That transparency will come in late February when the gender pay gaps of employers in Australia with 100 or more team members are made public.

The result will be scrutiny of employers by their team members, questioning what they will do to close such gaps and how quickly they can make it happen. Further external scrutiny will come from potential new hires, an employer’s wider industry, their clients, competitors, and the media.

It’s a shame, then, that some of the progress pay transparency could provide for closing the gender pay gap could then be undermined by tax changes that are set to favour men over women.

Those tax changes are coming via the Stage 3 Tax cuts due to start in July.

At first glance, the demand for equal pay from larger employers could seem like the perfect opportunity to address the gender imbalance of who will benefit from these tax cuts, should women receive salary increases that push them up higher income brackets.

But there is no way advancements on equal pay can keep pace with how fast these tax cuts will be distributed. This equal pay won’t just happen, it will require a significant fight. And the coming pay transparency work will, unfortunately, do little to make up for how the female-dominated care sectors like early childhood education continue to be undervalued.

As such, these tax changes remain one of several elephants in the room of the Albanese Government’s push to address women’s economic security. A push that has included a number of positive initiatives, including reform of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to give it the power to publish employer gender pay gaps, as well as last year’s pay rise for aged care workers, the appointment of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce and raising the age limit for single parenting payments. But a push that is seeing positives undermined by a fear of tweaking or moving on from commitments made by a different government and during a very different time (to be fair, the Coalition are already clearly preparing their ‘broken promise’ talking points)

As the legislated tax cuts currently stand, no tax cut is coming for those earning less than $45,000. Rather, the changes favour high-income earners, raising the top tax bracket to $200,000 and taxing all incomes between $45,000 and $200,000 at the same rate of 30 per cent. This will mean those earning $200,000 a year will receive a tax reduction of $9075 a year compared to a $125 a year reduction for those on $50,000. (Check out our recent explainer here)

Men are set to take 67 per cent of the savings from these tax cuts compared to 33 per cent for women, according to analysis by the Australia Institute.  

Updated Parliamentary Budget Office estimates released by The Greens and published in The Guardian today reiterate the inequity in the figures to come, with the cost of the cuts now estimated to be $323.6 billion over the next decade. The figures reveal that the lowest-earning 40 per cent of households will get nothing during the first year of the cuts, while the next 20 per cent will share in $1.2 billion, and the top 40 per cent will receive up to $15.9 billion. The Greens say the changes will deliver 77 per cent of the tax cuts to the wealthiest 20 per cent of society over the next financial year. The Greens say these tax cuts “give $2 to men for every $1 to women.”

Elderly single women, as well as female sole parents, are overrepresented when it comes to those on low incomes. Sixty-one per cent of mothers are raising children on less than $60,000 a year, according to a 2023 study by the Council of Single Mothers and their Children. Eighty-seven per cent say they are concerned about their long-term financial wellbeing.

Acting Greens leader Merheen Faruqi says she and Nick McKim have written to the Treasurer, urging him to scrap the Stage 3 tax cuts.

“Labor’s tax cuts for the rich are getting bigger by the day, and will turbocharge inequality and inflation,” she shared on social media.

The prime minister is set to address the National Press Club this coming Thursday, where he will outline new cost-of-living measures that will “put extra” dollars in low- and middle-income earners’ pockets.

On Tuesday morning, Albanese hinted that rather than scrapping the tax cuts, they could be expanded to include lower-income earners with a promise on KIIS FM radio that “everyone” would get a tax cut in the next financial year

Such a move would be a welcome and necessary tweak to the legislated stage 3 tax cuts package. But it’s unlikely to dramatically remove the full extent of gender inequity these tax cuts are set to provide.  

The post Men to take majority of tax cuts as women still fight for equal pay appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Our second Council of Single Mothers and their Children (CSMC) national survey and Navigating Turbulence Report reveals that in spite of doing all the right things, single mothers are not getting ahead. The sad fact for single mothers is a job and higher education are no guarantees of a liveable income and financial security.

Structural barriers are holding us back, it’s gendered, there’s a lack of time and opportunity, and the disadvantage in housing has only become more acute.

For us, the reality is that there is only one adult to do it all – earn an income, make decisions and run the household, while caring for children typically 12 days a fortnight. It’s an intense juggle. Being the primary carer for your kids during the working week limits paid work options and pushes many single mothers into casual work, which means no leave and no security.

Single mothers are in paid employment at similar rates to mothers with partners, however 61% of our survey respondents are raising their children on less than $60,000 a year, placing the majority below the national medium income of $65,000, many of them in dire poverty, with 87% concerned about their long-term financial wellbeing.

Our report is the largest survey of single mothers in Australia, undertaken in 2022 with 1168 respondents. The findings build on the responses of over 1000 single mothers in our first national survey, in 2018, and reflect the impacts of COVID and the burgeoning economic and housing crises.

The consequences during COVID on the casualised workforce were devastating, with single mothers losing paid hours – or having to give up work to homeschool and care for pre-schoolers – at five times the rate of couple families. We urgently need employers to return to permanent part-time jobs, with more roles of 24-30 hours per week suitable for all workers with caring responsibilities. The good news is that 65 per cent of respondents consider their workplaces supportive of single mothers – a positive starting place to expand workplace flexibility.

Survey respondents have an average age of 44 and an average of 1.9 children. They are doing all they can to provide a safe home and a bright future for their children; however, many external barriers are holding them back.

Family violence in all its forms is a significant issue for single mothers. Our society needs to address this outrage. Perpetrators go on with their lives while women are left struggling to protect their children and provide them with essentials like a roof over their heads. Sixty-seven per cent of respondents have experienced family violence. Of these 58 per cent report that it has impacted on their employment, half citing a strong impact. This is the long tail of family violence that slows financial recovery, which can take five to 10 years. Psychological recovery can take even longer. Coupled with the low levels of government benefits, it condemns these families to poverty or financial hardship and significantly heightens the risk of homelessness for these women as they age.

In 2023, in a significant win resulting from a decade of advocacy, access to the Parenting Payment Single was raised to when the youngest child turns 14 years old, up from eight. This is a big improvement, although government payments remain below the poverty line. A further policy limitation on economic wellbeing is how much a single parent can earn before their payment is reduced or cut, which prevents single mothers with low incomes from getting ahead through a combination of their wage (often insecure) and the social security net. Seventy-two percent of all respondents expressed difficulty in meeting their general cost of living expenses, across all income levels even prior to the current cost-of-living crisis taking hold.

We know that the ultimate casualty of poverty is children. Evidence over time shows it is not the number or gender of the parent that does harm, but the poverty experienced by 44 per cent of children in single parent households, compared to 13 per cent in couple families. It limits their full engagement in school, reduces or eliminates chances of extra-curricular activities, makes family holidays a mere dream, and dims their future opportunities. To help counter this, public schools should be genuinely free to make it a level playing field for children from all circumstances.

Housing is difficult for many at the moment; it is nigh on impossible for single mothers. With 43 per cent of survey respondents in the private rental market, 9 per cent with insecure tenure of less than six months, many families are paying upwards of 50 per cent of their income in rent. Most are struggling to compete with double income applicants.  Our survey found single-mother families are experiencing homelessness or marginal housing at almost four times the national average, with some women earning over $100,000 a year forced to live with their children in caravan parks or even tents when their many applications for rental properties fail. Some women are forced to include their abuser’s name on rental applications because joint applications are more successful than those by a single mother. The algorithms used by real estate agents must be reviewed, and all governments must prioritise more investment in social and affordable housing. More energy efficient public housing is needed to provide security and reduce energy bills.

Forty per cent of respondents live in a home they either own outright or with a mortgage. Ironically, many more could afford to service a mortgage, given the high rents they pay (could even be cheaper) but they either can’t afford to save the deposit or even with a deposit, can’t secure finance. Banks and governments can do much more to help women who can afford to buy a home; so they can avoid homelessness and poverty as they age.

All of these challenges are compounded for the high percentage of single mothers living with a disability and/or raising a child with a disability. Nearly eight in 10 have experienced family violence, compared with the six out of 10 respondents who do not have a disability or a child with a disability. Their long-term housing security and their outcomes in the family law system are also reduced.

There is no one more motivated than a single mother to protect and provide for her children. The lived reality of single mothers is one of determination and resilience, sometimes against the greatest odds. Many are exhausted. Negative stereotypes are demeaning misconceptions that we don’t deserve.

Look around you. There is a hard-working single mother nearby who is heading up one of 834,000 families in Australia on her own, and she’s doing the best she can. It’s time to give single mothers the respect they deserve.

The post Resilient, hardworking: Give single mothers the respect they deserve appeared first on Women's Agenda.

As the government weighs up whether to extend single parenting payments to parents of children older than the present cutoff age of eight in this week’s budget, new information has come to light about what happened when the rules were tightened in 2013.

When then-Treasurer Peter Costello reduced the cutoff age from 16 in 2006, forcing single parents who hadn’t found work onto (much lower) unemployment benefits, he said it would “help them with higher incomes and better participation in mainstream economic life”.

A few years later when then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced plans to remove a loophole that had allowed some parents with children over eight to continue receiving the payments, her treasurer Wayne Swan said it would “encourage re-entry into the workforce”.

Did the cutoff improve or harm lives?

Only now does recently available administrative data allow us to evaluate how single mothers fared after losing the payment when their children turned eight. Did they secure employment? Did they get higher incomes as a result of being pushed into work, or did their incomes sink?

Research Bob Breunig and I conducted on the changes enacted in 2013 finds that when taken together, the single mothers (they were overwhelmingly mothers) lost income.

On one hand, the change shifted a sizeable minority (about one-third) of single mothers off income support and into employment, boosting their incomes.

On the other hand, it left the majority on income support and on lower incomes – an effect that overwhelmed the increased incomes for those who left the payment and found jobs.

Multiple barriers to returning to work

What differentiates the (reduced income) majority from the (increased income) minority? While our particular dataset cannot identify characteristics that distinguish them from each other, there are two likely explanations.

First, individuals who have been on income support for long times tend to face multiple barriers to getting back to work, including illness and/or disability. In the case of single mothers, that illness or disability can also apply to their children.

Second is something more pernicious: domestic violence.

A personal safety survey conducted shortly after the Gillard changes found 60% of single mothers who had ever had a partner had experienced partner violence in their lifetimes – an astonishingly high figure.

If domestic violence underlies welfare dependence among single mothers (and it likely does), it doesn’t take rocket science to appreciate the difficulty of getting those mothers into work.

Single parents face greater financial constraints relative to dual-income households and greater constraints on their time, in terms of school pick-ups, drop-offs, sick days and things such as help with homework.

Domestic violence tightens these constraints, adding to demands on time and resources the need to find safe lodging, attend court hearings, and especially, as victims of trauma, care for their own (as well as their children’s) mental and physical health.

The trauma engendered by domestic violence can also be very difficult to escape when it is triggered at every custodial hearing, divorce proceeding, non-custodial parental visitation or on the days child support payments are due.

So what are the policy solutions?

First, increases in employment, unaccompanied by increases in income, appear to have deleterious impacts on children. Insofar as mutual obligations lead to unstable and poorly remunerated employment, they are counterproductive and detrimental.

Our research shows that additional mutual obligations did little to improve the employment outcomes of single mothers.

Second, individuals facing multiple barriers need tailored support that identifies and helps address multidimensional challenges.

The effect of domestic violence is hard to pin down

Scaling up individualised support can prove challenging, which is where case management experiments at the local level can help. The new treasury evaluation unit will be in a good position to ensure these policies are designed to be evaluated and assess their results.

As importantly, we need to be able to measure the impact of domestic violence on the economic security, employment and health outcomes of survivors and their children over time, as is done in countries like Finland.

The datasets needed to do this in Australia already exist, but so far the government has not allowed the linkage of longitudinal data on domestic violence and labour market outcomes.

Without the information that would come from putting these datasets together, Australia risks introducing policies, including those designed to assist single mothers who are victims of domestic violence, without a means of evaluating their effectiveness.

Single mothers – whether in paid employment or not – are among the hardest-working members of our society. They deserve better.

The post How removing parenting payments when children turned 8 harmed rather than help single mothers appeared first on Women's Agenda.

It comes after the program has faced years of criticism from advocates, who have said the mutual obligations for the scheme are punitive and damaging for vulnerable single mothers. 

The ParentsNext program applies to about 98,700 parents who have children aged nine months to six years and have not worked for 6 months. Almost all participants – 96 per cent – are women, while 75 per cent are single parents. 

It was implemented by the previous Coalition government, and was slated to help prepare parents for future employment (or study) once their children started school. 

Abolishing the program has been recommended by the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee and the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce. While a parliamentary committee chaired by Labor’s Julian Hill also recently recommended the scheme be abolished because it wasn’t flexible, compassionate or supportive of single parents. 

Indeed, when the committee handed down its report in March, Hill acknowledged that many people thought the program was something “close to evil” and had described the compliance process as “re-traumatising and akin to coercive control”. 

“Parents have a right to choose to actively parent their babies and very young children, and this right should not be available only to wealthy parents,” Hill noted at the time. 

“Caring for young children is work which used to be valued in its own right, and a mandatory focus on preparing parents of very young children for future employment is a very patriarchal view of caring and doesn’t take account of enormous diversity in the needs of families and children.”

The Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce recommended the government reinvest in a new “evidence-based program co-designed with young parents”, taking into acccount principles of “encouragement, support, flexibility and meeting their needs”.

In announcing ParentsNext would be scrapped, Minister for Women Katy Gallagher and Minister for Employment Tony Burke said a new voluntary service will be designed in consultation with parents and stakeholders from across the community.

“Women around the country have been telling us that the former Government’s ParentsNext program is punitive, counterproductive and causes harm,” Gallagher and Burke said in a statement. 

“At the election we committed to listen to women’s experiences and make decisions that make their lives better and fairer.”

All compulsory requirements for ParentsNext will be paused from today, May 5, meaning participants will no longer receive payment suspensions or penalties for not engaging with activities under the program. 

 The government said all affected participants will be contacted to inform them of the changes. 

The post Punitive ParentsNext program to be abolished next year appeared first on Women's Agenda.

For the first two months of Svetlana’s daughter’s life, the pair couch-surfed and lived on the streets. Granted public housing, Svetlana then worked to “stabilise” herself and slowly form “new ties”. A “former addict”, she had been “clean and sober for six years”.

Her daughter faced speech delays, and with help from a social service, Svetlana had been focused on supporting her, deciding to keep her at preschool for an additional year. Svetlana’s father, who has dementia, had lately moved to an aged care facility, leaving her mother “all alone” and “very sick”.

“On top of all this, ParentsNext was introduced to me,” she told me. “I wanted to keep an open mind,” she continued, “and I did.”

Parents as ‘workers in waiting’

The official description of ParentsNext is that it “helps parents with children under six, to plan and prepare for future study or employment”.

The program reclassifies the parents of very young children — initially six-month-old babies and now nine-month-old babies — as “workers in waiting”, who need to partake in monitored activities. Yet their designation is different from and their treatment more ambiguous than that of “the unemployed”.

Participants are required to engage in one of a range of possible activities, and some of these are certainly tied to and compatible with parenting. Attending playgroup and story time sessions at local libraries “count” as legitimate activities.

Paid work is Svetlana’s aspiration, and after a long break since her role as an administrator in a corporate setting, she was “terrified”. ParentsNext seemed to promise a bridge between the past and future.

“The phantom phone call” was how Svetlana referred to it. She remembered receiving an alert: “We’ll call you at this time. And if you don’t answer, your payments might be suspended.” The phone call didn’t arrive at the specified time; her “heart was missing a beat”. Then, at the day’s close, the phone call came, confirming her eligibility for ParentsNext. She was “happy to get help”.

Svetlana repeated, simply and without shame, “I need help.”

In early December 2018, she went to a meeting with her ParentsNext case manager and was “bamboozled” with information about where, when and how to report. Svetlana continued to report to Centrelink, as per the conditions of her Parenting Payment (Single).

She did not realise she had agreed to an additional layer of reporting requirements via a different app; on December 24, her payment was suspended, a common experience of women in this program.

An extension of welfare conditions

ParentsNext’s precursor was the 2006 Welfare to Work policy, which represented a radical change in policies affecting Australian single parents.

Previously, parenting itself was treated as a “legitimate social role”, with minimal conditions attached to the income support available to impoverished parents. Under Welfare to Work, sole parents were essentially “reclassified” as unemployed from when their youngest child turned eight.

ParentsNext waves the wand again, starting when children are nine months old (as mentioned earlier, it was originally six months). As Trish, a single mum, pointed out, “normally you don’t start getting harassed by Centrelink until your kid’s about to go to school or something like that”. For Trish, ParentsNext brings forward harassment’s start date.

I agree with Trish, but formulate it in more technical terms: the significance of ParentsNext is that it represents an extension of welfare conditions to circumstances previously protected from them.

My memory of the six-month, sleep-deprived mark is this: I read somewhere that it was time to start thinking about introducing solid food, which I duly did. It was flung around the room before my baby wailed for the breast. My focus, in other words, was my baby, even if there was more to my life than parenting.

Under pressure to accept that six-month-old babies are still unpredictable and demanding, eligibility for mandatory participation in ParentsNext was changed to nine months in mid-2021.

Is caring a legitimate activity?

By the time Svetlana’s ParentsNext provider reopened in the new year, she had a new case manager. “That lady”, who had seemed “overworked, jaded and cynical” — the one who explained verbally that ParentsNext essentially involved mastering a second reporting system — was gone. Her replacement “apologised profusely”, and together they set to work on a participation plan. Svetlana suggested that her weekly participation activity be, in effect, caring.

So, did it count, she asked her empathetic new case manager, that she looked after her little girl and also caught two buses across the city each way, each day, to visit her lonely, ailing mum? Was caring for others a legitimate “activity”?

“That’s not in our abilities to put it in as an activity,” came the response. As “helpful” as she tried to be, Svetlana’s new case manager — “freshly graduated”, “idealistic”, “you can tell it’s getting a bit much” — still seemed intent on “ticking boxes”.

They agreed, instead, that Svetlana would enrol in a TAFE course that would qualify her to seek work as a receptionist in a medical centre. Yet Svetlana discovered she had become so “unplugged from the system” that self-directed, online study was far more daunting than she envisaged. She floundered. The fragility of her confidence was painfully evident to me.

A sudden health emergency, three weeks before our interview, turned into a “real saga” and had interrupted her efforts at study. She had secured a temporary exemption from ParentsNext.

‘They will go after you’

For my research into ParentsNext, I circulated a call for interviewees on social media. Slowly, often cautiously, women contacted me wanting to talk. Anxiety pervaded many of these exchanges; reassurances about anonymity were sought.

One person, Misha, created a new email account for the purpose of corresponding with me, so concerned was she that her ParentsNext provider might find out she was criticising the program: “They will go after you if your name becomes public.”

I met Eloise in a house set deep in thick, tinder-dry bush. We ate strawberries while a fierce morning heat steadily swelled to fill the kitchen and a high, milky white sky. Within weeks of us meeting, the east coast was ablaze.

Eloise was in pain. A long search for a diagnosis had recently led to the conclusion that she has Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, which affects connective tissue. In other words, she was “too sick to work and not sick enough” for the Disability Support Pension.

When Eloise got that first phone call about ParentsNext, “out of the blue”, she was just “trying to work out what I was going to do with my health”. The caller asked a series of questions about educational attainment and her son’s age.

She then scheduled an appointment for Eloise for the next day, in an outer Sydney suburb that was a two-hour train ride away. “I don’t have a car. I have a toddler and a chronic illness. Like, I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

“I remember very vividly her saying, ‘Why are you crying? We’re here to help you; we’re trying to help you.’” Eloise continued, “I’ve been dealing with them ever since.”

Eloise signed a participation plan, agreeing to go to TAFE to complete her Higher School Certificate. “I wanted to do it anyway,” she reasoned. “In retrospect, I would’ve picked something else so I could go to TAFE without stress and do it at my own pace and not with payments-getting-cut hanging over my head.”

Eloise left school in Year 9 but completed Year 10 at TAFE and remained grateful for the support and understanding she received from TAFE teachers. For Eloise’s single mum, “education was the ticket out of poverty”. Her mum had slowly completed a degree and was now working as a counsellor. The two of them were meant to show the world that “we can do just as good as you can”.

At 21, Eloise became a mum. Like her own mother, she was acutely conscious of others’ judgements: “dumb girls have babies”.

The Ehlers–Danlos diagnosis solved some problems but threw up new ones.

I am not sure how to toe the line between, “Yes, I’m too disabled to get a job, but I am not too disabled to look after my son.”

Looking after him is my priority and has been my life for four years […] I love being a mum!

Me: “What do you love about it?” Eloise:

Oh, he’s cool. My kid’s just cool! He’s really funny […] I like hearing the weird stuff he comes out with.

Parenting, Eloise reflected, is “the first thing I’ve ever felt that I was kind of good at”.

Individual responsibility

Access to income support in the contemporary welfare state is conditional on the development of and adherence to an individualised agreement that emerges via “one-on-one meetings with individual advisers”. The “participation plans” that Svetlana and Eloise signed are an example of these kinds of agreements.

Some frontline workers certainly perceive that empathetic listening and attention is at least the one thing they do have in their arsenal to give their clients, since to assist them to find work when there is not enough work to go around is not within their power. Others go above and beyond to broker work and training opportunities where they do exist.

However, a consistent theme in research into this system is that the coercive work case managers do, in emphasising and enforcing compliance through computerised systems, is more keenly felt and perceived than the supportive work they do. Further, those working these roles in the conditional, privatised welfare system increasingly view their “clients” negatively, seeing them as individually responsible for their circumstances.

Māori foster mother Jo relayed:

So I met her. Her name is [Belinda]. My worker. She got surprised with me that I knew a lot. She liked my questions.

Belinda began to explain to Jo that ParentsNext “is a new government program and … this is how they going to roll it out for …”

Jo “interjected her”:

I was actually telling her that foster carers are exempt from these types of programs and her reply was, “I don’t know that; I need to find out for myself.”

Jo, in other words, knew more about the program than the worker tasked with enforcing its conditions.

While Svetlana perceived that her new, more supportive case manager was a recent university graduate, others sensed that case managers might well have themselves been “sort of quite downtrodden by the system and then now they’re suddenly in this semi-sales position”.

In these cases, when people have “been at the bottom” themselves, there can exist an almost evangelical edge: “I’m going to help people and I’m, yeah, a little bit better than these people because I’ve worked hard and I deserve it.”

‘Relative privilege’ and making the system work

Lallie described to me her first encounter with Australia’s welfare system:

Oh, my God, you have a system?! That looks after you? Geee! I came from war. There is no backup. There was just early insecurity: physical, emotional, psychological insecurity.

Lallie and her family are African refugees who settled in Brisbane when she was 10. Medicare, too, was a revelation.

Lallie completed high school in Brisbane and then went to university. Even before graduating, a path stretched before her. After gaining her degree, she worked in community sector roles in homeless services, sexual health and mental health. She also designed, launched and began running a consultancy on the side.

Her consultancy was just beginning to take off when COVID hit. No more “toxic workplaces”; no more “working with dickheads”. And, most importantly, she could devote more time to her youngest child, who had just been diagnosed with a complex medical condition. “I have to stay close to home. I have to be here more.”

She needed room to breathe. Without a regular income, Lallie found herself on Parenting Payment (Single) and then on ParentsNext.

I interviewed Lallie over the phone. She was articulate, compelling, forceful. I had no trouble imagining her first appointment with her ParentsNext case manager, which also took place over the phone.

Lallie told her: “This is where I’m at in life. My child has these needs.” Lallie insisted that taking her child to appointments be counted as her “participation activity” rather than doing something new. The case manager checked with her supervising manager and then acquiesced.

This was Lallie’s approach: “How do I make this work for me, immediately?” She emphasised:

How do I make this work for me? Because I don’t have time for bullshit. I just don’t have time for Centrelink to be dangling me left and right.

Impressed with Lallie’s plans for her consultancy, her case manager next agreed to upgrade Lallie’s Zoom account and buy lights so Lallie’s work could successfully transition online. Soon, Lallie was back at work, “nice shirt on top” and “pyjama pants on the bottom”.

In Lallie’s words, she insisted this was a story of relative “privilege”. Lallie explains it thus: “I have a background in advocacy. I just advocated for myself.” Lallie is a single mother, a refugee, an African Australian.

We talked of her experiences of racism and sexism: “I don’t always sit in the privilege basket.” I was surprised by her choice of words, but also grasped that Lallie was intent on impressing upon me that she is more than the identity categories I might be tempted to tell her story through.

Lallie sees herself and takes pride in possessing “system literacy privilege”. By this she means that through her work and over time she has accrued deep and valuable knowledge about how to navigate systems of support.

Every time she made a call to Centrelink or a provider, for example, she made notes about whom she spoke to and what was said. She undertook research before meetings and arrived knowing her entitlements, just as foster mum Jo had done. Adept at navigating welfare bureaucracies, Lallie was able to wring resources out of a scenario that only harmed many other of my interviewees.

The indignity of investigation

Historian Mark Peel eloquently describes the “indignity of the investigation” into one’s impoverished circumstances. For some of his interviewees, this was even more painful than the material penury they found ways to endure; they “resented having to passively accept someone else’s interpretation of their problems”.

This is what Arlie told me: she was initially hopeful ParentsNext might support her to attain her driver’s licence, which her first case manager affirmed. The idea was dismissed by her next case manager, whom she met a month later. At a third appointment, with another case manager again, “the lady asked me to tell her about myself”.

Arlie talked. Meanwhile, “she was writing it all down [on] a blank piece of paper”. Arlie is a “young mum”; she is 21 and has two kids. Her partner is an apprentice plumber. “I’m proud of everything I have, although not everyone sees it that way, and I felt quite judged as she wrote down my life story.” Arlie continued, “I don’t know why but I cried about it that night.”

The blank piece of paper being imprinted by another’s pen seemed to me a suggestive image. Arlie’s story was rewritten in that moment to fit a policy narrative about “teen pregnancy”, “educational attainment” and “welfare dependence”. That’s not the story Arlie was telling, nor the story she lives by.

Ayesha, who grew up in Kolkata and holds two postgraduate degrees, enjoys a greater degree of social standing than Arlie: she is highly qualified, speaks of a “career” rather than “work”, which has a more instrumental cast, and has led a transnational cosmopolitan life that shaped the tenor of our rich exchange. It struck me that she held tightly to her own self-imagining, despite attempts at its rewriting.

Ayesha saw herself as more than a welfare recipient and more than a mother, “as much as I love listening to Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol on repeat”. She liked to conjure an image of herself, she told me, “that active, corporate-gear-wearing, you know, Starbucks-holding person who was taking the commute into the city every morning”.

She referred to “that bit of me” and also said, “I’ve lost quite a bit of me.” Ayesha seemed poised to retrieve and foreground the parts of herself she valued. Others I interviewed had their story more strongly subsumed into the process of rewriting.

Yet Eloise, too, who left school in Year 9 and lived with the “dumb girls have babies” story, worked to subtly overwrite the tale of “intergenerational welfare dependence”. As earlier explained, she was raised by a single mother. It was

just me and my mum. Yeah. Just the two of us. Um, my dad kind of came and went occasionally, but it was, it was just the two of us.

She stated, “So I am the next on the line of single parenting.”

It was then that Eloise recast single motherhood from a source of lack to a source of strength. “I respect my mum a lot for raising me as well as she could,” said Eloise. She did her very best “with the resources […] that she had”.

This is an edited extract from Who Cares?: Life on Welfare in Australia by Eve Vincent (MUP), published 21 February 2023.

The post Friday essay: parents of 9-month-old babies as ‘workers in waiting’? How ParentsNext monitors single mothers appeared first on Women's Agenda.

As for unmarried women, you’re ever worse – representing a key demographic that rejected Republican candidates in the US midterms and got in the way of the much anticipated red wave sweeping across the US Senate.

And what about young women who are also unmarried? Well, you’re just a lost cause.

Yes, various segments of women are being blamed for the demise of right-wing party votes. Not just in the United States, but also here in Australia.

We need single women to get married, cried Fox News commentator Jesse Watters, responding to the higher than expected vote towards Democrats during last week’s midterms.

“Once women get married, they vote Republican,” he said. “Single women and voters under 40 have been captured by Democrats.”

“We need these ladies to get married. It’s time to fall in line, and settle down. Guys, go and put a ring on it,” the commentator said.

What a shame single ladies of the US, Jesse Watters is already taken.  

Today in The Australian, Nick Cater shares his view on “single young females” being the “biggest threat to parties on the right”.

In the actually published piece, Cater starts by declaring that US President Joe Biden should be grateful to single women – as they are one of the fastest growing voter blocks in the US, as they are here in Australia also.

In Australia, Cater is concerned about the rise of single 20 and 30-somethings as being “one of the most disturbing trends to emerge from last year’s census”, with women under 35 now more likely to be single than not, for the first time.

“Young women may be more ideologically drawn to the Left, than those older and wiser to the ways of the world,” Cater wrote.

He then goes on to discuss how life for “single woman isn’t as liberating as it appears in the average Hollywood rom-com.” Perhaps he knows something better about life for married women, other than stats that find women married to men do more housework than women who are not. He could do worse than to consider the suspected link between Australia’s increasing divorce rate and the the uneven division of unpaid labour between couples.

In acknowledging that life for “single women” isn’t all Hollywood and roses, you might consider some of the day-to-day challenges single mothers face in getting food on the table — with a third of sole-parent families headed up by women living in poverty. You might note the rise of older homeless women in Australia, and reflect on more policies that can support women’s overall safety — whether they are single, in relationships, or simply hoping to feel safe walking home at night.

But as Cater states, the real issue is that single women “have a vested interest in state intervention” and while a generation ago they could have relied on a “breadwinner to support them”, “today that breadwinner is the government to all intents and purposes, an ever-reliable partner with deep pockets to top up their meager income.”

Labor, he says, has abandoned the worker class for the “welfare and professional classes.”

Cater then goes on to share some ideas for addressing the rising single women’s problem, rather than ideas that could actually appeal to single women.

He suggests that removing various bureaucratic barriers for supporting more housing construction will help, somehow. He suggests superannuation changes – like lowering payment requirements for under 35s and increasing incentives for over 55s, will also help, somehow. He wants more incentives for young adults to work earlier and learn a “useful trade”.

More home ownership, Cater believes, is key to the Coalition winning more votes.

Not sure how the above is going to encourage women to go and get married. Nor how it will support some of those in the “welfare and professional classes” to get in and swing their support back to parties on the right.

Meanwhile, single women in Australia are actually on the increase when it comes to applying for home loans, with single women equalling single men when it came to who was buying property in 2021, according to ME Bank.

In the US, 72 per cent of women aged 18 to 29 voted Democrat in last week’s midterms.  Was it because they are unmarried, or don’t own a home? Or was there something else that was particularly frustrating them and causing them to pick anything but the Republicans? One guess could be that it had something to do with a US Supreme Court that took away their constitutional right to have autonomy over their own bodies.

Perhaps you could ask some young women in Australia, just what they’re rejecting and why, and consider policies and initiatives that support what you’re learning. You could also try speaking with some single mothers, and learning more about their challenges and what’s going on in their lives, rather than dismissing them as being only interested in welfare. There could also be something in those figures finding that first home ownership is on the rise among single women.

Parties on the right need to try and appeal to young women and single women, rather than attempt to “bring them into line”.

The post The ‘disturbing trend’ of young women rejecting parties on the right appeared first on Women's Agenda.

The one in six stat comes from the latest 2022 ACOSS/UNSW Sydney Poverty & Inequality Partnership Report. 

Anti-Poverty Week Executive Director Toni Wren says when children grow up in poverty, it “harms their lives and diminishes their future prospects.”

“Gains from record low employment are being overshadowed by the increased cost of living, especially housing,” she says. “Those left behind are trapped in hardship, including 760,000 children.”

Wren notes that the New Zealand Government has made great progress in decreasing child poverty after they introduced legislation in 2018 that had measurable targets and actions. 

Anti-Poverty Week believes Australia could find similar success by taking actions to increase JobSeeker and related payments so that everyone can afford the basics such as rent, food, medication and education.

The diverse network also suggests that Parliament build more social housing and increase Commonwealth Rent Assistance, as well as Review family payments and child support to ensure it’s working. And they say it’s important to restore single parenting payment eligibility until the youngest child turns 16 not 8. 

These calls to action align with some recent findings from an analysis undertaken for Anti-Poverty Week by Life Course Centre researchers Dr Alice Campbell and Professor Janeen Baxter of the University of Queensland. 

The analysis shows that over the last 20 years, single mothers are at significantly greater risk– more than double– of being in financial hardship than partnered mothers and fathers. 

The research shows that financial hardship decreased for single mothers between 2001 and 2006 but began to increase again from 2008 onwards.

In the past 10 years, the proportion of single mothers in financial hardship hasn’t dropped below approximately 30 per cent, except for a brief period when the Coronavirus Supplement was paid. 

In 2022, the analysis found that single-parent families reliant on income support payments are 95 per cent more likely to be women– an overwhelming amount. 

These mothers are often forced to choose between staying with violence or face poverty and homelessness if they leave a partner. 

Many are also more likely to be in private rental and housing stress, are less likely to be receiving regular child support and are owed debts of at least $2 billion. 

These statistics reveal a jarring reality and Wren says, “Disturbingly it is government policies since 2000 that have increased child poverty, especially in single-parent families headed by women.”

As for the policies affecting these struggling single-parent households, the Anti-Poverty Week network points to low family payments, increases in housing costs, low rent assistance and an eroding child support system. 

The same problems ring true for couple families with children as well, and the research pinpoints areas of support that need to be addressed. 

“Over 20 years we’ve learned much more about the consequences of child poverty and also more about what works,” says Wren. “Yet as a nation, we haven’t prioritised our children in policy-making and eroded payments aimed at families and children. The forthcoming Wellbeing Budget should commit to action to halve child poverty.”

The post 1 in 6 Australian children grow up in poverty: Anti-Poverty Week calls on parliament to halve child poverty by 2030 appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Some alarming statistics on food insecurity have been released today by The Foodbank Hunger Report 2022 that show a troubling picture of today’s Australia. 

The food relief charity conducted a nationwide survey of 4,024 Australians aged 18 years or older and found that around 1.3 million children lived in food insecure households in the last year, making these households the hardest hit by Australia’s food insecurity crisis.

Single parents are especially vulnerable to food insecurity with 37 per cent either skipping meals or going whole days without eating the past year. 

And overall, more than 2 million Australian households have run out of food in the last year due to limited finances. 

One mum in suburban South Australia says, “There have been many occasions where the food we’ve purchased for the week has just not stretched far enough as the children are getting bigger and their appetites have increased.”

Foodbank says the term “food insecurity” covers a range of experiences– from being uncertain about getting enough to eat, compromising on nutrition, having disrupted eating patterns and having reduced food intake. 

CEO of Foodbank Australia, Brianna Casey is incredibly troubled by the recent report’s findings, saying, “I have witnessed firsthand the rise in demand for food relief services over the past year as the country has been ‘recovering’ from Covid-19, but even I’m shocked by the picture that is exposed in this report.”

“We know how important it is for people to have access to nutritious food, yet the rising costs of energy, fuel, groceries, rent and mortgages have put this fundamental need beyond the reach of more and more people with no respite in sight,” says Casey. 

The survey findings show that the rising cost of living is the most common reason for household food insecurity, with 64 per cent of respondents reporting this.

The top cause? Forty-nine per cent point to the rising costs of food and groceries, while 42 per cent blame energy prices and 33 per cent report housing costs are the worst. 

A single mum in suburban Queensland says, “With the February storm came flooding and my roof was damaged and water damaged the ceiling too and my fridge stopped working. I’ve had to buy a new fridge and with Covid shortages, the cost of everything has gone up and, being forced to go to job network opportunities, means I spend a lot more on fuel. It all adds up.”

The report also found that on a typical day, 306,000 households in Australia are receiving assistance from food relief organisations. 

“These results should make everyone stop in their tracks,” says Casey. “The numbers being reported are massive and hard to process, but they represent the harsh reality of living week to week when the cost-of-living crisis collides with an income crisis and the household budget now lists food as a discretionary spend.”

This food insecurity crisis isn’t just affecting those who are unemployed or homeless. The research shows that over half of food insecure households had someone in paid work and a  third of households with mortgages have experienced food insecurity. 

The situation fares even worse in regional areas with 36 per cent reporting food insecurity compared to 27 per cent in metro areas. 

As for the future of food insecurity in Australia, the Foodbank report signals things are only set to get worse. Half of all households experiencing the crisis have reported the struggle to afford food is happening more often. 

Foodbank Australia is holding hope for positive change at next week’s Budget announcement though they are still concerned.

Casey says, “We have heard the Treasurer caution that the October budget is not the time for new spending measures to deliver relief to struggling families, but with more than a million people a month already seeking food relief, if not now, then when?”

The post Over half a million Australian households struggling to put food on the table: Report appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Female workforce participation has risen for the past two decades in Australia, and in turn, more young kids have been attending formal childcare.

So it’s very surprising the latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey shows a steep fall in the use of formal childcare among single-parent households, which by and large are headed by women.

The HILDA Survey has been running since 2001, and the same 17,000 or so Australians are interviewed every year on issues such as health, family and work. The newest report, published today, is based on 2018 figures, the most recent available data.

According to the HILDA Survey, 52% of single-parent households with kids aged under four used formal childcare back in 2016. But in 2018, that share has dropped to 35%. The same trend isn’t observed among coupled parents.

While it is unclear what is driving this trend, it is potentially a sign many single parents simply can’t afford formal childcare. If so, it risks kicking off a vicious cycle in which lack of money, lack of childcare, and lack of employment opportunities trap single parents in entrenched disadvantage.

A worrying trend

There doesn’t appear to be an obvious explanation for this phenomenon. The change in usage patterns comes at a time when childcare subsidies had just been substantially increased for the majority of low- and middle-income households, reducing their out-of-pocket expenses.

There also appears to be no reduced need for care; employment levels among single parents remained stable even while childcare usage dropped.

It may be many single parents are instead relying on informal childcare arrangements, such as relatives or friends. The HILDA data reveal a growing number of single parents with kids below school age, who have a job but no formal care arrangement.

In 2018, only 52% of all employed single parents with young kids had a formal care arrangement, compared with an average of 70% over the previous ten years.

This is a worrying new trend. It sets up single parents for a host of logistical problems juggling multiple care arrangements and unreliable access to care, which can jeopardise their employment in the longer term.

And because it’s unregulated, there’s no way to enforce quality standards of informal care arrangements. That could potentially limit children’s social, behavioural and cognitive development if they miss out on formal care.

As in other countries, Australian single-parent families who don’t access formal childcare are the most disadvantaged; they are more likely to live in remote or regional Australia, and in socially and economically disadvantaged locations, and the parents in these families have lower educational qualifications.

There is a strong link between families that don’t or cannot access formal childcare, and families affected by poverty and lack of employment.

A cycle of poverty and entrenched disadvantage

HILDA tracks households over time, so we can also see each family’s circumstances and childcare usage in the year prior. When we analysed single-parent households over time, we found two important facts.

First, the falling rates of formal childcare usage among single parents isn’t just about a shift over time, in which fewer and fewer single new families begin to use the formal care sector when their child is old enough.

It is, to a large extent, about families that already had a formal care arrangement in place, but cancelled their enrolments before their kids reached school age.

And second, just before these families stopped using childcare, they tended to be somewhat poorer than their counterparts who continued to use it — but not as poor as the families are who don’t use childcare in the long run.

In other words, there could be a vicious cycle whereby lack of income (whether because the single parent is unemployed, or employed on a low wage) prompts families to drop childcare, further worsening their economic position down the track because work opportunities are more constrained. It’s hard to maximise work opportunities if you don’t have reliable childcare.

The HILDA Survey had already shown a substantial increase in relative poverty rates among single-parent households — from 15% in 2016 to 25% in 2018, well above the 10.7% overall rate of relative poverty.

Given the devastating effects of COVID-19, we can expect the number of single-parent families that enter a cycle of poverty and entrenched disadvantage will only grow further.

It appears that even after the recent increase in subsidies, our childcare system is badly set up to help them find a way out.

This piece was co-published with the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit.

Barbara Broadway, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne and Esperanza Vera-Toscano, Senior research fellow, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Single parents are getting priced out of daycare, triggering a vicious cycle of entrenched poverty appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Once the economy was shuttered to halt the spread of COVID-19, the government quickly recognised that the huge number of people needing help – many claiming unemployment benefits for the first time – would have no hope of surviving on $40 a day. 

The gaping holes in our welfare safety net would mean they would have ended up with unmanageable debts, some would have become homeless and our charities would have been overwhelmed by demands for assistance.  

So, the Coronavirus Supplement of $40 a day was announced, but only for six months. Now that payment is being extended for another three months but at a lower rate. Yet we know it is currently protecting people who have recently lost their jobs, as well as helping lift many more out of poverty.

Our friends at the National Council for Single Mothers and their Children have collected stories via their  550 Reasons to Smile campaign, sharing stories from mothers on what they are finally able to afford thanks to being temporarily raised out of poverty during the COVID-19 crisis. We this supplement is helping women get the bond together to leave a situation of domestic violence, buy a family computer so kids can home school, put healthy food on the table three times a day and make it possible to repair cars and pay for other essentials like regular medication.

For single parent families with high rates of poverty, this coronavirus supplement has been a game-changer.

But we’re not out of the woods yet with COVID-19, and the labour market will be weak for a long time, making it hard to get work or more work. 

As Greg Jericho writes, for the first time in any recession, more women than men aged 25-64 years have lost jobs.  And analysis by former RBA labour market economist Callam Pickering has shown that single parent mothers with dependent children had the largest fall in employment of all family types, experiencing a 14.4% loss from March to June. 

We also know that the monthly ABS employment figures are masking what’s really going on.  The number of people needing DSS unemployment payments went over a million back on 10 April.  The DSS number is amuch stronger measure of what’s going on at this time; these are the real people receiving payments because they are unemployed. 

As we saw from those horrendous queues at Centrelink offices, there was a huge surge when the economy shut down in late March.  The peak so far was in the week of 15 May when the total reached more than 1.65 million people and then it started to gradually reduce. Sadly the numbers have begun to climb again with another 12,000 people in Victoria needing these payments in July alone.  

However the weak labour market is not just in Victoria.  University of Melbourne economist Jeff Borland attributes only about one sixth of the slow- down in jobs coming back to the second Victorian shut-down.  

Other factors are the slowing recovery in the industries most adversely affected by COVID‐19 (including those dominated by women) and slower growth or even decreases in industries outside those initially affected (such as construction).

Recent reports from the National Skills Commission show that: “The proportion of businesses expecting to decrease staff numbers in the coming months increased to 7% in the week ending 31 July and is now at its highest level since the beginning of May and for the same period… only 52% of all businesses reported that they were operating at full capacity, a  fall from the fortnight ending 17 July, with 56% of businesses reporting that they were operating at full capacity.”

We will need much more government stimulus from both Federal and State governments if we are to combat the devastating impact of long-term unemployment.  

The caring industries (aged, disability and children) are ripe for more investment to address many of the staffing shortages exposed by COVID-19 pandemic; repairing and building social housing which has the added benefit of addressing the shortfall in need which now surpasses 430,000; and of course ensuring income support payments remain above the poverty line. 

The post Shaky employment recovery not the time to cut payments, especially for women at the forefront of care & job losses appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Robodebt isn’t the only measure the government should consider withdrawing.

Late last Friday, after a long press conference from the prime minister which avoided any mention of the topic, the government conceded all points on its so-called “robodebt” formula for alleging welfare recipients have been overpaid.

It’ll refund all of the A$721 million collected including interest charged and collection fees charged. The 470,000 Australians affected have yet to receive an apology or damages.

Our research suggests ParentsNext needs also to be addressed .

It subjects more than 75,000 low-income parents of pre-school children, 95% of whom are female, to a compulsory, complicated and discriminatory “pre-employment program”.

Those deemed not to cooperate lose their parenting payments.

Disproportionately Indigenous and female

Participation is based upon perceived risk of “intergenerational welfare dependency”, itself a questionable assumption.

It began as a trial in ten locations in 2016. From July 2018 it was rolled out across Australia.

In December 2018, 75,259 people were in ParentsNext: 95% women, 19% Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, 21% culturally and linguistically diverse, and 12% with a disability.

Our interviews with participants paint a picture of a weekly “tick-the-box” exercise conducted under the threat of losing payments below the poverty line at a time when caring for children, often under challenging circumstances, is more than enough to keep them busy.

Natasha* left school in Year 10 and has since worked in sales and administration roles. She arranged for a friend to come and keep her two-year-old occupied so she would be free to take a phone call scheduled to determine her eligibility for ParentsNext.

After an hour of waiting, Natasha was stressed and her friend had to leave. Her call came eventually.

Anna’s never did. Anna* has three children and cares for people with spinal cord injuries on a casual basis. Her Centrelink payments were suspended because she was deemed to have missed a compulsory meeting about ParentsNext, deemed to have been set up in a call that never came.

Makework instead of work

ParentsNext attracted negative media attention in late 2018, with women revealing they were forced to sign participation plans agreeing to attend playgroups, story-time sessions at their local library and swimming lessons at their own expense, instead of getting appropriate training and employment assistance.

Failure to sign would have meant loss of income.

Megan* agreed to keep on taking her child to a local playgroup. Once playgroup became a compulsory matter, however, it “drained the joy” from her involvement and she grew increasingly resentful about needing to be there.

Svetlana* explained to her case-worker that most days she catches two buses across town to care for her elderly mother. This responsibility was not deemed a legitimate activity. She has health problems and is a single mother with few social connections.

“I need help,” she said simply. Like others, she had hoped ParentsNext would help get her back into the workforce. She was left demoralised after agreeing to enrol in an online TAFE course that proved too difficult to complete.

Meanwhile, program providers profit from creating and enforcing participation in “activities” of debatable benefit to participants.

These kinds of revelations led to a Senate Inquiry that reported in March 2019.

ParentsNext continues largely unreformed despite the Senate committee’s recommendation that it cease in its current form.

It is consistent with a long Australian history of blaming, punishing and stigmatising welfare recipients and single mothers in particular.

Participation requirements have been suspended during the stay-at-home period of COVID-19 restrictions, allowing participants to focus on parenting, but they are about to restart.

We can do better than forcing already stretched parents into more stressful situations. They already do huge amounts of unpaid work caring for their children.

This unpaid work is a fundamental part of economy; by some estimates worth three times as much as our mining, finance, construction or manufacturing industries.

We ought to value the role of unpaid care and view it as an irreplaceable component of the formal economy, essential to our rebuilding post-COVID.

*Pseudonyms have been used for the people taking part in our research

Andi Sebastian and Jenny Davidson (Council for Single Mothers and their Children) also authored this article.

Elise Klein, is a Senior Lecturer at Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University and Eve Vincent is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post After Robodebt, it’s time to address ParentsNext appeared first on Women's Agenda.

The assumption that single mothers would be burdened with more housework has been dispelled by new research that found married women spend on average 2.95 hours a day on housework, compared to 2.41 hours for unmarried women.

This data was taken from more than 20,000 mothers between the years 2003 and 2012 and was controlled for differences in employment, education, race, and number of children or other extended family members at home.

The sociologists who conducted the research from University of Maryland, University of Texas and University of Southern California, say that married mothers are more likely to “perform gender” in relationships. Conversely, single mothers may be less plagued by gender expectations to perform household duties.

Additionally, married women tend to spend 10 minutes less per day on leisure activities, and get 13 minutes less sleep. Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total more leisure time than married mothers.

“These findings are consistent with the gender perspective’s theoretical predictions that
married mothers have less time for sleep and leisure in part because “doing gender”
leads partnered women to prioritize housework and childcare over leisure and sleep,” the authors write.

These numbers are consistent whether the married woman works full-time, part-time or is a stay-at-home mother. It’s clear that an increased economic contribution to the household does not relieve married women of the housework burden.

“The research is really showing that men are not necessarily contributing in ways that are bringing about equality in the home,” author Joanna Pepin from the University of Texas told Fortune.

The research also indicates that children do more housework when they live with a single mother compared to a married mother and father.

The post Women married to men do more housework than single mums, study finds appeared first on Women's Agenda.