Australia has been experimenting with constraining the ways in which welfare recipients can spend their income support payments, limiting their ability to access cash and purchase some products. The policy objectives include to reduce spending on alcohol, gambling, pornography and tobacco in favour of meeting ‘basic’ family needs, especially for children, to limit the scope for financial harassment, encourage pro‐social behaviours, and build financial capabilities. In the logic of the programs these outcomes are expected to be manifest at the individual, family and community levels. The policy has primarily impacted on Indigenous Australians as a result of its geographic targeting, although a recent report has recommended a more stringent version of the program be introduced universally to all welfare recipients other than the aged. The largest of these experiments is ‘New Income Management’ in the Northern Territory, which has had more than 35,000 participants since its introduction in 2010. This article reports on the key findings of the major independent evaluation of New Income Management commissioned by the Australian Government.

Enacting high expectations for all students in the classroom is a complex undertaking. Underlying, out-of-awareness assumptions may lead to actions, behaviours or pedagogic choices that do not support these high expectations beliefs and intentions. For Indigenous education, this is compounded by public and professional discourses around deficit positioning, and by historical conditioning, where many Indigenous students do not see achieving in school as part of their cultural identity. High expectations are usually considered as a performance agenda — in terms of effort, learning and achievement. In this paper, we introduce the concept of high-expectations relationships where viewing and enacting high expectations through a relational lens equips educators with strategies to support such performance outcomes. We describe this relational lens where fair, socially just relating establishes a relational space of trust, thus enabling both student motivation and the firm, critically reflective relating necessary for quality learning. Using the voices of educators, we describe how high-expectations relationships can promote collegiate staff environments, strong teacher–student relationships and trusting and supportive relationships with parents and carers. We show how these positive educational attributes of any school community, seeded through a focus on high-expectations relationships, work to support the performance outcomes of a high-expectations educational agenda.

Income management programs -which restrict how some recipients of government transfers can spend these funds -have operated in Australia since 2007. The nature of the programs implemented varies, especially in regard to the combination of voluntary and compulsory elements, and there are also differences in scope and targeting. A number of evaluations and other studies of these programs have been undertaken. These vary in rigour, methodology, and the set of programs considered. This has led to an apparent diversity of findings, which has been exaggerated by selective use in public debate. The largest and most in-depth evaluation has been that of 'New Income Management' in the Northern Territory. This found that the program had not achieved its objectives and appears to have created dependence. The relative outcomes of the studies are considered.

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