Earnings funding for widows and single parents was made known to public in 1942 by the Curtin Government through the introduction of pensions for widows in 1940 as a campaign election strategy. This form of revenue care was in most suggestion from all corners of the political divide to expand the Commonwealth's involvement in this care since the introduction of the invalid pensions in the period of early 1990s. The structure of this current policy of payment was drawn from the report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Social Security through the directive of the Menzies Government to make inquiries into single parents’ pensions. These payments have been made through the department of Family and Community Services (FACS) for the children and child cares. This presentation provides a brief history of the advancements of these payments and a sequence of modifications to each payment from their introduction to date (Scharpf, " Schmidt).
From the onset the name of the payment was ambiguous. It was designed to assist females whose husbands had passed on and were likely not to engage in employment due to child care responsibilities or age. De facto widows, deserted wives, divorced women and women whose husbands were in institutions for the insane were included but single mothers, wives of prisoners, women deserted by de facto husbands and women who had deserted their husband or agreed to separate were excluded. These exclusions mirrored the influence on legislators of contemporary moral standards as did the requirement that pensioners be of good character and deserving of a pension. The outcome was the exclusion of many single parents from eligibility. An indication of the public attitude to such assistance can be found in the protests from some conservative women's groups about the provision of assistance to de facto widows. Such assistance was condemned as encouraging adultery and undermining the institution of marriage (Esping-Andersen).
In 2003 involvement necessities were introduced for Parenting Payment recipients with a youngest child of high school age. This change was provoked by alarms that parents should be encouraged to retrain and reattach to the workforce. The suitability criteria and participation requirements for Parenting Payment went through major alterations in 2006. As part of a broader set of Welfare to Work reforms, eligibility for new applicants for Parenting Payment was restricted to those with a youngest child aged less than eight years of age if single or six years of age if partnered. Those who would formerly been eligible were now eligible for New start Allowance but with a requirement to look for part-time work only. Participation requirements for those remaining on Parenting Payment were also increased (Hacker, pp.243-260.)
Impacts of implementing the social policy welfare to work
The implementation of the 2006 Welfare policy to Work reforms was that employment increases the wellbeing of single parents and their children, an important dimension of which is subjective wellbeing (Gornick et al, pp.45-70). However, the fiction proposes that while the AWT reforms had an impartial or slightly positive impact on parents’ and children’s wellbeing. The second effect of this policy to work is that parents grew into subject to the responsibility to search for paid job opportunity. They are brought into a new system that is designed to monitor their compliance with these requirements and in some cases also assist them to find paid work. With the introduction of the policy, parents became subject to more intensive monitoring from the income support system. This included more frequent submission checks from Centre link and, for those not previously engaging in a minimum of 30 hours of paid work per fortnight, new obligatory communications with Job Services Australia (O'Connor, Orloff, " Shaver).
Critics to the policy
However much the policy had positive implication to the wellbeing of both parents and children it also had some negative effects. The changes in emotional well-being of parents who had extra caring tasks (such as an elderly parent) or an on-going health problem were predominantly reported an increase in stress or a decreased confidence in their own abilities. This forced some of the single mothers or parents exposed to this social policy to work requirements were commonly forced to give up rewarding and flexible volunteer work in order to engage in unrewarding, poorly paid and unstable employment (Jones, " Jones).
There was also rise in the cases of single parents involved in this policy suffering from the psychological problems for example my aunt who is a widow. Resulting from self-report data that I obtained from large, representative national panel studies, a body whose work has recognized three significant things. Firstly, parents receiving this form of revenue or income support have significantly poorer physical and mental health compared to the general population. Second, an important fraction of the relationship between income support receipt and poorer mental health is due to their experience of financial hardship. Third, regardless of financial or personal circumstances parents experience a decrease in mental health when they transition onto income support (Alcock, " Craig).
Conclusion
Although the new social policy of payment to the single parents has been considered for decades to be a way through which the government of commonwealth it has more harm to the health of the parents and widows. These overweigh negative impacts should not be undermined by the government just because the policy has a long history and as such the legislation that brought forth this policy needs to be reversed for the betterment of peoples living. This is because it is quite evident that most of the eligible members of the policy are running away from it already.
References
O'Connor, J.S., Orloff, A.S. and Shaver, S., 2009. States, markets, families: Gender, liberalism and social policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States. Cambridge University Press.
Jones, M.A. and Jones, M.A., 2006. The Australian welfare state: Evaluating social policy. Allen " Unwin.
Gornick, J.C., Meyers, M.K. and Ross, K.E., 2017. Supporting the employment of mothers: Policy variation across fourteen welfare states. Journal of European social policy, 7(1), pp.45-70.
Alcock, P. and Craig, G. eds., 2009. International Social Policy: Welfare Regimes in the Developed World 2nd Edition. Macmillan International Higher Education.
Hacker, J.S., 2004. Privatizing risk without privatizing the welfare state: The hidden politics of social policy retrenchment in the United States. American Political Science Review, 98(2), pp.243-260.
Esping-Andersen, G. ed., 2016. Welfare states in transition: National adaptations in global economies. Sage.
Scharpf, F.W. and Schmidt, V.A. eds., 2001. Welfare and work in the open economy: volume II: diverse responses to common challenges in twelve countries. OUP Oxford.
