Single mothers copping roughest deal

IN the past decade there has been a huge push by policymakers of both ideological complexions to get more women into the workforce.

But no one has a harder time getting back into the workforce and, with the exception of the disabled, is likelier to suffer exploitation than single mothers.

Last year when I tackled then employment minister Joe Hockey about the rights of women under Work Choices - which meant few choices for most of them - Hockey tellingly remarked in exasperation, "Look, Angela, the country is running out of workers."

That statement of the bleeding obvious didn't make people feel any better about having their rights trampled on, as the election result last year showed.

The present Government has simply adjusted the rhetoric a bit with its heavy-handed "working family" mantra. For the Left, getting more women back into the workforce is not just a practical necessity. Paid work has always been a sort of feminist ideological nirvana. The simplistic reasoning of the leftie feminist is that there should be more government-subsidised child care and presto, the obstacles to paid work would disappear. There is scant acknowledgment that a woman's ability to join the workforce is often limited by many factors, not just her access to outside child care. Indeed, research since the early 1990s on preferences tells us that most women do not think it is right or good for anyone else to look after their children. This is particularly the case for single mothers.

For the Right and the Left, the woman who sees her main job as looking after her children has become an all but invisible relic of a past when we could afford, as some say, to have mothers at home. Few are held in more contempt than those living off the public purse who seemingly don't want to work, even though it depends on what you define as work. Women who are single mothers have rather a lot of work to do. But they still have to find work when their youngest child is in primary school. Remember, most of these women were formerly not single: they and the children have gone through the trauma of a marriage breakdown. So it is no wonder so many of them are feeling the strain and, as a result, are not moving into the workforce but on to the Disability Support Pension.

Few commentators have noticed that along with the push to get single mothers back into the workforce, there has been a huge rise in the number of women on the disability pension. According to labour market economist Bob Gregory, this began during the Keating period. A crackdown on one kind of welfare payment fed a rise in another. Previously the disability pension formed a halfway house between the dole and the age pension. In the '80s and early '90s, it was men who could not find work or were too old, which explained the jump in the disability pension. More recently it is women who have been moved on to the disability pension after being counted elsewhere in the system before 1995. So pension shifting is part of this story.

However, this does not entirely explain the huge numbers of women on the disability pension who have moved on to it in the past eight years. In this time, the total with disability pensions grew by 129,000.

The number of men on the disability pension grew just 25,000 in that period, an 8 per cent increase. This included only about 800 new skeletal injuries; that is, bad backs, which used to account for most disabled pensioners. The biggest increase for men was psychological causes, up about 40 per cent, and intellectual, up from a low base by about 30 per cent.

But the real increase in the disability pension was among women. Female disability pensioners grew by 100,000, which was about four-fifths of the total increase and a rise of 44 per cent. While there was a rise in women's bad backs as a reason, the biggest percentage increase, and also the biggest numerical increase in DSPs, was among women claiming psychological causes.

Why? Well perhaps because they are psychologically stressed. Even spinal problems, particularly in women, are exacerbated by stress. Many women simply cannot live on the parenting payments and the pressure of finding work with young children and teenagers is too great.

Instead of finding self-sufficiency in the workforce, more single mothers are joining the ranks of the least employable group of all, the disabled.

This would mean that the social-political push to put more women into the workforce, particularly single mothers of young children, is increasing the number of applicants and approvals for disability pensions on psychiatric grounds. So we are increasing disability pension numbers by trying to force mothers into the workforce by cutting off their supporting parents' benefits (quite arbitrarily) when their children are still truly dependent.

Is this good policy? I don't think so. It's not saving us much and is putting these women on to permanent welfare, the thing governments want to avoid. Even compared with keeping mothers on the old supporting mothers' payments, this doesn't look like such a good idea because it does the opposite of what the policy intends, which is to encourage more mothers to work. But the disability pension is certainly a better, more secure income than the parenting payment and subject to less stringent tests.

The workforce participation taskforce chaired by Patricia Faulkner has recommended a softening of the welfare to work provisions for single mothers. The report for Employment Participation Minister Brendan O'Connor has called for relaxation of the rules for single mothers in their job search requirements so that more consideration can be given for difficulties they encounter with the care of their children while looking for employment. The report also has recommended that the definition of a large family be more flexible and include secondary school children.

But the rise of women on the disability pension is a fundamental social problem. Just as we once had this problem with older men coming out of the Keating recession, we now have it with relatively young women. It is like bailing a boat with a bucket with a hole in it. And this Government doesn't have any more clues than the previous one about what to do because it, like the previous government, is determined to push single mothers into work. Ultimately the issue is whether we should be addressing the skills shortage by forcing mothers, even single mothers, into the workforce.