"This book is about looking after people," Vincent writes. "Caring for those in need is a role the twentieth-century Australian welfare state promised to fulfil for its citizens." Through the use of ethnographic interviews, Who Cares? demonstrates the many ways in which this promise of "care" has been steadily undermined.

This undermining is evident on multiple fronts: the attachment of onerous conditions to welfare payments that, put simply, make life harder for people subject to them; the coercive work of case managers tasked with enforcing compliance; the reframing of dependency as negative, ignoring its centrality to the human condition. And most perniciously due to its structural nature, the way in which the Australian welfare system fails to recognise value in unwaged activities, even when these activities involve caring for other people. The assumption implicit in the system is that only waged work is of value, and that unwaged people are unproductive and even idle. Vincent writes, "Welfare discourse, I came to see, obscures the constancy and centrality of care to all our lives."

Vincent's focus is to evoke the lived experience of welfare recipients who are caught up in one of two "welfare reform" initiatives - ParentsNext and the cashless debit card. These initiatives are indicative of a system that not only fails to deliver sufficient care, but is a paternalistic, invasive presence in people's lives.

ParentsNext is a pre-employment program compulsory for parents who receive Parenting Payment and meet certain criteria. Initially, the program applied to parents with children as young as six months. Failing to meet obligations imposed by the program can result in payments being stopped abruptly. Vincent shares the stories of many parents for whom the obligations of the program created significant, and sometimes pointless, stress on top of their caring commitments.

The other initiative, the cashless debit card, ran in certain locations from 2016 to 2022 and involved the quarantining of 80% of welfare payments onto a Visa Debit card that in theory could be used everywhere except at alcohol or gambling outlets. Disturbingly, the card emerged out of a proposal from Andrew Forrest, the Western Australian mining magnate who lacks any relevant expertise in employment policy or social welfare.

Who Cares? delves into important social questions, but it is not heavy reading, with analysis and history balanced by the voices and stories of real people as well as Vincent's own experiences. For a group of people who are already surveilled by the state, questions from a university researcher might not always be welcome - she acknowledges this in the first chapter, but makes a powerful argument for the importance of anthropology nonetheless. Our welfare systems simplify people, strip away their complexity and put them into pre-determined boxes - RoboDebt's income averaging is a crude example of how complexity is stripped away in pursuit of compliance. For Vincent, ethnographic research demands that she "get close to life as it is experienced by others". For the reader, these insights into others' lives are fascinating but also reveal an enormous mismatch between what the welfare state expects and demands of people, and the complexity of people's lives.

In one example, ParentsNext participant Arlie tells her story to the case manager, and feels judged and disenfranchised:

The blank piece of paper being imprinted by another's pen seemed to me a suggestive image. Arlie's story was rewritten in that moment to fit a policy narrative about "teen pregnancy", "educational attainment" and "welfare dependence". That's not the story Arlie was telling, nor the story she lives by.

Multiple stories, woven with analysis, sit side by side in Who Cares? in a manner that sometimes seems disconnected. But the reality is that life does not always conform to a coherent narrative. The primacy of the voices of Vincent's interviewees, combined with her self-reflexive concern about not putting her interviewees into boxes to fit an established narrative, is necessarily reflected in her style.

Vincent is a careful and considered writer: she resists generalisations and sweeping statements. Nonetheless her critiques point, for the reader so inclined, to larger issues: the valorising in society of individualism and of economic productivity. Combined, these values contribute to some significant problems that Australian society has yet to work out how to tackle, from environmental degradation to social isolation and, most obviously, to the devaluing of paid and unpaid care, such that we face a practical and existential crisis in how we care for our most vulnerable. Perhaps it is time that the welfare state led the way in demonstrating and enacting care, rather than denying that interdependency is, in Vincent's words, "core to all our lives".

This is a slim volume and an easy read, but if a book's worth were measured by how often it makes a reader question unspoken assumptions, Who Cares? punches well above its weight.