Ideas@TheCentre
Long-term welfare detrimental to kids, says new report
Welfare campaigners this week lobbied the government to lift unemployment benefits, after the OECD revealed that more than half the jobless households in Australia are ‘poor’: with incomes less than half of the median.
But acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard did not take the bait, standing by the government’s decision not to increase unemployment benefits and payments for sole parents in this year’s budget.
Gillard was right to stay firm. More work, not more welfare, is what these families need to improve their economic situation and the well-being of their children.
One in eight kids now lives in a jobless household. Most of us instinctively appreciate that the striking disadvantage they face extends well beyond the purely economic.
Fairfax’s Adele Horin reported yesterday on new research from the Youth in Focus study released at the Australian Conference of Economists this week. It highlights just how destructive welfare and parental joblessness is for these kids.
By 18, 65% of kids whose parents have never been on welfare are studying, with about 30% at university. Just over 25% suffer from asthma.
In comparison, only 40% of the kids whose parents had a spell on welfare were in education, with just 12% attending university. Almost 45% suffer asthma.
This chasm in health and education outcomes is mirrored by differences in school attendance, drug use, and mental illnesses such as depression, with kids from the welfare families doing worse on each score.
Noel Pearson has long argued that the pernicious effects of welfare dependence go well beyond having a low income. ‘Unemployment has other, more serious, effects that cannot be ameliorated, and indeed may be exacerbated, by long-term income support. These effects include psychological harm, loss of motivation, skills and self-confidence, an increase in sickness and the disruption of family and social life,’ he says.
We now have an abundance of evidence of the devastating effect of long-term welfare dependence. If welfare rights campaigners who this week attacked the government really want to improve the lives of those they claim to help, they could start by recognising that making welfare more attractive will only intensify their problems.
Jessica Brown is a Policy Analyst at CIS and author of Breaking the Cycle of Family Joblessness.
