The Abbott government has received widespread criticism for its proposed changes to the welfare system in the 2014-15 federal budget and has encountered a number of stumbling blocks to their implementation. Perhaps one of the biggest single recent changes to welfare policy, however, occurred in January of 2013 when the former Gillard Labor government moved recipients of Parenting Payment (Single), whose youngest child had turned eight, onto the lower Newstart payment. This policy signaled a critical shift in Labor welfare policy with Labor imposing its harshest limitations yet to welfare subjects. These reforms form part of a decades-old move toward increasingly paternalistic and punitive welfare measures that seek to increase the obligations of a range of welfare recipients while reducing the responsibilities of government (Hamilton, 2012; Mestan, 2014).