Couples’ hard choice: money or relationship
If the Government is trying to break up relationships and keep us single, isolated and lonely, it could hardly have designed a more effective social security system than the current one. If you lose your job and have a partner in paid full-time work, your Jobseeker entitlement is kore, zero, zilch, zip. Nothing. You and your partner are both supposed to be able to live on one wage, even if it’s the minimum wage.
The income support available for people in relationships is even worse than the dire levels the Government imposes on single people. If you have kids, you may get family tax credits, and if you’re ‘‘lucky’’ (i.e. without savings but still paying high rent), you may get some help with housing costs, but only if you meet strict criteria.
It is assumed that your partner will take all financial responsibility for you, even though that’s probably fiscally impossible. It’s assumed you won’t feel guilty about this, and that your partner won’t feel resentment while you’re both under the toxic stress of having to pay penalty fees on your power bills or sell your home.
Here at Auckland Women’s Centre, we know of couples who can’t afford to keep living together so they separate. Thus, in one fell swoop, the Government causes heartbreak and worsens the housing crisis.
Meanwhile, many sole parents (mostly women) are forced to forgo the potential loving support of a partner, or risk not meeting their children’s basic needs.
If you are supported by a benefit and are dating, you carry the humiliating task of having to inform your potential partner that at any given point the Government may oblige them to completely support you financially. If you have children, they will be needing to support them too.
When mums are forced to rely on a (new) partner in paid work for most of their family’s income, it can cause or intensify a relationship’s power imbalance, particularly when the safety and wellbeing of children are at stake. In our patriarchal society where economic scales are already tipped in favour of men, the Government makes women and their children even more vulnerable to financial control and coercion.
In all these cases, you have gone from a financially independent individual with agency and control over your own money, to being someone needing to go, cap in hand, to your spouse.
Financial independence is crucial when our bank balances control our access to everything. Many people today choose to keep their finances separate from their partners: their relationships are supportive, physical, and loving – but not financial. At least not until the Government steps in like the worst third wheel and forces partners into fiscal bed with each other without their consent.
This policy is stuck in the 1930s when it was written. The law doesn’t know anything about feminism, and it assumes that all us little women are in the home. It assumes women are financially dependent on men. The history is forgotten but the discrimination remains.
The impacts are also racist: Ma¯ ori and Pacific wha¯ nau are more likely than others to be forced into a position where they need income support due to systems beyond the control of individuals: colonisation, structural racism and migrant worker exploitation.
The income support available for people in relationships is even worse than the dire levels the Government imposes on single people.
There are other circumstances that can make the situations above even harder. If you are living with a disability, you may be unable to work and face social isolation, accessibility challenges or stigma. You may rely on your partner for help with practical tasks, and on top of this, the Government says you must ask your partner to support you financially. In families where a disabled child needs extra care and one parent (often the mother) is unable to work, there is already a huge strain on relationships without the financial pressure to be supported by a working partner.
The right to individual entitlement is about women’s right to be financially independent. It’s also about women’s right to partnership and marriage. That right is currently denied to many New Zealanders due to policies that discriminate on the basis of income, parenthood, gender and ethnicity.
It is time to scrap this unfair policy that was designed over 80 years ago. The Greens’ new income support policy would do that, and I hope we’ll see other parties also addressing this important issue in their announcements to come.
Leonie Morris has a Diploma in Social Work and an MA in Social Policy.