People say it’s selfish to be childless.

Pope Francis jumped on that cheery bandwagon earlier this year, arguing that a society that doesn’t want to surround itself with children is “greedy” and “depressed”.

“The choice to not have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: It is enriched, not impoverished.”

Straight from the mouth of the leader of the biggest child-free cult in history.

Figures out this week show that the Pope’s not quite on the money.

Budget numbers show that a childless single on $80,000 ends up with less disposable income than a single parent with two kids earning $30,000, once you factor in the welfare.

The single parent with children ends up with $66,000 in disposable income, while the welfare- and child-free person ends up with $60,000.

The barren are propping up the breeders.

It would be easy, at the end of a stressful 12-hour day, to feel resentful that wads of your hard-earned get redistributed like that.

It’s probably just as easy for a new parent, at the end of a sleepless week, to feel resentful that they haven’t had time for an adult conversation or time to wash their hair.

Thing is, this is how a society should work. We don’t leave our single parents begging in the gutters. Not least because they need to raise a functional generation that one day will support us all — childless and childbearing — with their taxes. And wheeling us to Bingo later on.

We need welfare, although as the hackneyed phrase goes it should be a hand up, not a hand out.

The question that remains is how much of a hand up, and who pays for it.

With the unseemly discussion about who did or did not accuse women who get two lots of taxpayer-funded paid parental leave of being rorters or fraudsters, a nuanced discussion of what PPL is actually for has been buried.

The Government put the case well for prioritising child care over the rolled-gold PPL scheme, having finally come to the sensible realisation that it’s at least important — if not more — for new parents.

Where they’ve fallen over is this idea that PPL for public servants is “double dipping” and that a simplistic argument about the childless propping up single parents makes for good policy (although it’s good politics).

For the record, it was the Government that pointed out that if you don’t have kids, you don’t get welfare, and you pay more in taxes than you’ll get back.

That argument ignores the benefits of supporting breeders.

PPL has three different functions.

Having a kid is not just painful, it’s often a pretty serious operation. As much as we think of it as ‘natural’, women — apart from those hardy (mythical?) peasant types who go straight back to the rice paddies within hours — can’t just pick up and work.

Besides that, there are very good outcomes for breastfeeding that should hardly need to be explained.

Then there’s the social engineering side of it; if there were no support for new mothers at all, more women and couples would make the decision not to have kids, or to delay kids, or to have fewer kids.

And as previously mentioned, we’re going to need the next generation.

Separate to that, there’s private PPL. When companies decide that they want to offer something above and beyond the paultry-but-necessary government safety net.

It’s a bright economic move. It’s a way to attract and retain the best workers. It costs, on average, a year’s salary to replace someone entirely. If you value your staff you’ll do what it takes to keep them or end up with an open plan full of duds.

Where things got confusing is that the Government is both, well, the Government, and the big employer.

When they argue that public servants are double dipping because their salary is taxpayer funded, they’re conflating the idea of PPL as welfare and as an employee incentive.

And the Government should be a tip top employer, because they should attract the best employees, and that means setting the standard for a workplace that attracts women.

It hardly bears mentioning that the Government could do a better job of getting women on board.