The sins of our fathers may be less than our own on Struggle Street

TRADITIONAL societies are inclined to worship their ancestors, but in modern Western cultures such as Australia they are vilified.

The chin-stroking narrative of social progress requires us to look down upon those who lived in less enlightened times and therefore lacked the decency and compassion so conspicuously on display today.

Conveniently, since they are either decrepit or dead, our forebears also lack the right of reply. These sexist, racist, environmental vandals are straw men we construct to demonstrate the achievements of the modern progressive project and how far we have travelled from darkness into light.

National apologies, such as the one delivered by Kevin Rudd to the so-called Stolen Generations, demand no personal humility. On the contrary, they are an exercise in hubris, an opportunity to proclaim our virtue by demonstrating how wretched we feel about atrocities for which we were not responsible.

We magnify the sins of our fathers. With the rhetorical flourish of a 19th-century evangelist, we condemn heartless acts that have left an indelible stain upon the soul of the nation and vow to do nothing in particular, not because we do not feel the pain but because no one likes a lawyers' picnic, except lawyers, of course.

It was the script Julia Gillard followed in March when she apologised on behalf of mothers whose babies were forcibly adopted. Her stated reason was "to shine a light on a dark period of our nation's history". She allocated a modest sum "to redress the shameful mistakes of the past" and resolved "to do all in our power to make sure these practices are never repeated".

In the future, Gillard pledged, the "focus will be on protecting the fundamental rights of children and on the importance of the child's right to know and be cared for by his or her parents".

It is tempting to buy such pretty arguments stitched with the dainty thread of human rights, but we know from experience that they have a tendency to come apart before you get them out of the shop.

What if some kiddies' fundamental rights are best protected by keeping them as far as possible from deadbeat parents? What if Mum and Dad are less willing to give up child welfare payments than heroin?

In the barbarous days before Gough Whitlam, that child might have been adopted coercively, but that, the former prime minister told us, was a "shameful practice" that denied the rights of the mother.

A recent book by Lucy Sullivan puts a historical perspective around these modern dilemmas, drawing from the statistical records to demonstrate that the social reforms of the 1960s and 70s rarely went according to plan.

False Promises plants a subversive, unprogressive thought: might life be better if the state had stayed out of the business of social improvement altogether? The past may have imperfect, but might it have been less imperfect than the world the technocrats have engineered? Indeed, might a future prime minister feel compelled to issue a national apology to the victims of chin-stroking?

For the past 500 years in England, and latterly in Australia, a combination of social stigma and an absence of welfare kept the illegitimacy rate at about 5 per cent.

With the spread of permissive attitudes in the 60s, the rate began to creep up. By the time Whitlam came to power, almost 10 per cent of births occurred outside of marriage. In 1972, 25,652 children were born to unmarried mothers and about 10,000 of those were adopted. In 1973, the Whitlam government introduced sole parents benefit, making it possible for single women to keep their babies and survive.

Today more than a third of births in Australia are ex-nuptial; in 2011, 103,098 new babies had unmarried parents - four times the number before the social engineers became involved.

The modern, caring, sharing gender-non-specific couples of Annandale or Fitzroy and their ambivalence towards marital vows cannot be held solely responsible for the ex-nuptial baby boom that has occurred in the past 40 years. The demographic profile of the single mother makes uncomfortable reading, and indeed it is almost always a mother; fewer than one in five single parents are male.

About 40 per cent of lone parents left school before Year 12, compared with 24 per cent of partnered parents. Single mothers are less likely to work. Four out of 10 are considered low-income families; when both parents live together, the proportion considered low-income families is less than two in 10. Two-thirds of lone mothers live in rented accommodation, and two-thirds rely on welfare payments as their main source of income. There is no glossing over the ugly facts: single parent families have hard and unstable lives. In the mid-80s, a child's chances of being caught in such disadvantageous circumstances was one in 10; today it is one in five.

If Geoff Thompson's recent insightful Four Corners study of welfare recipients is anything to go by, the default position for single parents is resilience. Many show remarkable courage, investing their energy in their children's future.

Yet the evidence from a series of studies suggests that children living with only one biological parent are more likely to suffer assault.

There is evidence too that Australia now has an intergenerational welfare class, albeit small by comparison with other Western countries.

Sullivan claims that the socioeconomic distribution of sole parents benefit invites the conclusion "that many sole parent births were not unintended, and that unmarried motherhood has become something of a profession" among less-skilled women with low wage-earning potential.

It is tempting to agree with Sullivan, who writes: "By the early 1990s it could be declared with confidence that the social theories and associated polices foisted on society by the Progressive Left in the second half of the 20th century were fallacious and destructive."

The result, claims Sullivan, has been "an explosion of cruelty and suffering" of which children are the especial victims. With hindsight, she concludes that it was wrong to allow the state to steal responsibility for charity and social reform from the churches in the second half of the 20th century. It was, says Sullivan, the work of a "middle-class bohemian minority, whose values were at odds with its solid, working-class mainstream".

There is no turning back the clock, and some readers may find Sullivan's social conservatism confronting. Many middle-class women have benefited from freedom to study and embark on their careers that the liberation policies have encouraged.

But at the other end of the scale, on Struggle Street, it is less easy to feel complacent about the present, and easier to feel nostalgic about the past.