Social security conditionality as a corrective to ‘flawed consumption’: the use of the cashless debit card to reframe Australian norms of social protection

ABSTRACT This article explores discursive legitimation of intensified conditionality in Australian social security policy, by the association of responsible consumption with a revised construction of Australian identity. Discursive rationalization of the use of cashless debit cards to constrain consumption choices by citizens is situated in representations of Australian identity and social citizenship. Against growing empirical evidence of a lack of conclusive efficacy and emergent social harms, political rationalizations for the card’s introduction assert a normative Australian way of life that frames card users as ‘flawed consumers,’ lacking in the characteristics of imagined Australian citizenship. The compatibility of this imagined Australian identity with the values of market liberalism completes the substitution of market citizenship for its antecedent welfare state conception of citizenship based on rights. In this substitution, the idea of a right to social protection is subordinated to conditional support that promotes the sentiment that social welfare is ‘un-Australian.’