In this article I explore how the child welfare system in Australia is a basis of governmentality, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 35 women resettled in Australia as refugees originating from African countries. Although the explicit aim of the child welfare system is to protect children from a risk of significant harm, the findings presented here suggest that such systems can concurrently operate to evaluate, monitor, and demand behavioural change from women who are the subject of intervention in accordance with logics of white neoliberal motherhood, in which parental merit is measured through, and problematised by, factors of racialisation, assumptions of cultural difference, counter-heteronormativity, and socio-economic marginalisation. I argue that the child welfare system not only operates to protect children, but can also function as an instrument to govern women to ‘fit’ with an idealised standard of citizenship in Australia. Thereby supplanting maternal guardianship with the mandate of government institutions, operations of child welfare position the paternalistic authority of the state as absolute and render mothers who do not conform to white neoliberal motherhood as vulnerable to intervention. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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