The rental market in Australia is at its highest in 12 years, amidst soaring housing prices and still with many struggling with continuous lockdowns. Australia needs a housing correction desperately. Rentals have followed the house price bubble, and are now more than double what they should be. When did $500 a week become normal?!
Single parents with dependent children — eight out of ten of them women — were far more likely than others to lose work at the height of the pandemic and are far more likely to still be out of work now.
Even before COVID, many were in financial distress.
Single parents’ paid hours fell more than 30% in the depths of the crisis in April.
By December, even though there were no significant restrictions in place anywhere in Australia, paid hours for single parents remained 10% lower than they had been a year earlier.
This was at a time when the hours worked by couple parents had recovered quickly, and was higher than a year earlier.
Employment for single parents fell more than 10% between December 2019 and September 2020, and is still 5% lower than in December 2019.
About 50,000 single parents dropped out of the workforce altogether during the first lockdown – 11% of all single parents.
Why was the COVID recession so bad for single parents?
Many single parents had no choice but to stop working
- The loss of formal and informal childcare and the need to manage remote learning meant many single parents had little choice but to stop working.
- Single parents would be over-represented in the job-loss figures because they are over-represented in insecure work.
- Single parents working casual jobs or part time were not deemed “essential workers” therefore were not eligible for schooling or childcare, which meant a job loss
- In August 2019, a quarter of single parents held casual jobs without paid leave. These jobs – many of them in COVID-vulnerable sectors such as retail and hospitality – were among the first to be lost during the lockdowns.
- More than half of single parents in casual jobs had been in those particular jobs for less than a year, meaning the rules made them ineligible for JobKeeper support
The outsized impact of the COVID recession on single parents is even more of a concern when we consider that they were among the most disadvantaged Australians before COVID.
In 2018, a third of single-parent families were living in poverty (compared to less than 10% of couples with dependent children). One fifth of single parents reported that they regularly skipped buying essential items. Incomes for single parents were falling even before the crisis: between 2016 and 2018, when the national median annual income increased from $48,360 to $49,805, the median for single parents fell from $38,000 to $34,000.
Decisions by successive governments have contributed to this outcome.
From 2006, the Howard government’s Welfare to Work program pushed new single parents claiming income support onto the Newstart unemployment benefit – $87 per week less than the Single Parenting Payment – if their youngest was eight or older.
The decision pushed about 20,000 single parents on to a lower payment.
In 2013, the Gillard government pushed another 80,000 single parents onto Newstart by extending the policy to single parents who had been claiming parenting payments before 2006, almost doubling the proportion of single parents in poverty, lifting it to 59%.
In 2016, the Turnbull government launched ParentsNext, with the intention of helping single parents with children as young as six months to return to work.
It included so-called participation plans, under which parents could be stripped of payments unless they performed mandated activities – for example, taking their child to swimming lessons.
A Senate inquiry recommended it “not continue “not continue in its current form”. Instead the 2020 budget set aside $24.7 million to “streamline the successful ParentsNext program”.
The COVID crisis and a series of government decisions before that are condemning hundreds of thousands of Australian children to growing up in poverty, and exacerbate intergenerational disadvantage.
Here are three things governments could do to make a difference:
- Significantly increase in the permanent rate of JobSeeker. This would make a huge difference for unemployed single parents with children aged eight or older who thanks to earlier government decisions have to rely on JobSeeker while they make the transition to work. The Federal Government plans to increase the permanent rate of JobSeeker by $25 a week.
- Make childcare cheaper. This would help single parents get back into paid work sooner and expand opportunities for early education for their children. Cost is the major barrier for families wanting childcare.
- Classify single parents in the workforce as “essential workers” for the purposes of any future lockdowns. This would mean their children could continue going to school and childcare.
These changes would help single parents raising the adults of the future, who are at risk of slipping further behind.
Related Blogs:
Co-Home Ownership with Mortgage Mates
Understanding The Rental Application Process
How To Write An Awesome Rental Application As A Single Parent
