Opinion & Commentary
Paying idle parents bad for kids Get a job, mum
A UN report comparing the well-being of children across the world's 25 richest countries recently produced a spate of disturbing headlines. These media reports generated predictable responses from welfare agencies. The Australian Council of Social Service called for a national plan to lift two million Australians out of poverty. The NSW Commissioner for Children called for more government spending on child care and provision of paid maternity leave.
Since the Howard Government came to power in 1996, the biggest single increase in spending has been on social payments. Before we commit even more taxpayers' money to this seemingly bottomless pit, it may be sensible to examine what exactly the UN report found. It assessed child well-being on six dimensions. On three of these the UN found no Australian data. So the well-being of our children was assessed on just three dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, and education.
Judging by the headlines, you may suppose we did very badly on these three criteria but that is far from the case. We came about the middle of the international rankings on the first two and towards the top (seventh place) on the third. So why all the gloom? Most media attention focused on material well-being, where we ranked 13th out of 24.
Material well-being was assessed on three indicators: the percentage of children living in households below the poverty line; the percentage of children living in jobless households; and the number of children reporting deprivation in the home (the lack of things such as books and computers). It was the second of these measures that dragged down our score. Australia came third on reported deprivation in the home and 11th on relative poverty. But we were second from the bottom on the number of children growing up in jobless households.
Here is the one indicator in the whole report where Australia really did perform badly. According to the UN, 9.5 per cent of Australian children are being raised in a home where nobody has a job. This is almost four times higher than in Sweden or the US. Even France and Germany perform better than we do, yet they have much higher rates of unemployment than Australia.
When children grow up in jobless households, they suffer financially but they also absorb a dependency culture from adult role models. Often, when they leave school, they too end up on welfare. This is why the UN includes this measure as one of its indicators of material well-being.
The explanation for our bad performance lies more in our welfare system than in our economy. Until the Government changed the rules last year, single parents and parents with unemployed partners were entitled to stay at home on welfare until their youngest child reached school-leaving age. Even after the rule changes (which were fiercely contested by the welfare lobby) these parents are under no obligation even to look for part-time work until their youngest child turns eight.
Britain and New Zealand are the only other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development with entitlements this generous. Like Australia, they too have high numbers of children growing up in jobless households. In all three countries the lesson is that if you pay parents welfare to stay out of the labour market, that is exactly what they'll do.
In most of continental Europe and Scandinavia, by contrast, parents on welfare are expected to find work by the time their children start school. This is why Sweden, for example, has only 2.7 per cent of children in jobless households, even though it has as many single-parent and blended families as we do. The value of welfare benefits in Sweden may be higher than here but Sweden's eligibility rules are much stricter.
The UN report did not find that child poverty in Australia compares badly with other OECD countries. Our performance is about average. Nor did it discover any serious problems on children's health or education; we did quite well on these compared with other developed nations. The only serious problem it uncovered was the high number of our children being raised in jobless households.
The way to rectify this is to tighten the eligibility rules so more welfare parents get jobs. This is what happens in other countries. It is, however, precisely the policy that most of our welfare lobbyists still oppose.
Professor Peter Saunders is social research director at the Centre for Independent Studies.
