Back to the future: coercive conditionality in the jobactive era

It had long been established that coercion has been adopted in liberal welfare regimes in advanced capitalist countries to shift people from welfare payments to employment to reduce government expenditure. Dean (2007) associated this with a contractarian set of social obligations that displaced the entitlements of social citizenship. While the scholarly literature on the Australian marketised employment services had evolved into two major tracks using both governance and street-level perspectives, there remained few studies of the experiences of Australian unemployment payment claimants themselves. This article reports the results of a survey conducted by the author on behalf of the Australian Unemployed Workers Union in 2019 of their members about their experience of coercion during the jobactive era. Jobactive is the main employment services program for Australian job seekers receiving income support. The program commenced in July 2015 and will run until mid-2022. While the data set may reflect the bias of the recruitment group, the size of the sample (n=935) is significant because of the extent of the coercion that was reported. While this coercion has been justified in the shift from passive to active welfare states, the article focuses attention to the ethical basis of the use of coercion in transformative social policy initiatives, particularly in relation to an emergent ‘punitive’ shift in welfare conditionality studies. It concludes with observations of potential openings for future research as Australia’s marketised system undergoes another fundamental reform in 2022.