When Samantha Skinner was made redundant in 2012, she thought she would be able to get another job easily. “I always had,” she says.
This time, however, it took two years of “jumping through Centrelink hoops” before the former public servant and administrator landed a role at Costco.
During her time out of work, Skinner, a single parent, had been receiving the parenting payment. Her new job was supposed to be full-time, but the shifts didn’t accommodate her son’s needs, and so Skinner moved to part-time work, supplementing her small salary with a partial parenting payment. It wasn’t a lot, but it was crucial.
Then her son turned eight, and Skinner was bumped off the parenting payment and on to the lower-paid jobseeker.
“From then it was a real struggle,” she says. “I didn’t go out a lot anyway because I was a single mum, but anything entertainment-wise went [away]. I was going over my bills and working out exactly what I didn’t need, or finding a cheaper option. I redid all my electricity and gas.”
Despite her best efforts, Skinner still ended up $15,000 in debt to her parents, which she has not been able to pay back.
Skinner’s story is not unusual. In 2006, John Howard’s Coalition government changed the eligibility requirements for the parenting payment, cutting off single parents – mostly women – from accessing it after their child turned eight, moving them on to jobseeker.
Before the changes, the parenting payment could be made to single parents until their child turned 16. In 2012, Julia Gillard’s Labor government scrapped the grandfathering scheme that applied to people who had been receiving the payment before the changes, pushing them prematurely on to unemployment benefits.
Australia has some of the lowest welfare payments in the OECD. The maximum rate of jobseeker is currently $204 less than the parenting payment for a single person, the latter of which is just over $949 a fortnight.
“Jobseeker is just so inadequate, it’s cruel. It limits our community,” says Terese Edwards, chief executive of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children.
The poverty caused by inadequate income-support payments has “an immediate flow-on effect to the child”, Edwards says.
“What happens is women rack up debt, they head to the payday lenders, they beg and borrow from friends – so you can imagine how their self-esteem is going – because nobody can survive on jobseeker. Even a short period on jobseeker is a slippery slope into a really dark well.”
The government has so far refused to increase jobseeker, despite its own economic inclusion committee recommending it be raised to 90% of the aged pension.
In addition to the necessities she had to forego, Skinner describes the experience of having to tell her brothers and their partners that she could no longer afford to buy her nieces and nephews Christmas or birthday presents. It caused a significant rift in the family, she says.
In March, the women’s economic equality taskforce, headed by Samantha Mostyn, made six “urgent and targeted” recommendations to the federal minister for women, Katy Gallagher, with the first recommendation to expand the eligibility for the parenting payment to women with children over eight.
“This will more appropriately classify single mothers as doing parenting work, rather than as being unemployed,” the letter to the minister said.
Edwards says that the cut-off at age eight never had any evidence or analysis about the benefits to either women or their children to back it up, and successive governments had refused to commission an independent review.
“Eight was always an arbitrary age,” she says. “It made no sense.”
With reports on Tuesday that the government is likely to raise the cut-off age of the child to 12, rather than returning it to 16, Edwards’ fears that another “arbitrary” age would be selected appear to be coming to fruition.
“The discussion thus far, except from the women’s economic equality taskforce, has been about the economic perils and economic consequences and safety aspects, but what gets lost is respect for gendered work, and respect for unpaid care, and respect for women who put their children before themselves, who will throw everything in to raise them,” she says. “That’s why, for me, this is really important.”
Skinner’s son is now 17, and getting ready to go to university. The two of them recently moved back in with Skinner’s mother, to ease the burden of the cost of living and to give her son support in his final years of school.
Skinner, now 54, would prefer not to have been so reliant on her parents over the years, but is acutely aware that she has been fortunate to have their help.
“I am one of the lucky ones,” she says. “I think every single Australian needs to look inside themselves and start supporting people in poverty.”
