The Australian government is under pressure to bring forward the start date for one of its key welfare budget measures to prevent more than 8,000 single parents falling into further poverty during the waiting period.
Expanding the eligibility for the single parenting payment was one of Labor’s flagship announcements in this year’s budget. The payment currently expires when the youngest child of a single parent turns eight, with the parent moving on to jobseeker, which is worth $204 less per fortnight than the parenting payment.
On 20 September, eligibility for the single parenting payment will extend to when the youngest child turns 14. The bill to amend the relevant social services legislation was introduced to parliament last week.
But in the interim, 8,140 single parents will find themselves knocked on to jobseeker when their youngest turns eight, only to requalify for the more generous payment in September, according to data supplied by the Department of Social Services during Senate estimates this week.
The Greens senator Janet Rice said it was “heartless” not to make an interim provision for these families, given “how impossible it is to live on jobseeker”.
“We know that the consequences for those over 8,000 families are going to be dire,” Rice told Guardian Australia. “You will have parents who will be only eating a meal a day, you will have them being in rent arrears and being threatened with eviction from their houses, you will have kids going hungry. It’s just heartless.”
Australia has some of the lowest welfare payments in the OECD. While the government has announced it will raise the rate of jobseeker by $40 per fortnight, those changes won’t come into effect until September either, and will still leave payments well below the Henderson poverty line of $88 a day.
Rice called for the eligibility changes to be brought forward to 1 July and for grants or backpay to be made available to those parents who would fall out of eligibility during the transition period.
Deborah Carrapett, 47, is one of them. Her youngest son turned eight on 13 May. “The payment was cut off the day before,” she told Guardian Australia.
Carrapett, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, had been notified of an appointment with Centrelink before the cut-off date, but it was at the same time as her oncology appointment, so she went in a week later instead.
As a consequence, her payments were cut off entirely. She was then told she had to make a whole new claim to go on to jobseeker, including proving all over again that she was not in a relationship. It has been three weeks since she was last paid.
“It’s just unnecessary stress,” Carrapett said. “It wastes my time, it wastes my children’s time. I have to find a babysitter – they don’t sit still for two hours while you’re in a government office. It’s stressful and annoying and frustrating and unnecessary. Their staff could be doing more productive stuff than processing and reprocessing applications.”
The independent ACT senator David Pocock took aim at the government’s assurances that there would be a smooth transition process for parents from one payment to another, saying such assurances were “proving to be largely hollow”.
“Rather than losing more than $200 a fortnight during what we were told would be a ‘seamless automated transition’, we are now hearing reports of single parents being left with no income at all as they spend weeks trying to get on to jobseeker.
“It’s disappointing that, when so many Australians are doing it tough, there aren’t plans in place to ensure the more than 8,000 single parents and their children don’t face unnecessary additional financial hardship. The department has confirmed that they are already working on implementing the changes and were able to deliver even bigger change in just four weeks during the pandemic. I urge the government to ensure that there is a more seamless transition for single parents.”
On Wednesday in the House of Representatives, the independent MP Kylea Tink moved an amendment to the welfare legislation to bring forward the start date of the changes to 1 July, saying many families would “fall through administrative cracks” on the current timeline and be hit with a huge and avoidable administrative burden.
“Life as a parent and a worker is hard enough. We don’t need further complication,” Tink said. “I don’t think this is an efficient or fair way of implementing the change, and therefore I’m encouraging the minister to consider changing the commencement date or implementing an interim measure for these parents.”
The minister for social services, Amanda Rishworth, said the measures were designed to take effect as soon as practicable, but were subject to the legislation passing parliament.
“In addition, Services Australia also needs time to implement the ICT, systems and processes changes required to successfully deliver these measures. Implementing new policies requires complex coding, staff training on new programs and services, online upgrades, and many other layers of service delivery to get the rollout right,” Rishworth said.
“An implementation date of September 20 was the date advised to us that would best enable all these processes to occur.”
