When Sarah* invited reporter Ben McCormack from A Current Affair (ACA) into her home she did so openly, trusting he was there to tell her story with honesty and integrity and to report on her efforts to improve the life of her family.

Sarah allowed McCormack and his camera crew to spend two days following and filming her family, getting to know her and befriending her children. Watching the footage it’s clear Sarah and her children felt comfortable with the reporter and were lulled into a false sense of safety. At one stage Sarah’s disabled son sweetly pats McCormack and tells the reporter he’d like to go to the park and Sarah says McCormack even attended the birthday party her son invited him to.

Because she felt a sense of camaraderie with the reporter, Sarah spoke openly and candidly about how much she received from Centrelink, the difficulties she faced finding work while looking after four children and why she was asking people to support her Go Fund Me project. She spoke about the small business she’d started, designing and making wall decals and the interest she was receiving in her designs; however, many customers were asking for larger decals, which Sarah’s current equipment can’t accommodate. To buy the machine she needs Sarah has to raise $13,000 and so she started the Go Fund Me campaign as a way to kick start this.

Reliance on welfare is not a lifestyle Sarah willingly chose for her family and no one in their right mind could legitimately accuse her of being lazy. Sarah has six children, four of whom live with her, including her teenage son with cerebral palsy, who requires near constant care. With the exception of her eldest daughter who now lives and works overseas, all of Sarah’s children have the same father.

The better part of Sarah’s life has been devoted to raising her children, leaving her with little opportunity to develop the kinds of skills that would give her access to employment which pays enough and provides the security she needs to look after her family. Sarah wants to work, but finding an employer willing to accommodate her responsibilities as a parent (which includes being on call for her son) has proved impossible. The moment she mentions she has a high needs child doors start closing and the already rare job opportunities available to her dry up.

If she were to return to work, childcare costs alone would undo any economic benefit she’d gain and in fact would put her in a worse financial position than the one she’s in. While the ACA segment acknowledged this it failed to recognise there are numerous other costs associated with working, all of which would set Sarah and her family even further back. Since she’s already struggling to make ends meet on what she receives from Centrelink it would be a foolish financial decision for her to take a job that won’t support her family. As she clearly stated in the interview, she often goes without food to pay for things her kids need and her sparsely furnished home is testament to how little Sarah’s family really has.

Still, determined to find a way to support her family, Sarah realised if no employer was going to give her a go she needed to take matters into her own hands.

When she approached ACA Sarah wasn’t looking for sympathy or a handout, she was looking for a realistic way to help her family get out of poverty. You can imagine her horror then when the program aired, portraying her as a welfare queen, laughing all the way to Centrelink and living the high life off tax payer’s dollars.

ACA chose to edit their program in a way that clearly painted Sarah’s family and other single mothers as welfare bludgers sponging off hard working Australians. They edited footage of a family experiencing intergenerational poverty into the segment, but failed to tell viewers Sarah’s eldest daughter is now living and working overseas and was recently promoted in her work.

The camera panned across her children sitting on the couch playing on iPads, knowing their viewers would surely question how a family on welfare could afford this expensive technology; however, they didn’t tell viewers Sarah’s disabled son requires an iPad to help with his communication and learning, or that he dropped the original tablet, shattering the screen. It was only through a stroke of rare good fortune Sarah was able to replace the broken iPad.

ACA deliberately didn’t show the cracked screen on the device her younger son was playing with. In fact in the shot where the little boy holds the iPad up Sarah states he did so at the cameraman’s request, so the broken screen couldn’t be seen.

ACA didn’t tell its viewers Sarah didn’t choose to be a single mum or that her family was shattered through violence and abuse. They didn’t tell you Sarah and her partner moved their family from Sydney to Melbourne to access better medical care for their son. They didn’t tell you about the unscrupulous real estate agent who reneged on the lease the family had signed and paid bond and rent in advance for when they got to Melbourne, leaving them homeless with five children.

They didn’t show you the hard working mum who, in spite of the many setbacks she’s faced, still manages to get on with life or the mum who still keenly feels the loss of her baby daughter. They didn’t ask why Sarah gets no child support, or tell you she manages the needs of their disabled son and the other children with almost no help from the children’s father. They didn’t focus on her genuine efforts to break her family’s current dependence on welfare and Sarah’s attempts to create her own work were only added as a kind of afterthought.

During the segment ACA shows Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison saying “We don’t want to give children and people growing up in families the expectation that welfare is a career choice, ‘cause it shouldn’t be.” 2GB broadcaster Chris Smith followed this with, “. . . the system’s there to cushion her through this, but she shouldn’t think that that should be her future, nor the future of her children . . . with all the welfare benefits she can obtain we’ve now got a situation where she won’t be contributing to the country, she won’t be getting a job. She doesn’t have the motivation to get a job . . . we’ve gotta get that multi-generational welfare out of the heads of people and make them realise the benefits for people that accrue when you go out and get a job.”

Neither of these men met nor spoke to Sarah and one wonders whether ACA told them Sarah’s real story, because they clearly didn’t understand her situation. And instead of focusing on the lack of suitable jobs for women with caring responsibilities, or acknowledging employers are rarely willing to hire women in Sarah’s situation they insinuated she was to blame for her circumstance.

Of course ACA must have known their viewers would take one look at Sarah and see a mum with four kids and make assumptions about her family without considering the dedication and obvious commitment it takes to raise four children on her own. They didn’t ask her about how hard it must be to be the sole carer of her disabled son. They told you what Sarah receives from Centrelink but neglected to acknowledge how hard it is to raise one child on that income, let alone four or a child with a disability.

Australia’s safety net long ago became a poverty trap for those who most need support. Income support payments are now so low single mums and their children often don’t have enough even to cover the basics.

Women like Sarah, who have experienced domestic violence and homelessness, still manage to achieve safety, security, education and love for their children, but programs like ACA choose to ignore this in favour of sensationalism and the opportunity to vilify single mothers and others caught in the devastating cycle of poverty.

Rather than highlight the true horror story, which is a system that abandons Australians to a minimum wage insufficient to support a family, a lack of real job opportunities or job security for anyone with limited experience, skills or education and the fact that support for income recipients has not increased to meet the real costs of living in more than two decades, ACA chose to use Sarah and her family. They came into her home, gained her trust and befriended her children. They asked her loaded questions, repeatedly stopped the camera to coach her on what to say, including asking her numerous times to say the line, “I earn almost a thousand dollars a week on welfare. Why would I work for anything less?” and then edited her words out of context in order to misrepresent her and hold her up as an example of people on income support who don’t want to work.

It was a confusing and contradictory segment, which on one hand seemed to acknowledge wages were too low for a family to survive on, but then implied a minimum rate of income support provided as a safety net was too generous.

Since the segment aired Sarah has received abuse from strangers and has had to suffer the embarrassment of a prospective employer “Googling” her during her interview and reading the mortifying details of the ACA beat up. After reading about her online this employer told Sarah, “We are looking for someone with work ethic. Clearly you don’t have one,” so not only has ACA humiliated her, they’ve further damaged her already limited employment prospects.

What’s even more devastating however, is the impact the show has had on her kids. Sarah’s children have been subjected to ongoing taunts and schoolyard bullying, including physical attacks and being told to “just give up and swallow a handful of pills” and “go home and cry to your welfare mum”.

Sarah contacted the show to advise them of the torment she and her children were subjected to after the program aired. ACA advised her they had pulled the segment from their website, which suggests they recognise it was cruel and its misrepresentations were putting Sarah’s children at risk, but it remained on the Nine website.

Sarah states ACA also tried to appease her by donating $1500 to her Go Fund Me account, but she returned this because ethically she couldn’t accept money from a program that had deliberately and publicly disgraced her.

The portrayal of vulnerable people, like Sarah and others on income support payments by sections of the Australian media are polarising and often appear to coincide with the introduction of cuts to income support and harsher penalties for non compliance.

“Sarah’s story on A Current Affair aired on the same day as a front page story in the Daily Telegraph claiming that Australia’s welfare bill was out of control,” says Cassandra Goldie, CEO of ACOSS.

Australia’s welfare bill to top $190b with taxpayers funding 240 million payments a year’, by Daniel Meers, The Daily Telegraph, June 29, 2015:

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/australias-welfare-bill-to-top-190b-with-taxpayers-funding-240-million-payments-a-year/story-fni0cx12-1227419226438

“This was at a time when the government was pushing to have legislation passed in Parliament to further reduce family payments that would particularly affect single parents,” she says.

“We have been concerned for a long time at the way sections of the Australian media treat people receiving income support payments, especially single mums, young people and people with work incapacities and with disability. Unfortunately, degrading and insulting portrayals of people doing it tough in our community have become commonplace and many of our members have repeatedly raised these issues with media outlets and the Australian Press Council over the years.

“ACOSS has also raised this with successive governments. It’s become striking to us that such stories invariably surface at a time when the government of the day is about to enact some harsh legislation that strips income or rights away from people receiving welfare payments. We saw this under the previous Labour government with the cuts to single parenting payments, which dropped around 80,000 sole parents onto the lower paying Newstart Allowance.

“It’s time for governments and media outlets to stop this practice of misrepresenting, demeaning and insulting people receiving income support payments. This only serves to damage people and divide our community.”

CSMC sought comment from ACA, Ben McCormack and the two men interviewed for the segment, Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison and 2GB Announcer Chris Smith. ACA, Ben McCormack and Scott Morrison all declined to comment. Chris Smith was not available for comment at the time CSMC attempted to contact him.

Understandably, Sarah was devastated by the program’s misrepresentation of her and her family and legitimately felt her trust had been horribly violated. Despite this awful setback however, she remains committed to doing whatever it takes to help her family and get her business off the ground. Working from home will allow Sarah to be there when her son needs her and she’s hopeful the business will eventually make enough money so she and her family will no longer need to rely on government income support.

* Name has been changed, given the time that has passed since this media coverage took place.