Single mothers an easy target

By LINLEY BONIFACE

The National Party has many faults, but even its harshest critics could not accuse it of a surfeit of imagination.

Former leader Don Brash attempted to win middle New Zealand's votes by adopting the staggeringly unoriginal tactic of attacking brown people, while current incumbent John Key has now had a pop at the party's tried-and-trusted preferred villain – single mothers.

Despite the fact that National has yet to reveal its plans for most of the major policy areas, Mr Key unveiled the party's policy on social welfare benefits last week with what was, for him, an unprecedented degree of frankness.

Mr Key has previously described mothers on the domestic purposes benefit as "breeding for a business", and this time he made it clear National would have no truck with these shiftless baby farmers if it came to power. Single parents – part of an "emerging underclass" – would, once their youngest child turned six, be required to spend at least 15 hours a week in paid work, looking for paid work or training for paid work.

His speech left listeners in no doubt as to the respective value Mr Key places on work, and on parenting.

"For most people, the real opportunity to improve their lives, and the lives of their children, is through work," Mr Key said. "And we all prosper, and society prospers, by having fewer people languishing on the fringes, and more of us productively engaged in our communities."

Curious – I would have thought the real opportunity people have to improve the lives of their children is not through working, but through being a good parent.

And I would also have thought that raising happy, healthy children would be enough of an accomplishment for parents to consider themselves "productively engaged" in the community, rather than feeling compelled to prove themselves through work. But apparently not.

According to Mr Key, only work has value; according to Mr Key, those who raise children on a benefit – no matter how good a job they're doing of it – are merely "languishing on the fringes" of society.

Given New Zealand's appalling levels of child abuse, I find this devaluing of parenthood rather sickening.

Earlier this year, a report by the Salvation Army found that the Government's welfare benefit reform had already succeeding in enticing single parents back into work – but, in some cases, at the expense of children.

The number of early childhood education places in the poorer suburbs where many single parents live is barely half the national average.

THE Sallies asked the obvious question: who, precisely, is looking after these children while their parents are working?

Christine Todd, an Auckland University researcher, recently wrote an illuminating article about her research into representations of single mothers on the DPB.

Most were "time-poor" from juggling multiple roles, and could only find work that was low status and poorly paid. Combining parenting and paid work was "extremely difficult and exhausting".

Almost half suffered poor mental and physical health because of the stress of raising children alone, and many reported feelings of inadequacy, stigma, failure and low-self-esteem as a result of being constantly depicted as bludgers and second- class citizens.

And yet – here's the cheery news – the women "argued that mothering was the most important job in the world, and their children were better adjusted and equipped because of their conscientious and devoted parenting".

After tax, a single parent on the DPB gets $263.78 a week. That's not going to pay for a whole lot of rent, food, electricity, petrol, washing machine repairs, shoes, school fees, warm coats or trips to the doctor. Almost half of children in single-parent households are living in poverty.

Unsurprisingly, few girls aspire to single motherhood. Of those who do end up being single mothers, most desperately want to claw their way out of the poverty trap. This isn't in dispute: of the 38,400 single parents with kids aged over six on the DPB, less than 4000 of them have been on the benefit for more than 10 years.

I wonder why Mr Key implied there were vast numbers of single parents screwing the system because of their sense of "permanent entitlement", when the statistics clearly show this isn't the case. Of course, single parents are an easy target in an election year. And who cares what happens to them, or to their kids? Because, as we all know, parenting doesn't matter.