As the government weighs up whether to extend single parenting payments to parents of children older than the present cutoff age of eight in this week’s budget, new information has come to light about what happened when the rules were tightened in 2013.
When then-Treasurer Peter Costello reduced the cutoff age from 16 in 2006, forcing single parents who hadn’t found work onto (much lower) unemployment benefits, he said it would “help them with higher incomes and better participation in mainstream economic life”.
A few years later when then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced plans to remove a loophole that had allowed some parents with children over eight to continue receiving the payments, her treasurer Wayne Swan said it would “encourage re-entry into the workforce”.
