Sole parents will have a lengthy waiting period before being paid social security under provisions buried in the proposed Parenting Payment Bill currently before parliament. The bill fuses the sole parent pension with the current parenting allowance to form a "parenting payment".
Since its inception in 1973, the sole parent pension has not had a waiting period. Given the nature of child-care, many sole parents have temporary and casual work, and are consequently among the poorest of people receiving social security payments. Under the proposed changes they will be even worse off.
The proposed bill removes current legislation that automatically continues the payment of the sole parent pension whilst a person appeals against a Centrelink decision that they are in a marriage-like relationship.
It also institutes, through an "income maintenance period", lengthy waiting periods before sole parents can receive social security payments. Sole parents with more than $347.80 in savings and annual leave payouts will be forced to use them up before being eligible for the parenting payment.
Imagine this common scenario. Jan has a part-time job in a country town and her husband is exceptionally violent. She leaves her town and job to escape him. The annual leave payout she receives from her employer would, under the proposed parenting payment, mean she has to serve a waiting period before receiving the payment.
Jan would have to care for her child, establish a new home, organise a new school and cover the financial costs of settling in a new town and obtaining child-care without any income support from the government while serving the waiting period. This would cause her extreme hardship and is precisely the reason that the sole parent pension has never had a waiting period.
According to the spokesperson for the Council of Single Mothers and their Children, Anne Callanan, "the income maintenance period will [also] discourage sole parents from returning to the work force" because they would be penalised for working by having to wait for the parenting payment.
[Abridged from the NSW Welfare Rights Centre's Rights Review, December 1997.]