This paper starts from the proposition that poverty is a contested concept and that debates about poverty are about more than questions of measurement and technical definition. Debates about poverty, I argue, are ultimately debates about the appropriate role of governments in the alleviation of poverty, and hence are about governance. On these grounds I claim that evaluations of competing conceptions of poverty should be interrogated not merely for their technical or epistemological soundness, but also on ethical grounds. To develop this argument, I explore representations of poverty in government policy. I look briefly at the Commonwealth Government's 1 1 Since submission of the paper, late 2007, there has been a change of Government at the Federal level in Australia. It should be noted, therefore, that the Commonwealth Government referenced throughout the text is the former Liberal Party Federal Government, led by Prime Minister John Howard, in office at the time of the 2004 Australian Senate Inquiry into Poverty. understanding of poverty and more comprehensively at the South Australian Government's Social Inclusion Unit. I find that, in both examples, poverty is represented to be an outcome of the poor choices of individuals, and proceed to reflect upon the inadequate ethical and governmental commitments that I find this particular representation of poverty entails.