Every few months, a new debate erupts about welfare, unemployment benefits, disability payments, or social support. Politicians argue about budgets.

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Commentators argue about "deservingness." Bureaucrats argue about compliance. But almost no one talks about the emotional violence embedded in the very structure of means testing - the quiet cruelty of forcing people to prove their poverty, their incapacity, or their desperation in order to receive help.

Means testing is often framed as responsible governance: a way to ensure resources go to those who "really need it." But in practice, it functions as a system of suspicion.

It assumes people are lying until they can prove otherwise. It treats need as a moral failing. And it turns the simple act of asking for help into a gauntlet of humiliation.

To qualify for support, people must repeatedly expose the most vulnerable parts of their lives: their bank balances, their medical histories, their employment struggles, their family breakdowns, their trauma. They must narrate their suffering in bureaucratic detail, often to strangers who hold the power to deny them.

They must perform their hardship convincingly enough to satisfy a checklist, while they are judged by third-party organisations who are paid based on how quickly they can get each "participant" into work regardless of what that work looks like and whether its appropriate, meaningful or even sustainable.

Imagine being told your trauma that has debilitated your capacity to even get out of bed is not "satisfactory" to tick their boxes.

This is not policy. This is ritualised degradation.

And it's not accidental. Means testing........

© Canberra Times