While a significant amount of research has examined the more traditional budgetary and procedural controls used by governments to maintain control over social security expenditure, very little research has examined the more obscure formal social controls used to achieve the same purpose.The primary aim of this study was to fill this research vacuum by examining both the formal and informal mechanisms used by governments to maintain control over social security expenditure and to achieve longer-term public policy appropriation. In particular the study focused on the payment of Job Newstart and Youth Allowances and how the social control discourse of marginalisation was used to achieve such control.The study was undertaken in two stages. In stage one, an e-mail questionnaire was distributed to Job Network consultants (n = 739) employed at 66 not-for-profit Job Network Providers throughout Australia. In stage two, focus group interviews were conducted to expand on the responses previously obtained from the e-mail questionnaire survey.The study produced several significant findings from the views of Job Network consultants. Most significantly the results support Foucault's discourse on marginalisation. That is the results help to explain how consultants identify and single out people who do not fit the norm and therefore represent a case for special treatment. The effect of this marginalisation process is that governments are able to assert power and authority over welfare claimants and that the process is justified from the government's viewpoint. It would also seem that society and the individual accept such institutional arrangements. The techniques of marginalisation are disciplinary in their nature and relate to the multiplication of social security rules and procedures and a correlative division of the claimant population in accordance with constitutive criteria of status and entitlement. The study also concluded that Job Network consultants recognised that the breaching regime should be modified longer-term to take account of the i nformal ethical and moral criteria of fairness, justice and the rights of individuals. Having said this however, the same group of consultant's indicated in very strong terms that recipients' of Newstart and Youth Allowances should comply with their mutual obligation requirements and that they should be penalised in those instances where they do not comply with these requirements.