Contemporary governments employ a range of policy tools to ‘activate’ the unemployed to look for work. Framing unemployment as a consequence of personal shortcoming, these policies incentivise the unemployed to become ‘productive’ members of society. While Foucault’s governmentality framework has been used to foreground the operation of power within these policies, ‘job-seeker’ resistance has received less attention. In particular, forms of emotional resistance have rarely been studied. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed welfare recipients in Australia, this article shows that many unemployed people internalise activation’s discourses of personal failure, experiencing shame and worthlessness as a result. It also reveals, however, that a significant minority reject this framing and the ‘feeling rules’ it implies, expressing not shame but anger regarding their circumstances. Bringing together insights from resistance studies and the sociology of emotions, this article argues that ‘job-seeker’ anger should be recognised as an important form of ‘everyday resistance’.

Social networks play an important role in helping people find employment, yet extant studies have argued that unemployed ‘job-seekers’ rarely engage in ‘networking’ behaviours. Previous explanations of this inactivity have typically focused on individual factors such as personality, knowledge and attitude, or suggested that isolation occurs because individuals lose access to the latent benefits of employment. Social stigma has been obscured in these debates, even as they have perpetuated stereotypes regarding individual responsibility for unemployment and the inherent value of paid work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed Australians, this article argues that stigma-related shame is an important factor in networking decisions. First, it demonstrates that stigma is ubiquitous in the lives of the unemployed. Second, it identifies withdrawal from social networks and disassociation from ‘the unemployed’ as two key strategies that unemployed people use to manage stigma-related shame, and shows how these strategies reduce networking activities.

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Compulsory Income Management (CIM) is a form of conditional welfare that involves the mandatory quarantining of a portion of welfare recipients’ social security payments. Quarantined funds are accessible via a government‐issued debit card, with restrictions surrounding where and on what funds can be spent. Official justifications of CIM have framed these policies as attempts to combat substance abuse and gambling problems, and to thus secure better outcomes for welfare recipients and their families. Central to this narrative has been the argument that welfare quarantining will ensure more money is spent on ‘essentials’, including accommodation. No existing studies, however, have specifically interrogated the impacts of CIM on housing security. This article responds to this gap in the literature by reviewing existing research concerning CIM's impacts and locating this research within broader debates regarding the causes of homelessness and the efficacy of individualised policy interventions. In doing so, it highlights CIM's potential to exacerbate housing insecurity not only through technical issues such as rental transfer failures, but also by contributing to underlying stressors such as economic disadvantage; relationship difficulties, poor health and addiction; and social stigma. The article concludes that – far from addressing the structural causes of homelessness – CIM has enflamed them.

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In the years since 2001, Australian governments on both sides of politics have at times appealed to compassion to justify their asylum seeker policies. This article takes these discourses of compassion – contradictory and cynical as they sometimes seem – and subjects them to careful and systematic analysis. It seeks to identify the underlying model of compassion that these government discourses employ, and to explain its significance. Ultimately it argues that the model of compassion that has been advanced by successive Australian governments deviates from traditional philosophical understandings of the concept. In reserving compassion for the weak and the passive, government discourses have allowed Australia to understand itself both as ‘good’ and as powerful. When privilege replaces solidarity as the basis for compassion, discourses of compassion – like the ‘hardline’ rhetoric that scholars have often prioritised in their analyses – speak to the fears and insecurities of the Australian people.