ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to outline the development of Australia’s contemporary welfare compliance regime to contextualise the present-focused chapters that follow. It picks up where the previous chapter left off, taking the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983 as its starting point. It was in the 1980s, during Hawke’s term in office, that Australia’s contemporary welfare compliance apparatus began to take shape. The chapter charts the development and consolidation of this contemporary welfare compliance regime and considers the extent to which these developments reflect and reify neoliberal rationalities. The chapter also describes Centrelink’s current organisational structure and approach to welfare fraud and non-compliance and introduces the key governmental techniques employed to police this problem today. This provides the foundation for elaborating on these specific governmentality techniques in the next four thematic chapters.
