as discursive resources by the speaker/writer’ (Mautner, 2016: 143). This inductive process confirmed vulnerable children as a key theme in the data, as a corresponding parent node emerged and quickly became saturated. It also revealed important intersections as data within the vulnerable children node had often been coded to multiple other parent nodes, particularly those concerning race, gender and class.

Once initial thematic coding was complete, further iterative coding was conducted. All data within the vulnerable children node were read and re-read, and child nodes were developed and refined as recurring arguments, assumptions and allusions were identified. These child nodes surrounded, for example, the purported character of the children in question, and the specific physical and moral dangers they were said to face, both now and in the future. While the linguistic choices of individual parliamentarians were considered (the use of literary techniques such as emotive language, metaphor and repetition, for example, was documented), primary analytical attention was paid to the constitutive elements of the vulnerable child trope, and how these representations were leveraged for political gain.

Australian discourses

The introduction of CIM to Australia was initially framed as a response to the Little Children Are Sacred report, and thus as an attempt to address child abuse and neglect in some Indigenous communities. The bill was introduced to parliament by the (centre right) Liberal-National coalition. Members of the (centre left) Australian Labor Party (ALP) expressed reservations regarding some aspects of the policy package, but conceded support, reasoning, ‘will it improve the safety and security of children in a practical way? We have come to the conclusion that it will’ (Evans, 2007; see also Kirk, 2007; Polley, 2007). Minority parties were divided on the bill but recognised that child abuse was ‘the hook’ (Murray, 2007) on which the policy hung.

As policy proponents recommended the bill to parliament, welfare recipients in general and Indigenous men in particular were subject to sustained stigmatisation and, arguably, vilification. Representations of ‘priceless’ children (Redmond, 2010) who needed urgent and immediate protection played a central role in these portrayals. The trope of the innocent child intersected with and animated race, gender and class stereotypes to condemn the actions of certain citizens, condone those of the federal government, and ultimately make the case for exceptionalism as an arguably authoritarian policy (facilitated by the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act) was rushed through parliament to address this ‘crisis’ (Brough, 2007).

In framing CIM as a response to child abuse and neglect, parliamentarians implicitly and explicitly represented welfare recipients as the culprits of abuse. A two-pronged argument was advanced to explain the supposed correlation between benefit receipt and abusive behaviour. First, the provision of ‘free’ money in the form of welfare benefits was said to provide ready access to the drugs, pornography and (in particular) alcohol that fuelled violent sexual crime, including child abuse. As Causley MP (National) (2007) put it, ‘[o]nce alcohol comes into it, then there is assault and rape’. Second, by allowing welfare recipients to be ‘idle’, the social security system was said to produce individuals who lacked discipline and purpose and were therefore more likely to succumb to moral vice. As Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Brough MP (Liberal) (2007) summarised, ‘the combination of free money (in relatively large sums), free time and ready access to drugs and alcohol has created appalling conditions for community members, particularly children’. Welfare recipients – especially Indigenous men in the Northern Territory – were thus homogenised and vilified as the receipt of benefits was discursively represented as a path to immorality and crime.

In positing that ‘passive welfare’ was causally related to abusive behaviour, proponents of CIM at times argued that quarantining welfare payments would empower welfare recipients ‘to take control over their lives’ (Brough, 2007). Ultimately, however, the policy was represented not as an attempt to assist welfare recipients, but as a strategy to protect the women and children in these individuals’ lives. The language of ‘vulnerability’ recurred in the dataset (see, for example, Hasse, 2007; Macklin, 2007; Polley, 2007; Wortley, 2007), and speeches often adopted an emotive tone to describe the trauma of physical and sexual abuse and the necessity to ‘rescue’ children from this fate (Fielding, 2007). Family First Senator Fielding, for example, used repetition and references to moral emotions as he described a trip he made with his wife to the Northern Territory:

We were told about the kids who see their parents and the communities awash with alcohol, the kids who are on the receiving end of drunken behaviour, the kids who are not kept safe and who grow up as victims and often become abusers [. . .] We were horrified that many of the next generation were being condemned to an endless cycle of abuse. As parents, we were outraged. If the adults could not be helped, or would not help themselves, these kids faced a desperate future. And we were ashamed. (Fielding, 2007, emphasis added)

Other parliamentarians identified the protection of children as a cornerstone of ‘any civilised, humane society’ (Wortley, 2007). While such language contributed to orientalist narratives regarding the Otherness of Indigenous communities and the supposed savagery of Indigenous men (Said, 1979), it also functioned to shut down political dissent. To oppose CIM or recommend policy delay was – under this framing – to condone child abuse. ‘There comes a time when government has to act’, Somlyay MP (Liberal) (2007) declared. ‘Now is that time. The safety of children is at stake.’

This construction of children as the innocent victims of dangerous (welfare-dependent) Indigenous men contributed to a third representation: that of Australian parliamentarians – and, by extension, of white Australians – as would-be saviours. Several speakers shared stories of ‘vulnerable’ Indigenous women who had turned to them for help and protection. Causley MP (National) (2007), for example, stated:

One woman I know very well and whom I respect enormously said: ‘Ian, we have come to you because we know you and trust you. We are frightened to come publicly, but we want to tell you what is going on in our community.’ This woman said to me, ‘Ian, no female of any age is safe in our community.’

Senator Heffernan (Liberal) (2007) painted a similar picture:

In [the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission] inquiry, I came across a 22-month-old girl who was vaginally and anally pack raped and who had to be surgically repaired. I rang her grandmother last week – the girl is now 12 years old – and I said, ‘Do you think we’re doing the wrong thing here?’ She said: ‘No, Senator. You are doing the right thing, because we are frightened of our men.’

These stories – not personally relayed by Indigenous women, since Indigenous peoples were excluded from consultation on policy design (Yu et al., 2008), but instead re-told by white parliamentarians – built on the previously described representation of racialised male welfare recipients as objects of fear, but also positioned white Australia as having a moral obligation to save these women and children. ‘Every minute we waste arguing, we lose the chance to intervene and rescue a child and give them back a future’, Senator Fielding (Family First) (2007) said, in an argument reminiscent of those employed to justify the removal of Indigenous children from their families during Australia’s Stolen Generations (Bielefeld, 2018).

In addition to constructing childhood as a time of innocence and vulnerability, childhood was also portrayed as a season of development. Within these debates, the danger that welfare recipients were thought to pose to their children was not only the risk of harm in the present, but also the possibility that abuse, neglect and poor role modelling might lead to problems in adulthood. As Garrett MP (ALP) (2007) expressed:

There is primacy with the rights of children that they be able to begin their journey through life without threat of abuse, without harrowing experiences of violence or sexual abuse – because, after all, it is those early experiences that so determine the progress and the journey that people have in later life.

Children were thus conceptualised as dependent entities in a process of ‘becoming’.

This future-focused view of childhood introduced a degree of ambivalence to the figure of the child. While the lexis of ‘innocence’ and ‘vulnerability’ was constant, it was implied that children existed in a sliding doors moment: if the government acted soon enough, their present innocence and future contributions could be protected; if it did not, these children would be irrevocably tarnished and become the abusive welfare recipients of tomorrow. As Fielding’s (Family First) (2007) earlier quote cautioned, kids who ‘grow up as victims [. . .] often become abusers’. This Schrödinger’s cat construction of disadvantaged children as both victims and (future) perpetrators added urgency to government calls for intervention – the intergenerational cycle of welfare dependency needed to be broken and there was no time to delay. It also brought new ambiguity to the figure of the child, laying the groundwork for the marginalisation and vilification of these individuals should they become welfare recipients in adulthood.

In another paradox, this developmental-based model of childhood also constructed young people as economic commodities. Childhood was not (as the early reformists may have envisaged) entirely free from economic imperatives. Rather, while childhood was represented as a time of innocence and vulnerability, the purported purpose of this period was the creation of adults whose worth would be measured in economic terms. In justifying the introduction of sanctions to ensure parents sent their children to school, for instance, Brough MP (Liberal) (2007) argued that education was important because it prepared children for the workforce:

Job seekers with weak numeracy and literacy skills are [. . .] more likely to experience long-term unemployment. More generally, poor literacy skills impact on a person’s capacity to be a productive worker in today’s workforce.

Other speakers made similar arguments, not only observing that educated children would grow into productive workers, but also contributing to the representation of employment as an inherent good by suggesting that work would provide these children with fulfilment and self-esteem in adulthood (Eggleston, 2007; Hasse, 2007). While such arguments may seem uncontroversial, their valorisation of work and stigmatisation of welfare naturalised an economic system that had benefited the elite while oppressing Indigenous peoples for generations (Bielefeld, 2012, 2016, 2018).

Conclusion

Despite the policy narratives that surrounded its introduction, CIM has been largely ineffective in addressing child welfare issues in Australia. Far from winding back this emergency intervention, however, the Australian government has expanded the scheme, such that variations of the policy are now in place at sites across the country (Marston et al., 2020). This doubling-down on bad policy raises questions regarding whether child welfare concerns were, in fact, the initial drivers of CIM’s introduction. Given the government’s seeming unwillingness to heed the evidence and change course, one might ask whether initial appeals to child welfare concerns were sincere, or whether they were chosen for their political expediency in the context of a broader program of ideologically driven welfare reform. At a minimum, the arguments that facilitated CIM’s introduction – despite significant international evidence concerning the deleterious impacts of welfare conditionality more broadly – warrant careful scrutiny.

The international scholarship on welfare conditionality underlines the pejorative representations that work to underpin and justify these policies. Vulnerable child tropes have been central to these policy narratives but have received comparatively little focused attention. This article has interrogated the complexities and ideological underpinning of the vulnerable child trope through an analysis of its use in Australian parliamentary debates concerning CIM. In particular, it has highlighted important intersections between constructions of vulnerable childhood and other stereotypes – particularly surrounding race, class and gender – which have been implicated in the reproduction of the current socio-economic order.

Discourse is powerful in its legitimising function, and that which is taken for granted as ‘natural’ or ‘unquestionable’ is particularly potent. Oppressive stereotypes regarding race, class and gender have rightly received considerable attention and critique in recent years, but representations of children still fall largely beneath the radar. Policy narratives that stigmatise welfare recipients through seemingly ‘unquestionable’ arguments – in this case, moral arguments about the importance of protecting vulnerable children and placing them on pathways to work – are particularly virulent. While such aims are not without merit, these arguments can function as Trojan horses in the introduction of hard-line welfare conditionality policies which ultimately harm those they claim to support.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

ORCID iDs

Michelle Peterie

Louise Humpage

Author biographies

Michelle Peterie is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong.

Greg Marston is Professor of Social Policy in the School of Social Science, University of Queensland.

Louise Humpage is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Auckland.

Philip Mendes is Associate Professor and Director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit in the Department of Social Work, Monash University.

Shelley Bielefeld is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Griffith Law School, Griffith University.

Zoe Staines is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Social Science, University of Queensland.

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