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.