My speech to a rally against welfare cuts, 2014

Family Tax Benefit A changes, and the impact on single parent families

Many of the impacts are similar on couple families who are poor, but single parents get a lot of special treatment by governments, and that’s what I’m going to speak to you about.

These changes are predicted to save the government $18 million over two years.

That’s $18 million worth of basics — school lunches, shoes, school trips, rent, car rego, birthday presents.

The ideology that single parents should work and no-one deserves a hand out, betrays a complete lack of knowledge of what life is like for people who are struggling. In particular it is callous and cruel in what it does to the children who grow up in these families.

These families are going to lose up to $5, 824 per year, but the govt is going to give back $750. That leaves families $5,074 short, out of a total income of about $25,000.

These are families who after the last round of cuts to the parenting payment single, are barely surviving. And they’ll lose 20% of their income.

The cruelty is unbelievable. It is one thing to suffer yourself. It is another to witness a child, who is dependant on you, who has no one else to help them, to watch them suffer, and be helpless to do anything about it.

If there were jobs available it might be a different matter. But a single parent has to work within school hours, and take holidays and student free days off and attend parent teacher meetings and pick up a sick kid from school. It takes a pretty special employer to work around all of that. I don’t see employers being made to employ single parents, I just see single parents being made to go to work.

There’s two questions

a. are the jobs out there? And the answer to that is no, and

b. is a job always what’s best for the family? A parent needs to make the decision about when their family is ready for them to go to work, depending on the needs of that individual family. We don’t know if they are struggling with mental health issues, school issues, battling homelessness. Often these are the consequences of domestic violence, the pieces that a family has to pick up and put back together again before they have the resilience to get out there in the world of full time work.

What I’m giving you is the worst case scenario, because that’s the ones who are vulnerable. Yes there are single parents who are well supported and able to work, who’ve got good childcare, good education, resilient, not dealing with domestic violence and all the fall out from that, no mental health issues or disabilities either for themselves or their children, in the right place at the right time to get a job. It happens. You probably all know a single parent who’s doing fine.

I’m talking about the ones who are trying to combine part time work and parenting, perhaps some study for better opportunities. They are the majority. Just, marginally, ok. Struggling, poor, upset, but with ambition and a plan for the future. These are the families hit hardest by the move to Newstart on Jan 1 this year, and will also suffer with these proposed FTB B changes. More families that were nearly doing ok, will become homeless, crack under the pressure and become families not doing ok.

Is that what we want for this next generation of children? Yes there might be some single parents who abuse benefits. But are we so fixated on “getting” them that we are going to make all other families suffer? Can we not tolerate a little bit of possible, potential abuse of the system in order to provide a safety net for the vast majority who we would deem worthy. Or must we wreck it for everyone?