Opinion & Commentary
One rule for all single parents
In its May budget, the federal Government announced that recipients of the Parenting Payment will in future be expected to seek part-time employment once their children start school. Five months later, this initiative is starting to unravel.
Under present arrangements, single parents can remain on welfare until their children reach 15, by which time they are often unemployable.
By requiring parents to return to work earlier, the Government hopes to reduce their risk of long-term welfare dependency.
This change would only apply once children start school and it would bring Australian policy into line with normal practice in America and continental Europe .
Under heavy pressure from the welfare lobby, the Government is now backtracking on this key reform. Two major concessions have been made.
First, some single parents with school-age children are to be exempted from the part-time work requirement. They include parents with four or more children, those with a disabled child, and those opting to educate their children at home.
More importantly, the requirement to find work will be waived for any parents who cannot find child care or "suitable employment". This looks like a huge potential loophole, for all claimants will have the right to seek exemption on these grounds.
Second, claimants who fail to turn up for an appointment with their Job Network provider will not now have their payments automatically suspended. Rather, those in breach of the conditions governing their benefits will continue to receive payments while a warning letter is sent out and another interview is arranged.
These two concessions threaten to blow a gaping hole in the Government's new welfare package. The proposed exemptions are particularly worrying, for allowing claimants to avoid work if they cannot find a "suitable" job or child care will do little to encourage them to overcome such obstacles.
If the Government really believes in promoting self-reliance, there is one simple principle that should underpin all its welfare policies. This is that nobody who works for a wage should be treated any less favourably than anybody who lives on welfare.
These new concessions violate this principle. Consider the changes to the breaching rules.
If an employee fails to turn up for work, they do not get paid (and they may well get sacked).
Yet if a welfare claimant fails to turn up for an appointment with their Job Network provider (a condition of the mutual-obligation agreement that they sign), they will continue to receive their welfare payment even if they offer no good reason for their absence.
One rule for workers; another, much softer, rule for those on welfare.
It is the same with the proposed exemptions.
It is not easy juggling the demands of work and family, but this is a problem all working families have to confront.
If a working parent has difficulty arranging for their children to be looked after, they have somehow to find a solution - they are not exempted from going to work.
Yet welfare parents who say they cannot find suitable child care will now be excused the obligation to work.
Workers have to resolve their problems, welfare recipients are allowed to hide behind theirs.
There is something fundamentally unfair about all this.
What is basically wrong is that lower expectations are being applied to parents on welfare than normally apply to parents who work.
The federal Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Kevin Andrews, says he does not know how many single parents with school-age children will successfully avoid the work requirement as a result of these concessions.
The government hopes it will be fewer than 10 per cent, but the likelihood is that many more than this will wriggle through the loopholes that have now opened up.
Of course it is true that welfare parents with children at school may encounter problems in organising their lives if they are obliged to take up part-time jobs.
But this is true of all of us, including the millions of single and coupled parents who work.
Anticipation of difficulties posed by child care or unsocial hours is no reason to exempt those on welfare from the requirement to work.
It is only when people currently on welfare return to work that practical solutions to obstacles like these will be sought and found, just as they are by all those who currently hold down a job.
Professor Peter Saunders is social research director at The Centre for Independent Studies and the author of Australia's Welfare Habit: And How to Kick It.
