Hidden workers and the politics of care: framing health and wellbeing in the ParentsNext debate

Welfare-to-work policies increasingly mobilise health and wellbeing to justify activation and compliance, particularly for single parents. Existing research shows that such regimes often individualise unemployment and caregiving, obscuring structural barriers linked to poverty, gendered care labour, and trauma. In Australia, the ParentsNext program became a focal point for these debates prior to its abolition in 2024. This study examines how health and wellbeing were framed in the policy debate surrounding ParentsNext. The analysis draws on critical scholarship on welfare conditionality, neoliberal activation, and feminist political economy of care. Using critical framing theory, welfare policy debates are conceptualised as discursive fields in which responsibility, deservingness, and parenthood are morally constructed. The concept of hidden workers is used to theorise how unpaid care and health burdens contribute to labour-market exclusion. A qualitative critical framing analysis was conducted on 73 submissions to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry into ParentsNext. Submissions were coded to identify individualising, structural, and equity-oriented frames and compared across government, industry, advocacy, academic, and lived-experience actors. Government and industry actors predominantly framed health and caregiving as individual compliance barriers, aligning with activation logics. Advocacy organisations, academics, and culturally specific groups emphasised structural and equity-based explanations, while lived-experience submissions highlighted both harm from conditionality and the importance of relational trust. The findings situate ParentsNext within a broader trend of governing welfare through health and conditionality. Reframing care and health as matters of social responsibility rather than compliance is essential for welfare reforms that recognise hidden workers and address structural inequality.