Rachel Carbonell: Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, I'm Rachel Carbonell. I'm standing in a park in Bacchus Marsh, a town about 50 kilometres west of Melbourne. Peppertree Park is off the main street, behind the local swimming pool, and it's where Mandy Webber would sometimes park her car so she could sleep in it with her two young girls after she became homeless.

Mandy Webber: I would have my seat forward like that so there was room for my dog to sleep on the floor, my daughter would lay down and then we'd use this handle here on the passenger side and just wind the seat right back, and it goes pretty much fairly flat, and that was how Mariah would sleep in the front seat. And I'd quite often just start the car during the night just to put some heat into the car when it was cold.

Rachel Carbonell: How did you sleep?

Mandy Webber: I didn't really sleep, you don't sleep because you're scared someone is going to come along, you are worried about the girls and worry about whether they're being comfortable and warm for the night, so you just have little power naps.

Rachel Carbonell: And so that was because you felt anxious?

Mandy Webber: Yeah, yeah, stressed out, scared that I was going to lose the kids and trying to find somewhere safe for them to sleep each night too, because I wasn't the only mum out there with kids sleeping in a car.

Rachel Carbonell: When her youngest daughter turned eight, Mandy was taken off the single parent payment and put onto the lesser Newstart payment under the federal government's welfare-to-work reforms.

Mandy Webber: So we've always struggled, but we managed just keep afloat when we're on the pension. Once they changed from the pension to the Newstart, I decreased $180 a fortnight. I just fell behind, trying to juggle. I've always had to juggle bills, but it got to the point where I couldn't juggle anymore. I sold fridges. I sold TVs, I had to sell a lot of stuff to survive. We just couldn't afford to pay our bills, and the real estate said, 'Now legally when you're two weeks behind, we can evict you,' which is what they did. I nearly lost the girls because we were living out of the car. I did have Welfare involved there because it's unsafe to sleep in a car with your children, and I understand that, but I had no choice.

Rachel Carbonell: Mandy Webber is one of tens of thousands of single parents welfare groups say were pushed into poverty—along with their children—by a policy that's now been in place for 10 years, under successive governments, Coalition and Labor.

Peter Davidson: We hear of parents going without meals so that their children are properly fed, and it seems as though 20 to 30 years after Bob Hawke's pledge to eliminate child poverty, that we care less about it than we once did. If governments were really concerned about child poverty, then they wouldn't be bumping single parents from poverty-level payments to well below poverty-level payments.

Rachel Carbonell: So you think that this policy risks a new generation of children in poverty?

Peter Davidson: Oh, I think that's happening, and it's unnecessary.

Rachel Carbonell: That's Peter Davidson from the Australian Council of Social Service.

The Minister for Families and Community Services in the Gillard Labor government was Jenny Macklin.

Jenny Macklin: We do realise that the decisions that were made were too harsh, and that people are in worse circumstances, and we certainly think that if we had our time again, we would not have made those decisions.

Rachel Carbonell: Today on Background Briefing we investigate the welfare-to-work reforms that were supposed to move more single parents into work, raise their standard of living, and reduce the burden on taxpayers.

The latest figures suggest the policy has failed to significantly increase employment among single parents, and up to 150,000 single parents and their children are now worse off. And there are more substantial welfare cuts planned by the current federal government.

The welfare-to-work reforms go back to the Howard government.

John Howard [archival]: We are not on a punishing mission here, we're on an expansionary mission. We want to expand the participation of Australians in the workforce.

Rachel Carbonell: The policy was aimed mostly at people on disability pensions and single parent payments. In his 2005 budget speech, Treasurer Peter Costello made it clear that those who were physically able to work, were expected to work.

Peter Costello [archival]: If more people are able to move from welfare to work, then this will help them with higher incomes and better participation in mainstream economic life, and it will also reduce the obligation on other taxpayers whose taxes pay for the welfare support.

Rachel Carbonell: At the time, welfare groups predicted the reforms would push already disadvantaged families into poverty.

Peter Davidson from ACOSS:

Peter Davidson: I remember it well because I spent many hours treading the boards in Parliament House, lobbying against aspects of this change. It happened in 2006, and the essence of the policy was to move single parents and people with disability from pension payments, which were higher and didn't have work requirements, to the lower Newstart allowance.

Rachel Carbonell: For single parents on Centrelink payments, the policy works like this. When their youngest child turns eight, they're obliged to look for work and take courses that improved their chances of finding work.

The real bite is in the big drop in payments. Parents are shifted from the more generous parenting payment to the lesser Newstart allowance, a drop of up about 100 dollars a week. As well as financially penalising disadvantaged families, new research commissioned by Anglicare Australia suggests the policy has also failed in its aim to increase employment among single parents.

Anglicare Executive Director, Kasy Chambers:

Kasy Chambers: When we actually look at the research and look at these statistics and look at the data, there are no corresponding changes to the participation rate, no significant changes whatsoever in the participation rate of sole parents. So it's very clear to us that what is driving the participation rate of sole parents is the availability of work, it's not the amount of welfare.

Rachel Carbonell: Kasy Chambers says this point is evident in the nation's job figures alone.

Kasy Chambers: For example in July 2015, just a couple of months ago, using ABS data, so the government's own figures, there were approximately 809,000 people who were unemployed and registered as looking for work. In the same month, 159,000 positions were advertised, so there were five people looking for every job.

Anglicare commissioned NATSEM, the University of Canberra's National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, to analyse living standards in Australia. Principal researcher and author of the report, Ben Phillips, says single parent employment has gradually increased, but he says it's a long-term trend that significantly pre-dates the welfare-to-work policy.

Ben Phillips: We had already seen some pretty strong improvements in the workforce participation of single parents in the decade leading up to 2006, but since the policy was enacted, we haven't really seen any change in the labour force participation, and that can be related to a number of factors, it may not be just the policy not actually working, it could be related to the GFC, the global financial crisis, and generally weaker economic conditions. But overall, we haven't seen…for single parents, we haven't seen their labour force participation rates change relative to any other group. So we haven't really seen any particularly strong dividend from these policies in terms of single mothers working at any greater rate than otherwise may have been the case.

Rachel Carbonell: Ben Phillips says the employment figures are for all single parents, not just those on welfare. But he says if there had been a big boost in single parents coming off Centrelink payments and into the workforce, those numbers should show up in the overall figures.

Ben Phillips: You would have expected to see a sizable impact in terms of the labour force participation and we really haven't seen any change in participation rates of single parents over the past seven or eight years.

Rachel Carbonell: According to NATSEM's analysis, the biggest consequence of the policy has been the effect of the drop in payments.

Ben Phillips: The overriding concern though is that the Newstart payment is a very low payment and doesn't really succeed in terms of being a poverty alleviation measure in that it can still keep families around about at the poverty rate or even below the poverty level.

Rachel Carbonell: The policy has evolved over the ten years since it was introduced, and while it was a coalition government initiative, it was continued and accelerated under the Gillard Labor government.

Ben Phillips: Between about 120,000 and 150,00 single parents have been moved on to the lower Newstart Allowance payment, and that was accelerated in 2013 by the Gillard government when they shifted all parents off the parenting payment on to the Newstart payment once their child had turned eight. So some parents had been what they would term 'grandfathered' by the Howard government, so they were effectively removed from that policy change, but under the Gillard government, they actually were taken straight off that payment once their child had turned eight, and some had already turned eight so they were shifted off quite quickly.

Rachel Carbonell: How many single parents in 2013 were shifted from the more generous payment for single parents to the Newstart Allowance?

Ben Phillips: Roughly around 80,000 single parents were shifted onto that lower payment and the lower payment effectively is about $5,000 a year less. These families still do receive some other payments like family payments, but keeping in mind that these families are typically only receiving somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per year, so a $5,000 reduction in their payment is quite significant.

Rachel Carbonell: Ben Phillips says overall about a quarter of all single parents in Australia have been affected by the welfare-to-work payment cuts, and about 25,000 to 30,000 parents each year are moved onto the lower payment when their youngest child turns eight.

While the NATSEM analysis suggests single parent employment hasn't improved as a result of the policy, there is some disagreement among policy experts. Peter Whiteford is a professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.

Peter Whiteford: It's certainly true that the employment rate was increasing already beforehand, before the policy was announced, but as I said, when you look at the rate of change, it did accelerate. Now, you'd have to do fancy economic modelling to work out how much of that was due to the policy change, but certainly it's consistent with the story that the policy change did have an impact.

Rachel Carbonell: But Peter Whiteford also asks the question; at what cost to those who had their incomes cut and didn't find full time employment?

Peter Whiteford: In terms of policy success it's important to separate out the extent to which there has been a positive effect on employment versus the extent to which there has been a negative effect on the people who got moved from parenting payment single to Newstart. And so at a level of, 'Is the overall policy a good idea?' I think the fact that there are now more than 100,000 lone parents who are receiving Newstart at a lower rate than parenting payment single has very serious implications for them. I think you can argue that for those people it isn't a policy success because they're still unemployed.

Rachel Carbonell: Peter Whiteford says it would be far better to urge single parents into the workforce, without financially punishing them.

Peter Whiteford: Encouraging lone parents into paid work I think is a very sensible policy, but you don't have to put them onto lower benefit levels to further accentuate the incentives.

Rachel Carbonell: Despite his view that the welfare-to-work reforms have improved single parent employment, Peter Whiteford says the policy does risk creating more child poverty. The poverty line can be measured in several ways, but put simply, it's 50% of the median income. Peter Whiteford says in 2005, Newstart payments kept people just above the poverty line at 52%, by 2012 it was well below the poverty line at 44%.

Peter Whiteford: I think we run a real risk in the next five to ten or fifteen years of seeing a re-emergence of the problems of child poverty.

Rachel Carbonell: It's dusk, and children are playing in a quiet suburban cul-de-sac in Bacchus Marsh, west of Melbourne.

This is Mandy Webber's new home…for the time being. It's been a bumpy ride for Mandy and her daughters since she was moved off the single parent payment and onto Newstart two and a half years ago. When they were homeless and living in a car, Mandy was deeply worried, not only about finding food and shelter but about losing custody of her children.

Mandy Webber: We were lucky that a local church here fed us. Like a family, they would bring meals around and give us meals and stuff. But without the generosity of the community and actually not being embarrassed to ask, I don't know where we would have ended up, because I did have Welfare involved there because it's unsafe to sleep in a car with your children and I understand that but I had no choice.

Rachel Carbonell: Eventually they found some emergency accommodation, and later this house, which is part of a low income rental support scheme.

This evening Mandy and her girls are preparing marinated chicken and vegetables for dinner.

It's still a struggle to make ends meet but things are so much better than they were.

Mandy Webber: It's been a tough two and a half years to get where we are now. It's still really tough now, but at least we've got a roof over our heads.

Rachel Carbonell: Charity groups say the welfare-to-work changes have led to a surge in the number of single parents needing emergency relief.

Anglicare Executive Director, Kasy Chambers, says it hit hardest when the Gillard government cut-off happened in 2013.

Kasy Chambers: Suddenly in January, which is one of the most expensive months in the year in much of Australia in terms of getting ready for school, paying off Christmas, large utility bills if you're keeping your house cool, those kind of things, so suddenly we had about 80,000 more people moved onto this much lower benefit level. By actually moving people who have children onto a very low benefit, all we're really doing is disadvantaging those children.

Rachel Carbonell: The Federal Minister at the time and now opposition spokesperson for families and payments, Jenny Macklin, says Labor made the changes in the hope of increasing single parent employment.

Jenny Macklin: We did want to see people supported into work. But we've all really had to face up to the fact that it was too harsh. I'm not trying to walk away from that at all. But I think the most important thing now is to figure out what we do in the future, and how we make sure that we support single parents in their number one job, which is of course helping to make sure their children are brought up in homes where people have got enough help.

Rachel Carbonell: Foodbank is the largest food relief charity in Australia. And it's one of the organisations experiencing growing demand from single parents. It collects free goods from the food and grocery industry and distributes them to 2,500 charities, which in turn hand the food out. Their huge Victorian warehouse is a bustling hive of volunteers, forklifts and trucks delivering food to and fro.

Chris Scott is the operations manager here.

Chris Scott: This is our largest distribution centre, we pick and pack 27,000 kilos per day. There's market produce that is rescued from the market twice a week and we also have refrigerated goods. The cool room holds 100 pallets of fresh products…

Rachel Carbonell: Oh you're going to show me? Yeah, this is like the biggest fridge I've ever seen.

Chris Scott: So this is where you can never worry about your milk going off, in this space. So as you can see as we walk in, rather chilly, and over there on the left you can see fresh milk which is one of the main commodities and an expensive item for any family, yoghurts, eggs, we certainly don't get enough of those.

Rachel Carbonell: Figures from the Foodbank 2014 Hunger Report show that single parents are now in the top three groups that rely on the organisation's food relief.

Chris Scott: I think traditionally we always had a vision that food emergency relief was to the disadvantaged or a homeless or somebody who was drug and alcohol affected. I think over the last three years we've seen a significant shift towards what we would class as the working poor.

Rachel Carbonell: In terms of the people who end up using the food relief that you provide, where do single parents fit in to the people who are using it the most?

Chris Scott: Single parents are in the top three groups of people that we support through Foodbank Victoria. More than 60% of the agencies provide food relief to single parents. Low income families come first, second and third would be single parents and also the unemployed.

Rachel Carbonell: One of the places that takes weekly deliveries from Foodbank is Wingate Community Centre in Melbourne's inner north. There's a food drop every Friday, where volunteers lay out what is available for that week for each person to take.

Woman: Okay, so you'll give out one of each of the potatoes or the broccoli, you'll give out parsnips…

Rachel Carbonell: Those who turn up needing food pick random tickets out of a box, which are then called out in numerical order. The people who score the early numbers have an advantage because popular foodstuffs run out quickly.

Today there's not much bread or milk. People are given a choice between the high demand items like bread and pasta, and I see many people struggle to choose between the two.

Woman: This one, this one, or that one? Bread? There you go....

Rachel Carbonell: Arranging food relief is one of the services Wingate Community Centre provides for the housing commission estate communities that live in this area. Most of the people here are from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Ka Wah Tam is a single father of a young teenage girl who has found himself needing to use the foodbank service.

Ka Wah Tam: Before my wife dead, pass away, I have a job, then I look after her, after that she pass away, then I no job and I look after my daughter.

Rachel Carbonell: How's your daughter going?

Ka Wah Tam: Not very good, she…after her mother pass away [tearful]…she can't learn…

Rachel Carbonell: I can stop if you like, I'm sorry that the questions are upsetting for you…

Ka Wah Tam: Nobody look after her. Nobody look after her.

Rachel Carbonell: So, she's struggling.

Ka Wah Tam: Yeah.

Rachel Carbonell: Ka Wah Tam looks for work every day. He fears losing his payments if he doesn't study and seek employment. But he's clearly heartbroken at having to leave his daughter at home alone after school. In his housing estate he fears she will fall victim to the anti-social influences he regularly sees here, such as drugs and crime.

Ka Wah Tam: Thirteen, 14, 15, the young people at that age need parent to teach them, show them which way is the right way. But now I need to go to school, need to look for job, need to attend interview, do this, do that.

Rachel Carbonell: So you feel like you would be there for her more but you can't?

Ka Wah Tam: Yeah. Always leave her alone.

Rachel Carbonell: Along with Ka Wah Tam I met Sara Zakaria, who is a single mother of a nine-year-old boy. When her payments dropped, she says she had to stop all her son's after-school activities because she couldn't afford them anymore.

Sara Zakaria: My son is not happy, you know? Yeah. But I feel bad.

Rachel Carbonell: So he was doing swimming and soccer but he's had to stop?

Sara Zakaria: Yes, I stop him now. Sometimes I take him to the park because he play with the kids because he'd be upset, but it not enough for him because he remember before he to soccer, now he stop it's very hard for him. No money, no life.

Rachel Carbonell: Sara Zakaria says these activities kept her son fit and occupied. Now he hangs around on street and, like Ka Wah Tam, she worries her child will become involved with the wrong people.

Sara Zakaria: When he didn't have sport, nothing, he go in the street. What can he do? And for me I can't force him and say no don't go out. Because out in the area, a lot of people bad.

Rachel Carbonell: Ka Wah Tam and Sarah Zakaria's stories of hardship are indicative of just how different the circumstances of each single parent are, and the many and varied reasons why single parents struggle when their Centrelink payments are suddenly reduced.

The sole parents at Wingate suffer multiple disadvantages in their struggles with poverty. Some are refugees and aren't literate in their first language, let alone in English. When the income cut from single parent payment to Newstart hits these people, it hits them hard.

Stella Avramopoulos is the Chief Executive of Kildonan Uniting Care.

Stella Avramopoulos: We're seeing an increase in the complexity of issues that people are presenting with. It's no longer just about the financial issues that they're struggling, often there's been death or separation, an illness affecting a family member, mental health, family violence. These are the multiple issues that people are grappling with that are exacerbating their financial circumstances.

Rachel Carbonell: Kildonan's manager of child, youth and family services, Jo Howard, says the welfare to work policy also has a significant inter-relationship with family violence in that it leaves women without the resources they need to escape violent relationships.

Jo Howard: And actually I know from the Royal Commission on Family Violence in Victoria, one of the key issues emerging is the difficultly that women find in being able to access alternative housing. So that's a barrier to leaving family violence and your income is obviously very much part and parcel of that. Women are just really loathe to leave violent partners if they feel that they and their children will be placed in financial hardship. And when women go from the single payment parent to Newstart, that can be a significant barrier to being able to leave a violent man.

Rachel Carbonell: Jo Howard says cutting single parent payments when a child turns eight doesn't just increase the risk of poverty for that child, it increases the chances of abuse, drug use, criminality and physical and mental health problems.

Jo Howard: I just think it's totally backward-looking policy. We know that there's a really strong relationship between poverty and child abuse. When parents aren't supported to be able to do their job as nurturers and carers, it's the children that are going to suffer. So we're going to see more children raised in poverty and we're going to see more child abuse, we're going to see greater mental health, substance use, and disconnection from community. It's not the sort of society that we want.

Rachel Carbonell: Many of the tens of thousands of single parents receiving Centrelink payments are working, but they're working part-time and not making enough money to survive.

When single parents are moved from the higher single parent payment to the lower Newstart payment, the amount of money they can earn before their payments are reduced or cut off altogether is much lower. So moving to the lower payment is a double whammy.

Single mother Mandy Webber, who we spoke to at the beginning of the program, works part time.

Mandy Webber: I've been working part time as a chef and basically by the time I declare my earnings, take out childcare, babysitting, take out petrol, take out what you lose off Centrelink, I'm working for $80 a fortnight, whereas before when I was on the pension, I would be working, but I'd still be up maybe…I'd make $200 for the fortnight, maybe $250 for the fortnight. I'd still be that little bit ahead. Right now, I'm not ahead no matter what I do. I'm falling further and further behind.

Rachel Carbonell: Like so many others who juggle work and family, Mandy Webber struggles to find work that fits in to school hours. Affordable after school care is scarce, and when children go to high school, after school care is no longer an option. Because single parents like Mandy Webber will lose their payments if they refuse work, once their children are in high school, they have no choice but to leave young teenagers at home alone.

Mandy Webber: To be honest, I don't even know how I'm going to afford my daughter to go to high school next year. That's the next step for me. She'll have to be at home on her own while I work, which is not ideal because she's 12. How do I know she's going to get the bus from high school up to here safely when you don't know what's happening out there in the world. I don't know how I'm going to handle next year with trying to work. I don't know, no idea.

Rachel Carbonell: Mandy Webber says although she's finally found a home, she's still struggling to deal with the set-backs she and her daughters suffered when her payments were first cut. In order to pay for the first month's rent and bond, she used high interest pay day loans. She was unable to repay those debts and recently declared herself bankrupt.

Mandy says her children needed psychological counselling after their stint of homelessness. And Mandy herself now suffers from anxiety related health issues.

Mandy Webber: My blood pressure's up a lot because of stress and anxiety. That is because I really struggle to pay the bills. I really struggle. I work and I think, 'Well, I'm working, I'm doing everything right. I'm doing everything I can,' then I've got school fees and I'm about to get my power disconnected. I've had to go bankrupt from all these payday loans I've had to take out to secure properties and to keep us in private accommodation. It's just astronomical. It's affected my health a lot.

Rachel Carbonell: Going into debt is a common story among single parents whose Centrelink payments are reduced when their youngest child turns eight.

Rose is a Melbourne single mother with an 11-year-old son. She resorted to credit cards to cope with the income drop.

Rose: My entire budget was based upon the Parenting Payment that I was receiving and the money I was earning through work. When $200 is taken out of that, it has meant that I now have enormous credit card debts. I looked at our budget and how I could minimise the outgoings. Half of my outgoings are my rent, so there's nothing I could do about that. There's nothing I could do about utilities because we are already pretty frugal. Food, if anything we buy more food as my son is becoming a teenager, not less. There was actually nowhere to reduce the budget. I've just been putting the extra amount of money that once upon a time used to be covered in our budget, it's all now going on the credit cards. I now have three credit cards, and the balances continue to grow.

Rachel Carbonell: As her son heads into high school, Rose says she will be able to work more hours and she has a plan to start paying off her credit card debt.

Rose: I am optimistically looking at paying it off in five to seven years. Realistically, factoring in the cost of high school, seven to ten. The majority of what's left of my working life will be to pay down the debt. I'm in my mid-40s.

Rachel Carbonell: That's a sobering thought.

Rose: It's a sad thought.

Rachel Carbonell: Rose says she was always planning to increase her work hours as her son became older and more independent, and she doesn't understand why she and her son were financially penalised in order to motivate her.

Rose: I wasn't working school hours because I'm lazy or because I didn't want to work. I was working school hours because that's how we have to run our lives. In order to raise my child by myself, I have to be around. I'm the only parent, there is no fallback. So yeah, we were absolutely unnecessarily penalised.

Peter Davidson: This policy was a good idea wrapped in a bad one. The good idea was that more children could be lifted out of poverty if single parents were required to and supported to look for paid work. That was essentially a good idea.

Rachel Carbonell: Peter Davidson from ACOSS says the cut in payments under welfare-to-work was motivated by the desire to save money, not to improve the policy.

Peter Davidson: The bad idea was that in the process, we'd cut their payments. So if you didn't find a full-time job, you'd be worse off than you would've been under the previous policy. Even if you found part-time employment, you'd be worse off because the income test was tougher on Newstart than the pension. There was no valid reason to bump people down to the lower Newstart payment.

Rachel Carbonell: Why do you think that decision was made to financially disadvantage people who were now required to actively look for work? Why not just require them to look for work?

Peter Davidson: The answer is simple; both governments wanted to save money, unfortunately at the expense of children at risk of poverty.

Rachel Carbonell: There are more substantial cuts proposed. In a move that welfare groups and the federal opposition are trying to raise the alarm over, the government hopes to save billions of dollars by reducing family payments, including family tax benefit part A and part B. The way these payments work is complicated, but in simple terms they target low income families as poverty alleviation measures for children. Although some higher income families can receive some smaller payments too.

Ben Phillips from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling says if these cuts are passed, single parent families on welfare will be among those worst affected.

Ben Phillips: That's where the big sting is for lower income families, particularly families with children. What we're seeing there is that, say, a low income family, once a child turns six, will be losing their FTB Part B, and that's roughly around $3,500 for older children, and it will be replaced by a $750 per child payment. So if you had two kids, that would be missing out on around $1,500 per year just from the loss of that payment.

Rachel Carbonell: And he says annual increases in family payments would also be frozen for a number of years.

Ben Phillips: Obviously with prices increasing, families do need to have those payments increased at least with the CPI or with the cost of living. So without that happening, it's quite easy to see that a single parent could be behind by $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 or even $6,000 per year.

Rachel Carbonell: These cuts haven't yet been passed and the Federal Opposition's Jenny Macklin is calling for them to be abandoned.

Jenny Macklin: For these parents who are already struggling, of course these cuts will be devastating. From next year they're going to lose all access to the school kids' bonus, which can mean more than $1,000 each and every year for that family. If the Liberals also succeed in getting the cuts to Family Tax Benefits through the parliament, it could mean anything up to 10%, 20% of a family's income, depending on what they're earning. If they're on unemployment benefits, of course it's really going to be devastating for those families.

Rachel Carbonell: Jenny Macklin says Labor is re-thinking its policy. But she wouldn't reveal what measures the party is considering to minimise the hardship caused by the welfare-to-work policy.

The Federal Coalition government has declined numerous requests from Background Briefing for an interview. In a late written response, the new Minister for Social Services, Christian Porter, says the 2006 and 2013 welfare-to-work reforms did boost single parent employment. You can read the full statement on the Background Briefing website.

Anglicare's Kasy Chambers says from a preventative perspective it would be cheaper to pay single parents more money than to clean up the mess that poverty creates.

Kasy Chambers: I firmly believe so. I'd love to see us do some really good data on this. We know that health outcomes are linked to your standard of living and your income. If you grow up in a family where the income is low, you've got a whole lifetime of exposure to all those factors that actually then turn up in the stats that say when you're on lower income you have lower health outcomes. We can look at things around crime, we can look at things around teenage pregnancies, around drug use. But even just to look at health, even just to look at who gets jobs; if you've had a good education, you've got good health, you are more likely to take part in the workforce and in the wider society. But the economic cost alone of having people living in poverty in a rich community is not only economically nonsensical, it's actually immoral.

Rachel Carbonell: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Lawrence Bull, technical production by Leila Shunnar, the executive producer is Chris Bullock. I'm Rachel Carbonell.