The new governance of Australian welfare: street-level contingencies
The new governance of Australian welfare: street-level contingencies
This chapter serves as a report on the findings of an ethnographic study about the street-level experiences of welfare reform in Centrelink, which is a national benefits agency in Australia. These findings show that there is more incoherence and contradiction within welfare reform than is being suggested by the linear neo-liberal accounts of the process. The discussion focuses on three important aspects of Australian welfare reform, namely: policy concerning sanctions, the delivery of a personalised ‘One-to-One Service’, and the changing role of ‘risk management’ techniques. The chapter concludes with a review of the implications of the findings for the theories of welfare governance.
Keywords: ethnography, sanctions, Centrelink, risk management, Australian welfare reform, welfare governance
Policy Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.