Media bash 'single mums'
By Karen Fletcher
Brisbane GP Judy Stokes has shot to media super-stardom in Queensland following her letter to the Courier-Mail calling for single mothers to be forced to give up their children for adoption after the first child.
This "Pauline Hanson with a medical degree" has hit on a sure-fire target for the politics of hate and scapegoating: those selfish women who bring up the next generation by themselves.
Stokes' outburst is not original. Single mothers have been pilloried many times before. But the vehemence of the attack, and the alacrity with which it has been taken up by every commercial media outlet, have left many gasping.
It seems incredible that these suggestions could be canvassed when we have just learned of the thousands of Aboriginal and Islander families who still struggle with the pain resulting from the state's forced separation of parent and child.
Stories are emerging, too, of the many non-indigenous women who had their babies stolen from them by nuns and social workers in charitable homes for "unmarried mothers" as late as the 1970s.
The war on single mothers, like the entire offensive against people's right to social security and public support over the past couple of decades, is not confined to Queensland, or even to Australia.
In the US, Democrat President Bill Clinton's "reforms" cut off welfare entitlements after two years, and many states provide only a one-way ticket across their state border for "welfare mothers". The introduction of "parenting licences" has been seriously discussed in several US legislatures.
In Britain, despite strong opposition from within his own party, Labour PM Tony Blair is pushing ahead with cuts to benefits for single mothers, pledging to force them back to work (by which he means "real work", not the unpaid work of child rearing).
In order to make savage cuts to the share of the economic pie consumed by ordinary people (in the form of wages or welfare entitlements), the ruling class in these countries is inciting working people to hatred against their own sisters, mothers, aunts, daughters, wives and girlfriends.
They are calling on "us" to blame "them" for everything from falling wages and tax increases to the horrific incidents of child abuse and murder which stare at us from the newspaper every morning.
Stokes says her comments were prompted by her concern over recent reports of child abuse, including a particularly distressing case where a toddler was horribly tortured while in the custody of his mother and her partner in a Queensland caravan park.
Whilst the harrowing details of this incident snaked over metres of press clippings and hours of talkback, less coverage was given to reports that this child had been taken to a local hospital at least once by his mother, with severe symptoms of mistreatment, yet nothing was done until a neighbour called the police.
Where are the headlines and "in-depth reports" about hospital closures and understaffing, inadequate treatment, and lack of child health centres, community nurses, refuges, community mental health programs and young parents' support groups?
The big business media will not print such stories since this would direct the blame to where it really belongs: to them. Where did the money for community health programs go? It went into tax cuts, concessions, rebates and subsidies for big business.
In a follow-up article on January 26 headlined "Half all single mum pensions 'claimed illegally'", the Courier-Mail quoted an "estimate" by the National Tax and Accountants Association president, Ray Regan, that "half the $5 billion paid to single mothers by the government every year was claimed illegally".
Five paragraphs into the article, Regan admitted that illegal claims by single mothers were only a "drop in the bucket" compared to the billions of dollars rorted from the tax system by big corporations. Single mums still got the headline.
The lot of a single mother is hard and thankless. Seriously underpaid and overworked, she is also deprived of the respect which should be accorded to one who does a difficult and essential job. Rather than respect, she is subjected to moral censure, sexist degradation and threats to take away her children.
Every time there is an economic downturn, she will be blamed for child murder and generally endangering human civilisation.
Judy Stokes and Pauline Hanson are among the "shock troops" of political reaction in Australia. They express their views in crude and emotional terms, with no concern for facts or evidence, and with great empathy for ordinary people's need to find someone to blame for their increasing insecurity, suffering and discontent.
The Howard government is not quite so free to ignore the facts. It can't yet afford to force single parents off the pension into non-existent jobs and imaginary child-care arrangements. The shifting of single mothers from the pension to the dole would massively increase the unemployment rate.
Statements from the office of the minister for social security, Jocelyn Newman, pointing out that the proportion of "unmarried mothers" on the pension has actually decreased from 11% to 3% since 1976, indicate that she does not yet see the need for the government to engage directly in single-mother bashing.
Nevertheless, the way must be smoothed for the government's proposed Parenting Payment Bill, which reduces the support available to single parents (see accompanying article).
This task, of softening up public opinion and undermining parents' expectations and demands for support from society in bringing up children, is being done for the government by Judy Stokes and her rather efficient media secretaries, Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer.