Income Management and the Rights of Indigenous Australians to Equity

Abstract

This paper examines the changing policy rationales for income management in prescribed Indigenous communities. The proposed welfare reforms currently before the Australian Parliament will fundamentally alter a citizenship rights-based approach to welfare, replacing it with one that is skewed towards a far higher level of state governmentality of citizen subjects. Yet there is no evidence that such measures generate positive benefits. They are also discriminatory, for while non-discretionary for Indigenous people, they have not to date been applied on a blanket basis to non-Indigenous Australians.

This Topical Issue is based on a submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs Show more