No dole for non-working sole parents - The Centre for Independent Studies
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No dole for non-working sole parents

christian porter kelly o'dwyerA new front in the ‘welfare wars’ has opened following revelations that a significant number of those dependent on welfare are receiving financial support from the government that exceeds the value of the wages earned by average workers.

But the debate about the way welfare discourages work – an issue which is being pushed hard by Social Services Minister, Christian Porter, and Human Services Minister, Alan Tudge – also needs to be broadened to focus on how outdated the welfare system is compared to modern ideas about women, work, and family.

New analysis of the welfare system by the Department of Social Services has revealed that more than 43,000 welfare recipients – who have 4 or more dependent children – last year received at least $45,032 tax-free from the single-parent payment, child care rebates, and family tax payments.

The combined amount of taxpayer-funded benefits for this group of overwhelmingly sole-mother families was higher than the $39, 841 in after-tax income of workers earning the median wage.

The Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) says that Turnbull government is indulging in a bit of old-fashioned single mother bashing:  a worker earning the median wage with the same number of dependent children would actually have a much higher income because they would also receive more than $30,000 in family tax benefits.

This is small mercies: it is only right that a person who works to support themselves and their families should have a higher household income. Few people would begrudge working families earning average incomes receiving family tax benefits to support the raising of children.

The crucial point is the relative effort involved in not working and relying on welfare compared to the effort involved in working.

The welfare lobby is ignoring the fact that a system that rewards dependence at a rate higher than paid employment is profoundly unfair to those who do the right thing and work in lower-paid occupations.

Think of all the tens-of-thousands of working mothers (whether partnered or un-partnered) who each morning get the kids ready, pack the lunches, do the drop off at school or child care, and then commute to do a day’s paid work. Many of these (frequently tired and stressed) women also plan their families to make it financially possible to combine work and family responsibilities.

Think, by contrast, of how the welfare system is subsidising the non-working lifestyle choices of thousands of sole parents.

There are good reasons to think that some sole parent recipients have children to game the system.

Some start families to transition from the less-generous Newstart unemployment benefit to the more-generous Parenting Payment.  Some also have additional children not only to receive higher family benefits, but also to avoid the mutual obligation requirement that they actively look for work when their youngest child turns 8 years old.

A comprehensive solution to these problems starts with understanding how anachronistic the current welfare system. It is based on the presumption in vogue when parenting payment was established 40 years ago that women with children could not combine paid work with family obligations

The introduction of the “supporting mothers’ pension” by the Whitlam government in 1973 represented cutting-edge ‘progressive’ social policy, and was hailed by the feminist movement for liberating women from the patriarchal institution of marriage and economic dependence on men.

Prior to the 1970s, having children outside of wedlock was socially unacceptable, and there was no welfare for sole parents for fear of discouraging the formation of traditional married families to conceive and support children.

According to the traditional social values of the day, mothers would cease paid work, stay home to raise the children, and rely on their husbands to be the family bread-winner.

The irony behind the creation of the so-called right of single mother’s to receive welfare was that the government was called on to step into the place of absent husband and fathers – because the sexist presumption remained that women could not combine paid work and motherhood.

Needless to say, but it is now commonplace for women with children – whether married, divorced or single – to work outside the home. We no longer think that a mother’s place is in the home…unless they are on parenting payment!

Parenting payment is what is truly old-fashioned about the welfare system. There is no reason why only some mothers should be treated as a special class allowed to choose not to work and receive a guaranteed-taxpayer funded income – almost equivalent to the value of the age pension – until their youngest child is in Year 3 at primary school.

Sole parents who don’t work should receive the family tax and child care benefits all family qualify for. They should also be eligible for Newstart and subject to the mutual requirements designed to encourage the unemployed into work.

A refashioned, modern set of welfare arrangements along these lines would also address the way the current system encourages welfare-dependent parenting and help cauterise the associated social problems such as intergenerational welfare dependency.

Children raised in jobless households are far more likely to also join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. A wealth of social science evidence also shows that children raised in single-mother families do worse, on average, in life across a range of social measures.

Gary Johns believes these problems are so serious that drastic action is required to stop women having children and relying on welfare to support their families. Johns’ book, No Contraception, No Dole, argues that parenting payment recipients should only get the benefit on the condition they take contraception.

But short of getting into the contentious business of compulsory contraception, there are steps we could take now to encourage women to voluntarily control their fertility.

Abolishing the more generous, and activity-test exempt, parenting payment would make combining work and motherhood mandatory. This would remove the incentive the current system creates — to have children and shift the cost of paying for that lifestyle choice onto taxpayers.

Jeremy Sammut is a Senior Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.