Unable to afford fruit or the internet for kids' homework: the reality of single motherhood in Australia
What is the cost of caring? Sadly, it still amounts to a great deal for women in Australia today, where far too many end up paying the price through a lifetime trapped in poverty.
Disturbingly, in our wealthy country, 37% of single mothers and their children are living in poverty.
Our new analysis with the University of New South Wales, released on Thursday, exposes the disproportionate impact of poverty on households in which women are the main income earners, including single-parent families. These households are twice as likely to live in poverty as those in which men are the main income earners (19% and 10%, respectively), with the gap even higher when you look just at households with children (at 23% and 10% respectively).
This reflects the persistent fact that most caring work falls on women, and how hard it is to combine unpaid care and careers. With childcare usually so expensive, more women are employed part-time rather than full-time, and many with preschool-aged children are caring for them full-time. Even today, many women still have to depend on men’s earnings, and are a divorce or break-up away from poverty.
The other reason is the low levels of income support available to families out of paid work. A single parent with two preschool-aged children relying fully on income support receives around $630 a week. That falls to $580 when the youngest child reaches eight years of age and the parent, almost always a mother, has to transfer to the lower jobseeker (formerly Newstart) payment.
Our research with UNSW was carried out before Cvoid-19 began threatening lives and livelihoods here in Australia. The early indications are that women, especially those with unpaid caring responsibilities, will disproportionately carry the cost of this crisis for years to come. This is not unlike what happened in the aftermath of the GFC – a crisis created almost exclusively by wealthy men.
As our report shows, before Covid-19, poverty in Australia, especially for single mothers and their children, was unacceptably high. Without government action, it will get even worse, entrenching gender inequality and leaving the children of single mums to face even greater challenges as they grow up, despite the efforts of their mothers to give them the best opportunities.
Our report quotes single mother Rebecca who says that despite gaining qualifications in business administration, “there are just no employers willing to take a chance” on her. She cannot afford fruit and vegetables, warm clothing or internet for her son’s grade-eight homework. “I can’t give him the basics that others have, which has led to bullying and mental health issues for him.”
Rebecca had been looking for paid work for two years.
Now, we’re dealing with unemployment levels we haven’t seen for at least 25 years. The harsh reality is that when the job market gets more competitive, those with caring responsibilities find it harder to get any, or enough, paid work.
We can rebuild from the crisis without leaving people behind, trapped in poverty. For single mums and their children especially, income support and childcare are the key government lifelines that can get them through.
Through this crisis the government has now recognised that the cruel rate of Newstart was unliveable. Single mothers whose youngest children were over eight years of age could not feed their families properly on the old Newstart rate. After it was effectively doubled through the coronavirus supplement, we’re hearing from single mothers that they’ve been able to do things like replace their broken fridge, get their kids school supplies and pay off electricity bill debts. If the government goes ahead with its original plan of cutting the new jobseeker payment by half – back to the old Newstart rate – the impact would be brutal.
Secondly, early education and care must be both affordable and accessible. The “activity test” requiring women to be employed, or seeking employment, to get more than 12 hours a week of subsidised childcare, will not work in crisis recovery and it has never worked for children’s education.
Women across the country breathed a collective sigh of relief on hearing the news of free childcare. No doubt quite a few tears of relief were shed too. Any “snap back” to unaffordable childcare costs and the unfair activity test will disproportionately harm women, whose incomes have already suffered through the pandemic.
Coming out of this crisis, the government must finally get the settings right on income support and childcare so that we can rebuild into a society where being a woman, and caring for children, isn’t a precursor to poverty.
• Jacqueline Phillips is the acting CEO and director of policy at the Australian Council of Social Service