Labor backbenchers are preparing an eleventh-hour intervention in an effort to stop the Federal Government's plan to significantly curtail single parenting payments.

The plan would move single parents onto the lower unemployment payment when their youngest child turns eight.

Some MPs are set to argue against the plan at today's Labor caucus meeting, before Parliament debates the bill.

The changes, first revealed in this year's budget forecast in May, should net almost $700 million in savings over the forward estimates.

The Government has consistently argued the changes will encourage single parents back into the workforce and provide less incentive for them to stay on welfare.

Employment Minister Bill Shorten says the Government will provide workplace training programs to help single parents but Greens Senator Rachel Siewert says that is not a realistic substitute.

"What does it mean about our economy if in order to balance our budget we have to drop 150,000 single parents who are doing it tough into poverty?" Senator Siewert said.

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon says two parliamentary committees have recommended the legislation be put off until more is known about whether families could survive on the dole.

"Let's proceed with caution and this mania that the Government has to have a budget surplus at all costs I think is quite dangerous," he said.

"We need to look at the consequences of budget cuts, we need to look at these sorts of savings measures, if in fact they will lead to the sorts of savings that are predicted and whether it will cause a greater dislocation in some other sector of the community."

Backbench unrest

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There is also growing dissent within Labor ranks.

Labor senator and left faction convenor Doug Cameron says he will be fighting to change his Government's mind when caucus meets.

"I don't see any evidence that forcing people into poverty, forcing them onto charity gives them a better incentive for a job," he said.

"I just think it's a crazy proposition. To run these arguments without any evidence and I've seen no evidence."

However, the outspoken senator says if caucus ploughs on with the plan, he will toe the line.

"I'm a team player, I take up the arguments on issues that are important to me within the caucus and I am then bound by the outcomes of caucus," he said.

"But caucus has to be a robust forum for ideas, debate and to sort differences out.

"And forcing people into poverty and charity I don't think is the Labor way."

A spokesman for the Opposition says despite harbouring concerns about the timing of the legislation the Coalition will not oppose the Government's plan.

Under the proposal, single parents will start losing payments in January just before the new school year begins.

'On the street'

Nicole, a single mum with a seven-year-old daughter who relies on the sole parenting payment, says without the parenting payment she would struggle to keep a roof over her head.

She says politicians do not know what it is like to live on a shoestring.

"Without the parenting payment we would be on the street," she said.

"Life is pretty tough and precarious, so I'm quite outraged about the Government decisions to be throwing single parents like me onto the dole, when we are experiencing a lot of stress and pressure already and doing the best that we can."

Nicole is preparing for harder times ahead because if new Government legislation is passed, when her daughter turns eight, she will be moved onto the lower unemployment benefit.

"I'm going to have to be humiliated and approach the school and say, 'look, I simply can't pay for this anymore because I'm now not a parent and I'm being treated like I'm a person without children on the dole'.

"So yes, it would make things very tight and I just don't understand why they're doing it."

Nicole says the Government's argument ignores the fact that many single parents are already working.

"We have a casualised workforce out there with unreliable work hours," she said.

"There's problems with access to childcare, the cost of childcare. It's almost impossible to be an unsupported single parent and to work at the same time."