Every few months, a familiar political debate reignites in Australia, focusing on welfare, unemployment benefits, or disability support payments. Politicians spar over budget lines, commentators dissect notions of "deservingness," and bureaucrats enforce compliance. Yet, as careers consultant and columnist Zoë Wundenberg argues, a critical conversation remains conspicuously absent: the discussion of the emotional violence embedded within the very architecture of means testing.
The Quiet Cruelty of Proving Desperation
Means testing is frequently presented as a pillar of responsible governance, a mechanism to direct finite resources to those deemed to be in genuine need. However, in practical application, it operates as a pervasive system of suspicion and ritualised degradation. The foundational assumption is that applicants are dishonest until they can prove their hardship through exhaustive, often humiliating, evidence.
To qualify for support, individuals are compelled to repeatedly lay bare the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of their lives. This includes disclosing bank statements, confidential medical histories, details of employment struggles, family breakdowns, and personal trauma. They must narrate their suffering in precise bureaucratic language to strangers empowered to deny them aid, performing their hardship convincingly enough to satisfy an impersonal checklist.
This process is exacerbated by the involvement of third-party organisations, which Wundenberg notes are often incentivised by payments linked to how swiftly they can move "participants" into any work, irrespective of its appropriateness, sustainability, or meaning. The result is a gauntlet where the act of seeking help becomes an exercise in shame.
A Full-Time Job of Navigating Humiliation
The administrative and emotional burden of navigating this system is immense. For many, the process itself becomes a de facto full-time job, involving gathering documents, attending mandatory appointments, meeting arbitrary deadlines, and battling malfunctioning online portals. The system offers little grace for human fallibility; being late, overwhelmed, sick, or grieving can trigger punitive measures.
This burden falls disproportionately on neurodivergent individuals, people with disability, caregivers, and anyone with fluctuating capacity. Rigid bureaucratic demands directly clash with challenges in executive functioning, sensory processing, or time management. The system frequently misinterprets these differences as non-compliance, further penalising those it purports to assist.
Wundenberg contends this is not an accidental flaw but a design feature rooted in a corrosive historical idea: that poverty is a personal moral failing. The modern welfare system, in this view, functions as a descendant of the poorhouse, engineered not merely to distribute aid but to enforce social hierarchy and discipline.
Flipping the Script: Dignity as Policy
The public narrative, Wundenberg argues, persistently frames these punitive systems as neutral or even benevolent. Discourse centres on "fraud prevention" and "incentivising work," perpetuating the myth that people choose hardship and that the greatest fiscal threat is a vulnerable person receiving a small overpayment.
She proposes a fundamental paradigm shift. What if policy treated human dignity as a core priority? What if systems were built on a foundation of trust, assuming people are truthful about their circumstances? Alternatives like universal basic programs, unconditional supports, and trust-based models are not merely more humane; they are often more efficient. They reduce colossal administrative waste, eliminate the need for punitive oversight, and acknowledge the complex, non-linear realities of people's lives.
Most crucially, such an approach removes shame from the equation. Shame, Wundenberg emphasises, is not a motivator but a silencer. It prevents people from seeking help until they reach crisis point, fractures self-worth, and transforms a social safety net into a source of personal indictment.
Means testing, concludes Wundenberg, is a cultural statement about who society believes deserves care. The current statement is bleak. However, the emotional violence it inflicts is not inevitable—it is by design. And anything designed can be redesigned into a system that recognises poverty is not a character flaw and that asking for help is not a moral failure.
Zoë Wundenberg, a careers consultant and un/employment advocate at impressability.com.au, published this critique on January 4, 2026. She is a regular columnist for ACM and a volunteer with the Voices of Farrer.
