At the heart of setting the age of the qualifying child for Parenting Payment (PP) is the question: when should a sole parent cease to be treated as a person whose primary responsibility is to care for children and more like a person seeking paid work? Sole parents are, due to the absence of a partner, responsible for both caregiving and earning income.
The financial wellbeing of sole parent families is directly linked to the age of their youngest child because Australia’s categorical income support system uses that criterion to determine which Social Security payment a sole parent receives.
The age of the youngest child for Social Security payments on the basis of sole parenting has changed seven times since the Commonwealth Government began paying income support to widows in 1942 (and the name of the payment has changed six times). For the first 45 years, in the expansionary stage of the welfare state, the age of the qualifying child incrementally increased from 16 to encompass dependent full-time students up to the age of 18, then 21, and finally 24. In 1987, however, the contraction of the welfare state began and the age of the qualifying child reverted to 16, and is now 8 years.
Once a youngest child has its eighth birthday, a sole parent loses PP, and instead is paid the penurious JobSeeker Payment (JSP) for unemployed people. From 20 September 2023, about 57,000 sole parents on JSP (91 per cent women) and 110,000 children will fare much better due to the Albanese Government’s 2023/24 Budget decision to raise the age of the qualifying child for Parenting Payment (PP) to 14 years of age. These sole parents will immediately receive an extra $176.90 a fortnight, and be able to earn substantially more income before losing their payment.
Raising the age of the qualifying child to 14 marks a hiatus in sole parents being easy targets for governments attempting to balance budgets by reducing Social Security expenditure. This began with the Hawke Labor Government’s May 1987 Economic Statement, which cut the age of the qualifying child for sole parents on pensions from 24 to 16 years, with four months’ notice to the affected parents. Some of these sole parents were eligible for other pensions such as Invalid Pension, but life became tougher for the many who were put onto lower unemployment payments.
Winding the clock back 45 years to the introduction of Widow’s Pension didn’t go far enough for the Department of Finance though. During the 1990s when I worked in the Canberra public service on income support policy, the Budget argy-bargy became a predictable contest in which the Department of Finance submitted proposals year after year to slash the age of the qualifying child for sole parents’ pension from 16 to 12, or 6 years of age. The Department of Social Security vigorously opposed it and briefed the Minister to do likewise; these efforts to make sole parents worse off were successfully resisted.
Until 2006 that is, when the Howard Government lopped another eight years off the age of the qualifying child for new applicants for PP as part of its Welfare to Work agenda. The Gillard Government finished the job with its 2012 Budget decision to remove the ‘saved’ sole parents from PP and put them onto unemployment payments in the name of equity (with substantial savings), making the age of the qualifying child 8 years for all sole parents.
In deciding to raise the age of the qualifying child, the Albanese Government endorsed the first priority of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce for “reinstatement of the Parenting Payment (Single) for women with children over eight” in recognition that they are not unemployed, but are engaged in parenting.
Senator Katy Gallagher, a former sole parent, and now Minister for Women and Minister for Finance was interviewed on 7am on Budget Day and explained the Government’s reasons for choosing 14 and not 16 as the right age by saying it’s “affordable and sustainable”, whereas 16 would be too costly. She also said 14 is an age at which a child is more independent, “settled in high school, … considering getting (their) own job.”
A child’s growing independence may increase their parent’s availability to work, but it doesn’t alter the parent’s need for an adequate and secure income. The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children shows that children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development is compromised by living in poverty, as children in sole parent families (especially those on Social Security payments) are more likely to be.
Although parents do increase their labour force participation as their children get older, sole mothers lag behind other mothers irrespective of the age of their youngest child (even those with children aged 15-24). This highlights that sole parents face greater barriers to work, with the age of the youngest child being only one barrier, and a crude marker for gauging availability to work. It takes no account of the presence of children with disabilities or special needs, the number of children, twins or multiple births, geographical location, availability of family support, and so forth.
Raising the age of the qualifying child to 14 will enable parents to make the choice about the balance between parenting and paid work that suits them and their particular circumstances. However, the chosen age of 14 is arbitrary: it doesn’t correspond to the age at which children leave school, learn to drive, legally become adults, or are eligible for Social Security payments in their own right.
Without a more rigorous and defensible rationale for the new policy on the age of the qualifying child for Parenting Payment, it is susceptible to being a revolving target for any Government desperately seeking Budget savings or hellbent ideologically on getting sole parents off welfare and into paid work. History suggests that the enhanced wellbeing of sole parent families could be short-lived.
Fiona Carberry
Fiona Carberry was formerly Director of Sole Parent Policy, and Parenting Policy sections from 1995-98 in the Department of Social Security (DSS). She also worked in the Social Policy Divisions of DSS and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 1991-1994. She has a Master of Arts (Public Policy) from the University of Melbourne.