Single parents are three times more likely to live below the poverty line. The deterioration in circumstances is traced back to the Howard years

When her son was six, Emily Lightfoot split with her husband. A trained accountant, she was able to make a little bit of money each month by doing some tax work. She also applied for the single parenting payment.

Lightfoot and her ex-husband were still living under the same roof during the separation phase. Some time later, Centrelink decided the split couple were together – a ruling contradicted by a court when her divorce was finalised, Lightfoot says.

“I had to live off my business income for that year which was less than $10,000,” she says. “I had to support a child on that as well. It was very, very hard.”

The parents shared a rental property as they went through the process of separating. Things deteriorated to the point where Lightfoot had no choice but to leave quickly. By then, her son was eight. Lightfoot was no longer eligible for parenting payment, so she applied for the dole. She struggled. And she waited.

During that time, Centrelink raised a $300 robodebt with her. She went without food. When she ate, it was mostly two-minute noodles. After three months of waiting, she started getting Newstart payments.

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“When I had my son, I was in a well-off financial position,” she says. “I was married. Things were stable. I had no reason whatsoever to think that I would end up having to survive on [welfare] payments.”

On census night in 2016, there were about 959,000 single-parent families in Australia, 82% of which were single mothers. The majority of single parents with children under four years old are not in paid work. Instead, they are three times more likely to be living below the poverty line. Their median income of $974 a week is about half that of all households. All up, about one-third of sole parents and their children live in poverty, according to the Australian Council of Social Service.

On the face of it, the discrepancy can be explained in the simple difference between two incomes and one. The pertinent question might be: what have governments done to bridge the gap?

Unfortunately for single parents, efforts to bridge the gap have deteriorated since the 1990s. Most observers point to the Howard government’s decision during the mining boom to move those with children eight and older off parenting payment (now $384.25 a week) and onto Newstart ($297.55 a week) as the starting point to a new, more punitive approach to welfare payments for single parents.

“I think that is so dark in terms of the financial context we were in,” says Terese Edwards, the chief executive of the National Council For Single Mothers and their Children. “Everyone was getting a pat on the back, a hand up … Except if you were a single mother. And then, bang, you became officially unemployed.”

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On the same day as her 2012 misogyny speech, Julia Gillard jettisoned Howard’s grandfathering provisions, hitting the incomes of about 80,000 single parents who were previously immune from the changes. Two years after the new laws came into effect in 2013, poverty among unemployed sole parents had risen from 35% to 59%.

The sum of all changes since 2006 mean a single-parent family could have nearly 19% less disposable income due to changes in government policy, one projection by researchers at the Australian National University and University of New South Wales suggests. They say 360,000 of Australia’s poorest families with children now get “considerably less financial support”.

Juanita McLaren, an academic who took Australia’s treatment of single mothers to the United Nations after she was moved from the parenting payment to Newstart, sees the impact in the chatter between single parents on Facebook groups.

“I think the gig economy, hustling, is increasing,” she says. “Everyone talks about missing out on food and skipping meals.

“There is this underground economy of trading. Some milk for some eggs, old fashioned bartering. People are doing things like dog walking, pamphlet dropping, market research, things that can be sporadic, that can pay OK, that don’t require any skills, but still are not reliable.”

Exacerbating the situation, Edwards says, is Australia’s $1.5bn child support debt, the cost of child care and the fact that governments are focused on a “deficit model” that blames parents for their predicament.

Last July, the Coalition secured another sweeping change to the way single parents who receive welfare are viewed by government. It introduced ParentsNext, a pre-employment program for about 75,000 people on the parenting payment. It means that, like the unemployed, parents with children between six months and five years must now complete “mutual obligation” activities to keep their income support. About one-in-five have had their welfare payments suspended, something that was previously rare among those with young children. Indigenous participants, who are targeted for eligibility, have been far more likely to have had their payments temporarily suspended.

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Once the child turns six, parents face the same job search requirements as everyone else. The problem, McLaren says, is that well-paid jobs with child-friendly hours are “very thin on the ground”. “That means you are having to sign up to casual work,” says McLaren, who has studied Australia’s ‘Welfare to Work’ policies. “They give you lots of flexibility to be with your kids, but you don’t get sick leave and holiday pay and all those kinds of allowances. That’s the exchange.”

During the height of her financial struggles, Lightfoot maxed out her credit card. Now it’s down at around $13,000. The stigma attached to being a single parent receiving welfare, meanwhile, is “soul-destroying”. Lightfoot’s robodebt was waived by Centrelink this month after she told her local MP she had spoken to the Guardian about it.

“Single parents are usually very motivated to improve their circumstances but they know the best way to go about that,” she says. “They know their circumstances, employment history, goals for the future. And they have an idea of how to go about that.”

Reporting in this series is supported by VivCourt through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust