Coping with Welfare Shame: Responses of Urban Indigenous and Non‐Indigenous Peoples to “Mutual Obligation” Requirements in Australia

Abstract

This article examines how Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people in cities navigate welfare and the mutual obligation regime in Australia. Since the introduction of the mutual obligation requirements (MORs) and the accompanying “Work for the Dole” program, initially for Indigenous and later for non‐Indigenous welfare beneficiaries, welfare recipients from both groups are perceived as morally deficient people and are stigmatized by paternalistic state surveillance. Drawing on the idea of shame as a cultural boundary‐making process, this article shows that although welfare recipients from both groups have reinterpreted the concept of “mutual obligation” based on their cultural values and practices, contesting interpretations of the concept within each group have hindered them from fully deflecting shame by disrupting and replacing normative scripts of conduct. This article argues that such variations occurred first because the interpretations that both groups adopted to cope with government surveillance are already mobilized by the state to justify intervening in citizens’ lives, and second because the sociospatiality of a city such as Adelaide, where a broad range of neoliberal policy experiments have been implemented, facilitates the internalization of neoliberal values among citizens, regardless of whether they are Indigenous or not. [mutual obligation, “work for the dole” program, Indigenous, welfare recipients, shame]