UNDERMINING THE UNDERDOG - Impacts of the new anti-welfare culture on women and workers and what we can do
I’ve been a union member my entire working life – because I’ve worked a few different places that means I’ve been a member of a lot of different unions! I’m currently a member of the ASU, and was active during the equal pay campaign in the community services. And I sit on the branch executive of the ASU.
I’m also one of the Tasmanian representatives of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children, something I’ve done for twenty-one years. I have one child – a daughter who’s now 27.
I’m going to start by giving you some background to women and welfare, then talk about the current situation and the relationship to work. Then we’ll have some discussion. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the room who’s got experience in this area.
Then we’ll have a look at the current campaigns.
Background
We have a long history of households being male-headed and even of women and children being the property of the male. The start of this changing was really only in the late 1700s, at the time of the French Revolution, when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication on the Rights of Women. From there we had the suffragette movement, and Australia was always comparatively advanced when it came to women’s rights to vote, and to own property.
There is an interesting story about when South Australia got the vote for women, one of the first places in the world to do so, in 1894. A conservative politician attempted to scuttle the Bill by amending it to make it what he thought would be outrageous- giving women the right to stand for election as well as to vote. It got through, making South Australia the first jurisdiction in the world allowing women to stand for election. Trade unions were a part of this campaign, once it was for all women and not just propertied women. And the South Australian suffrage also included Aboriginal people. The only part of the legislation not to make it over into the federal legislation in 1902.
Since then of course was the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s. This was an era when social justice movements around the world were making advances. For example, the decolonisation and independence of many prior European colonies, the peace movement opposing the Vietnam War and the ending of the Vietnam War.
It was in this era that women’s rights at work made some gains. Bans on married women working were lifted, equal pay was agreed to in principle. Single parents at this time were divided into two categories – women who were widowed or could prove they were abandoned, could receive the widows pension. Women who gave birth to babies outside of wedlock, or who left their husband, were entitled to nothing. We’ve seen in the media over the last few years the impact on particularly young women in this era, with the forced adoptions. Many single mothers were forced to relinquish their children.
In 1972 the Whitlam government were elected. They were responsive to the progressive social agenda of the era, and extended the widows pension to all sole mothers, and in 1977 to single fathers as well.
Through until the election of the Howard government in 1996, this was as good as it got for single parents. We had a modest income to support us in times out of the workforce. This support phased out as our employment increased. The Child support legislation was brought in to ensure non-residential parents helped financially. Originally this was managed through the tax department, who had authority to collect, which is better than the independent body now that often can’t collect.
Most (65%) of single parents combined parenting with paid work. The remainder generally had very young children, were exiting violent situations, had other tumultuous family circumstances including homelessness, or had disabilities or health problems within the family making work difficult. There is a stereotype of the single mother who ‘bludges’ however I would put the tiny minority of people this applies to, in the category of health problems. The desire to work and the belief that contributing to your community will lead to reward and benefit for yourself and your family is an indicator of good psychological health. If you have given up and believe that there will be no benefit to you of working, I’d say you need the opportunity to heal psychologically, not to be further damaged by being stigmatised.
So progressively up until the Howard government, small gains were made to build up assistance for single parents. Such as the family tax benefit, rather than being a tax concession to the income earner in the family, was made a payment to the spouse. Or in the case of single parents, became something that we actually benefited from for the first time. Or the pensioner education supplement to assist with the cost of study (only $30 a week, but it helps a lot on a low income).
Come 1996, Howard is elected, and around the whole world economic rationalists are successfully pushing for cuts to social spending.
There is a class war going on in the world. It mostly remains invisible, until for example the mining super profits tax when the likes of Twiggy Forest, Gina Rineheart and Clive Palmer came out fighting and openly using language of class war.
The basic measure of this economic war is to look at the GDP and how much of the wealth created is going to those who own the capital invested in the businesses, and how much is going in wages to those who work for a living because they don’t own the capital – us, the working class. The ACTU sometimes publish this info and its very interesting. It shows all over the world an exponential growth in the share of income going to the very elite of the owners of capital. This is what the Occupy protests around the world have been about, and the identification of the “1%”.
So the other objection that this elite have is in paying the taxes which fund things like the single parents pension. Which is why around the world they were supporting governments like the Howard government in Australia, the Thatcher government in the UK and the Reagan government in the US. They weren’t happy with the gains made by the social and labour movements in the 60s and 70s, and prior, and were fighting back hard.
Incidentally, I think it was the political activism and taking to the streets of the 60s that got us those wins.
Current situation and relationship to work
Listening to the brave stories of 10 single mothers makes it clear that the legislative change that shifted single parents onto a reduced level of government support, known as Newstart, when their youngest child turned eight, has not had the intended effect. The vast majority of these women were already working when the change took place, and many were also undertaking further education to improve their future prospects. These sole parents are now stuck in a cycle of working in insecure, part-time, low paid roles struggling to cover the basics. Their education has been put on hold and everyday activities, like school excursions and sport, are out of reach. Their children’s future prospects are suffering and that affects us all.
Current campaigns
Firstly, what I’m going to say is based on the following five points:
Children spending their formative years in poverty is bad. It puts children at risk of poor outcomes for the rest of their lives and is not what a civilised society should do.
Single parenting is a feminist issue. It is a new phenomenon that numbers of men are also single parents, but more than 80% of single parents are women. When you look at the single parents in poverty that number is higher.
We have enough money to provide the social support needed. The government is making decisions to direct it to other places, mostly ensuring that the rich get richer. Australia is ranked 27 out of 33 OECD countries for our spending on welfare, so we are certainly not at the top. And like most OECD countries, we had a brief period in the 1970s when the wealth of the country started being shared more equally. But people like Thatcher and Bush and Fraser ensured that the world quickly returned to what they think of as normal – that is the wealth that we create through our work going to the rich and not everyone else. We need more of that activism of the sixties that led to the sharing of the seventies!
Parenting is also work. It is raising the next generation of humans to run this thing called society.
Paid work should be a right. It is a way of participating meaningfully in our society and it support the family with an income. The vilification of those unable to get work is unacceptable - there are five unemployed for every one job vacancy. We will always have unemployed until we commit to making paid work a right, and we could start doing that right now by getting employers to reduce overtime and employ more people.
Support for those out of a job is vital to maintaining wages for those in a job. I just want to go over this point about support for unemployment and how this relates to industrial relations, because this is a union conference.
When the unemployed are vilified and in poverty, that creates a pool of desperate people. People who are at higher risk of taking jobs that are not safe and don’t pay properly, undermining wages and working conditions that have been hard fought for, just to survive.
It is a tactic of the Joe Hockey’s of the world to divide the working class to make unemployment something to fear. With five times more unemployed than available jobs, we must not fall for it.
If you have hope, ambition, you can look after yourself and your family, then you are lucky! Life has taught you that your effort will be rewarded. You have not been crushed and beaten down. The jobless who appear to not want to work, need hope not vilification.
So, this is what the federal budget has done for single parent families:
And first, I’ll just let you know, just under 20% of Australia’s children, or 852,000 children, live in single parent households. Some of them are doing ok financially, many are struggling, 29% are living in poverty. That is, “unable to enjoy a normal or mainstream life”. They are marginalised. That is 251,000 children. Nearly half the population of Tasmania.
By poverty I mean – heating. Seeing a dentist. School excursions, after school activities. School clothes that are old, worn out, don’t fit. Forget about holidays.
So here’s what the budget did for single parent families:
· Cut FTB when the youngest child turns six - a loss of $54 per week or $3020 per year (replaced with a payment of $750 per child).
· Froze indexation increases to FTB-A and FTB-B for two years – effectively a cut because it doesn’t keep up with CPI
· Removed the earning limit for FTB-A based on the number of children - means working single mothers with more than one child will lose more income.
· Reduced and ended indexing of FTB-A and FTB-B supplements - means a loss of $180 per year (more for families with more than one child).
Remember that FTB stands for Family Tax Benefit. Originally this was a spouse tax rebate, it evolved to a payment to the carer, as partial recognition for their role in child raising. I’m pretty sure that child raising hasn’t become less work.
· Cut the large family supplement to families with three children – which means single mother families with three children will lose $942 per year.
· Changed the indexing of Parenting Payment Single from the more generous Average Weekly Earnings to CPI - will cause payments to lose parity over time because the AWI rises more than CPI
· Froze eligibility thresholds, instead of increasing them as wages increase, means more working single parents will be ineligible for income support.(affects FTB, Childcare benefit, child care rebate, Newstart, Parenting Payments and Youth Allowance)
· Increased the age of eligibility for Newstart and Sickness Allowance impacts on single parents who are young (once their youngest child turns six), and again on single parents whose children are unable to achieve independent income support.
· Increasing the waiting period for all working age payments by one week will make newly separated or unemployed single mothers need to survive for a week with no income.
· eight week loss of payment for job seeker non compliance
· six month non payment period for job seekers under the age of thirty – single parents have not been made exempt from this
· Reduced Jobs, Education and Training Child Care Fee Assistance
· increased Family Day Care fees
· Ceased the Pensioner Education Supplement, Education Entry Payment and Career Advice for Parents – making it virtually impossible for single parents to go on to higher education
· Terminated contributions to State governments for concessions
· Reintroduced the fuel excise tax
· Cut funding to Legal Aid Commissions and Community Legal Centres
· Removed the Schoolkids bonus
· Removed the Low Income Superannuation Contribution
NATSEM did some modelling on what this means for your average single parent family. The average single parent works by the way. About sixty per cent of single parents combine work with parenting, and always have done, despite this round of attacks on single parents that began under Howard.
Access to childcare and housing affordability are also issues. As is the medicare co-payment
Remember this is all off a base of very severe attacks on single parent families during the Howard years – which included moving single parents with school age children onto Newstart, reducing the money we could earn before losing benefits, changes to child support arrangements that disadvantaged women, changes to family law that put women and children experiencing domestic violence more at risk.
A 2013 study by HILDA - Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia – showed that single parents and their children had been left behind in Australia’s decade long period of economic prosperity. Poverty in other types of households decreased, but poverty in single parent households increased. This was largely to do with Howard’s welfare reform of 2006, which unfortunately the Gillard government extended in a bill tabled by Bill Shorten. So the Labor party need some sorting out on this issue too.
The aspects of the budget that impact on young people will also affect single parents, because these measures are going to impact on the children of families that are already struggling.