Questionable use of Treasury data to suggest some welfare recipients with two small children are better off than singles earning $80,000 a year

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has hinted changes to social security payments could be on the cards in the near future, just days after handing down the Coalition’s second federal budget.

Treasury figures published in News Ltd papers on Sunday suggest that a sole parent with two children aged under six who earns $30,000 a year and receives $39,000 a year in government assistance would be better off than a single person who earns $80,000 a year.

Neither the News Ltd papers nor the Treasury source of the data – Appendix C of the Budget Overview – qualified the figures to note that, for example, supporting two children creates for sole parents expenses which singles do not have to meet from their income. “Government assistance”, as defined in the table, includes payments for which any family with children could be eligible, not just sole parents.

Abbott said workers need incentives to earn more, and hinted at a more in-depth shakeup of the welfare system further down the line.

“There are all sorts of people in all sorts of different circumstances who can find that they earn an extra dollar and instead of being better off, they’re worse off,” he told reporters in Perth on Sunday.

“It’s right and proper that over time we should be going through the system to ensure that this is no longer the case. We should always be better off in work than on welfare, and you should always be better off when you’re earning more. Earning more should not penalise you, earning more should benefit you.”



Labor wants the government to make any flagged changes public.

“We should have this debate, if the government has a proposal to make about welfare they should make it,” the shadow treasurer, Chris Bowen, said. “The government has just brought down a budget and I would have thought that would have entailed such policy proposals.”

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The furore around the government’s changes to paid parental leave (PPL), which aims to stop new parents from accessing both employer leave benefits and government ones, has threatened to overshadow other post-budget debates.

The treasurer, Joe Hockey, on Sunday sidestepped questions about whether his language when describing the PPL changes demonised working women.

Last week Hockey agreed new mothers who “double-dip” by accessing employer leave benefits on top of government benefits are essentially committing fraud.

“But this is basically fraud, isn’t it, taking an allowance twice effectively? Who is doing it?” Channel Nine’s Laurie Oakes asked last Sunday.

“Well, it is,” Hockey answered. “In many cases it’s mostly people who go on parental leave that earn more than $90,000 a year.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Malcolm Turnbull refused to use the term ‘double dipping’ last week. Link to video

But asked on Sunday morning if he regretted the choice of words, the treasurer denied he said it in the first place.

Labor was quick to criticise Hockey’s memory lapse.



“The only thing bigger than Joe Hockey’s budget deficit is his honesty deficit,” Bowen said.

Hockey has labelled reports the social services minister, Scott Morrison, was responsible for the PPL as “an embellishment”.

“I don’t want to be cynical about journalists but it went through the normal process, we all accept responsibility for the decisions. There was nothing unusual about this process,” he said.

“Last week they were falling all over themselves to take credit for the budget; this week they’re falling over themselves as they walk away from this terrible measure,” Bowen said of changes to PPL.

Internal divisions continue within the Coalition, with the agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, urging the government to look more closely at how to support parents who choose to stay at home rather than work.

“My wife who stays at home and looks after the kids is just as much part and parcel of my career as I am,” Joyce told Sky News on Sunday. “We have a tax white paper coming up and that allows discussion of these [issues] in a more prudent, deliberate form.”

• This article was amended on 19 June 2015 to remove an overstatement in the standfirst, to qualify the figures and to provide a link to the Treasury data itself, rather than to the News Ltd papers’ reporting of the data.