Ideas@TheCentre
Karate Line
How are welfare payments supposed to help people? The commonsense answer is that they help people pay for the basics of life, including food, shelter and transport, to name a few. But the recent debate over changes to the Parenting Payment suggests that welfare payments are intended to provide much more.
The changes, which came into effect from 1 January this year, have pushed tens of thousands of single parents of school aged children off Parenting Payment (which pays up to $663.70 a fortnight) and onto the less generous Newstart Allowance (up to $533 per fortnight). These payments do not include the hundreds of dollars that single parents also receive through family tax benefits or the schoolkids bonus.
The policy will generate savings to taxpayers of more than $700 million over four years and provide an additional incentive for single parents to work more. For some, it appears to be working. This article in The Age reports the situation of one parent choosing to work 20 hours a week more so she can pay for her kid’s karate lessons.
Other parents are choosing to cut expenditure. One affected parent complains the changes forced her to pull her son out of ‘footy, guitar lessons, swimming lessons and scouts this year.’ Claims along these lines have made ample fodder for human interest stories and the adequacy of welfare payments more generally.
The debate goes to the heart of the role of welfare payments. Are they to help some people maintain a lifestyle they have come to enjoy, or are they to help prevent people from going hungry and without shelter?
I think it is the latter, but it seems that for some, welfare payments are no longer about keeping people above the poverty line by providing basic support, but about keeping them above a ‘karate line’ — a line at which they can afford to do the things that they want to do while still receiving welfare payments — like sending a child to karate.
Andrew Baker is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies.
