Surveillance and governance of the poor have been key foci for the critical social policy literature for some time, although scholarship regarding the role of big data in social policy – and how this might differ from previous forms of surveillance – is continuing to emerge. This article contributes to this literature by exploring the use of big data under Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand's social investment approaches. Both seek to replace social policy spending with “investment” expected to produce future fiscal returns; in the words of a former Aotearoa/New Zealand Prime Minister, they aim to do “more with less”. We argue that big data often provides a poor evidence base for social investment and can, instead, be better understood as part of a panoptic toolkit for poverty governance, mediating continuous surveillance, examination and normalisation of the body politic by enabling the discursive (re)construction of people's identities and subjectivities. This construction serves to exacerbate social inequalities and undermine the rights of ordinary citizens.

中文翻译：

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澳大利亚和新西兰“社会投资”政策下的大数据和贫困治理

一段时间以来，穷人的监督和治理一直是关键社会政策文献的关键焦点，尽管关于大数据在社会政策中的作用——以及这可能与以前的监督形式有何不同——的学术研究仍在不断涌现。本文通过探索大数据在澳大利亚和 Aotearoa/新西兰社会投资方法下的使用，为该文献做出贡献。两者都寻求用有望产生未来财政回报的“投资”取代社会政策支出；用前 Aotearoa/新西兰总理的话来说，他们的目标是“事半功倍”。我们认为，大数据通常为社会投资提供了一个糟糕的证据基础，相反，可以更好地将其理解为贫困治理全景工具包的一部分，调解持续监测，通过对人们的身份和主体性进行话语（重新）建构，对政治体进行检查和规范化。这种结构会加剧社会不平等并损害普通公民的权利。