The social safety net as a complex system failure for women
Women are more reliant on the social safety net than men, but what is their experience of it? In today’s analysis, researchers across multiple components of the safety net explain how deliberate design decisions have created a system that places women in crisis. This long read is based on a presentation at the Australian Social Policy Conference in October 2021.
The authors and their areas of expertise are:
Policy Whisperer Susan Maury (@SusanMaury): Framing (complex systems failures)
Policy Whisperer Sue Olney (@Olney_Sue): JobSeeker & Mutual obligations
Policy Whisperer Kay Cook (@KayCookPhD): Child support
Elise Klein (@EliseJKlein): ParentsNext
Shelley Bielefeld: The Cashless Debit Card
What is a complex system failure?
In wealthy nations, and Australia is no exception, so much of our everyday life is dependent on interrelated and highly sophisticated networks. This includes our electric grid, transportation networks, internet, and reliable waterworks to name a few. We fully expect these systems to maintain both reliability and safety, and yet each of these systems are vulnerable to failure simply due to their complexity.
An inordinate amount of time, expense and energy is expended to ensure infrastructure systems don’t fail. A somewhat humorous example of this process is what’s known as the ‘TV pick-up’ in the UK, in which the electricity supply must be carefully calibrated down to the minute to the rolling credits of the soap opera EastEnders (and other popular broadcasts), when Britons head to the kitchen and turn their kettles on to enjoy a cuppa more or less simultaneously. This requires a precisely-timed request for electricity from Scotland, Wales and France to address the surge in usage, but must be carefully monitored that the additional power doesn’t overwhelm the grid. In 2017, when a complex system failure left parts of South Australia without power, you may recall the outrage and finger-pointing; infrastructure systems are expected to work seamlessly.
Complex system failures are at times an inconvenience but at others a matter of life and death. There are many examples of complex and tightly coupled systems failing spectacularly, including the nuclear disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima; the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia; and even the disaster that befell the unsinkable Titanic.
This terminology is mostly used when considering physical infrastructure and physical failures. But what about human systems? Here we present a case for considering complex system failure in relation to Australia’s social safety net, utilising four examples drawn from the authors’ areas of expertise: mutual obligation requirements, child support, ParentsNext and the Cashless Debit Card.
Women’s experience of the safety net
Worried that the power will go out every time you switch on the kettle? It’s unlikely. The equivalent assurances for women on income support are just not there. Photo by Andrew Valdivia on Unsplash
Similar to physical infrastructure, the social safety net is also a sophisticated network of systems, incorporating both human and technological aspects, which are required to keep the system operating. And, while systems failures within the social safety net may at first glance appear to be gender-neutral, a gender lens illuminates how women are more likely to be victims of system failures, leading to increased entrenched disadvantage. Women receive 58% of all government payments, they make up 60% of those forced onto the Cashless Debit Card, 85% of parents who are compelled to seek child support payments, and a staggering 95% of parents forcedly enrolled in ParentsNext are women.
Failures can also cascade across multiple discrete systems, which is an endemic issue with the social safety net. For example, women are often in receipt of a payment, enrolled in ParentsNext and also eligible for child support, but these various systems often fail to account for the requirements and limitations of the others. Having to traverse multiple discrete systems can become the primary preoccupation of women who struggle to remain compliant while also maintaining the financial security and indeed the safety of their household.
None of these systems centres the everyday lived experience of women. This includes accounting for the role of caring for children or others, acknowledging the far-reaching impacts of family violence on individual lives, or the long-term impacts of discriminatory practices on women, for example in the employment market.
Several themes emerge when considering the experience of women across different, yet intersecting, parts of the social safety net; here we explore four:
Failures are deliberate
The safety net is often purposefully harmful
The safety net perversely stops women from securing their financial independence
Exemptions are disingenuous
Failures are deliberate
The social safety net is a complex system. However, what it lacks are the excessive fail-safe mechanisms inherent in physical infrastructure to ensure that failures are avoided at all costs. In fact, it could be argued that the social safety net is designed to encourage system failure - it is a deliberate design choice.
For example, the Australian Federal government claims to incentivise and support labour market engagement through ParentsNext, however research suggests the program makes parenting harder and impinges on parents’ human rights. ParentsNext is premised on an assumption that reproductive labour is not work—indeed, this is a structuring principle of the program as it overlooks and undervalues the gendered division of labour, resulting in disregarding the considerable amount of labour that single mothers engage in on a daily basis by deeming them unemployed and not working. Unpaid work is not valued as ‘real work’ within ParentsNext. Therefore, parents compulsory placed on ParentsNext not only have to contend with undertaking unpaid care labour for children, often as the sole parent, but also the compulsory burdens put on them through ParentsNext. Specifically, women interviewed by Klein (2021) found that ParentsNext participation requirements were onerous, harsh and unnecessary. This included the compulsory nature of the program, the activities prescribed to women, and the reporting which often led to sanctions if not completed on time. ParentsNext is compulsory if you fall into the set criteria. The compulsory nature seemed at odds to how women thought about their parenting responsibilities – especially with young children.
Under the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) Program, bill payment problems and transaction failures are commonplace, and the cards are not universally accepted, which creates financial and social exclusion (Bielefeld, 2021).
Despite Australia’s spending on unemployment benefits being considered to be low and well-targeted in comparison to similarly developed countries, the reframing of welfare from social justice to moral hazard has been relentless. Successive reforms have moved people who have historically been outside the labour force from other forms of income support, such as parenting or disability payments, onto unemployment benefits with associated obligations and penalties for non-compliance. This ‘mutual obligation’ does not help most of the new ‘unemployed’ find and keep a job. It is, however, a way for government to perpetuate the narrative that unemployment is an individual problem, and to withdraw support from those who do not meet activity requirements with minimal political risk. This raises serious questions about the design of the outsourced welfare-to-work system in relation to government’s duty of care to women living in poverty, particularly in assessing their capacity to work and enforcement of mutual obligations while they are out of work. Those with the most to lose in relation to activity requirements for income support are the least equipped to navigate the process.
Child support provides a stark example of the differential requirements placed on those who are least and most equipped to navigate them. Cook’s (2021) research shows how the administrative burdens of the child support and family tax benefit systems fall disproportionately on low-income women as would-be recipients to expend time, money and energy making applications, providing evidence and pursuing non-payments. At the same time, fathers as child support payers could evade, ignore or avoid the system, often with no penalty and in fact often resulting in financial gains in the form of lower child support obligations and retained income through unpaid liabilities. While Centrelink withheld Family Tax Benefits from women who did not enact the child support system on behalf of the state, fathers faced no such penalties.
The safety net is often purposefully harmful
Perhaps reflecting a strategy of pushing people off of payments at any cost, people who rely on government supports often stress the profound psychological toll. For example, numerous women on the CDC have reported experiencing unwanted visibility in terms of their socio-economic status when they are shopping or paying bills, which is seen as stressful and humiliating. Further, a female CDC holder from the Hinkler region has described the impact of the program as destroying her ‘mental, emotional and physical health’, leaving her ‘with lifelong repercussions’ due to ‘a stress-induced heart attack’ (Bielefeld, 2021).
Concerning ParentsNext, in interviews people spoke of the stigmatising effects of the program (Klein 2021). One interviewee on ParentsNext living regionally talked about the stigma she had experienced “It is an echo chamber but that’s what happens a lot when you’re a single mum ... You’re stigmatised into the, it’s a harsh word, but the useless pile. You’re never going to amount to anything because you’ve ruined your whole life by not having a husband… We’re societal lepers”. Telling is how women recovering from the trauma of domestic violence, but still put on ParentsNext, felt that ParentsNext was like entering another abusive relationship, “The conditionality is like a new violent relationship – financial and psychologically abusive”, one interviewee said. It did not provide the nurturing or caring space needed to support them from recovering from their trauma, even producing further trauma and stress.
There are other harms as well, including policy-induced poverty or the increased risk of violence to women and children (see also here and here). Examples of everyday harms caused by the safety net includes:
The CDC makes it difficult for women to have access to enough cash to leave family violence situations, and restricting the majority of a woman’s social security income to the CDC can make it harder for women to repay debts incurred in the context of financially abusive relationships (Bielefeld, 2021).
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, despite determined campaigns to raise the rate of income support, unemployment benefits had not increased in real terms since 1997. The rationale from successive governments of all political persuasions for keeping the rate of what is now called the JobSeeker Payment below the poverty line was that it was a transitional payment, designed to deter long-term welfare dependency. The repeated messages were that the best form of welfare is a job and that anyone willing to work could find a job, despite ample evidence to the contrary. That approach also ignored the changing composition of the pool of people in the welfare-to-work system, and the complex barriers to work that many of them now face.
The requirement to seek child support as a condition of Family Tax Benefit Part A eligibility ties women to their ex-partner or requires women to reveal the nature of their abuse and ‘out’ their ex-partner as abusive to the government. While women with violent ex-partners can be exempt from seeking payments, seeking an exemption relieves violent abusers of their financial obligations to children and reduces already financially vulnerable women’s total income. This can place women at risk for flagging their ex-partner as abusive. Alternatively, not seeking an exemption can also expose women to physical abuse as they seek payments from a violent ex-partner or provide perpetrators with an ongoing means of enacting abuse through the withholding and manipulation of payments and threats of renewed child contact disputes.
The safety net perversely stops women from securing their financial independence
Financial independence is not the end goal of the safety net, but if the government truly believes that ‘the best form of welfare is a job,’ it should rethink its strategy. When women experience poverty and psychological distress, their capacity to move into meaningful employment is reduced. This disconnect is perhaps most clear in the JobSeeker payment, which is designed to support people back into employment. Debate about women’s access to sustainable employment is often clouded by industry citing demand from workers for more flexible employment conditions. There has been a steady drift towards casual and short-term employment contracts and less access to paid leave in industries with high levels of female workforce participation – care work, hospitality, retail, health, allied health and post-compulsory education. However, secure employment and flexible work arrangements are not mutually exclusive. The current trend arguably favours those from high skill, dual career households or those without dependents over single income families. Women with children may need flexibility to manage responsibilities outside work, but they also need secure employment to find stable housing close to support networks, to plan and pay for childcare, and to accumulate superannuation - the lack of which can generate significant long-term public costs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this inequality. Female employment has fallen more than male employment. Women who were precariously employed when the pandemic hit were ineligible for JobKeeper payments, while those who could work at home faced new challenges if they were combining work with caring responsibilities during lockdowns. The number of women in the jobactive caseload has jumped since the onset of the pandemic from 310,653 at the end December 2019 to 464,256 at the end of September 2021, and all are subject to mutual obligation requirements. This situation is not only compounding women’s economic disadvantage - it is also likely to have intergenerational social and economic impacts.
The lack of suitable jobs is also an issue for many people put on ParentsNext where they need either flexible work arrangements or specific work hours to fit around their childcare responsibilities – keeping in mind that ParentsNext is targeted at parents of young, pre-school-aged children. Not only were women precarious in these unpaid caring roles, but often the only work they could find was precarious casual or contract work which continued to subject them and their families to economic insecurity. Furthermore, the inability to upskill while children are young can lock women into precarious jobs across their lifetimes.
Turning to the CDC, expenditure difficulties and transaction failures can impact the capacity of single mothers to provide what they need when they need it for their children. It can also adversely impact their capacity to socialise their children in how to use cash and budget, which is an important life skill that builds financial literacy. Due to these types of difficulties, this program also places pressure on women to accept whatever poorly paid employment options are available, irrespective of suitability. Research has shown that any job, however, is not a good for single mothers, as psychological wellbeing reduces when job security is poor.
Child support, benefit receipt and employment income interact in ways that can produce perverse outcomes. The more that single mothers earn, the less child support will be required of fathers whose income remains unchanged. In turn, lower child support payments increase the proportion of child support income that mothers can retain. But, higher child support payments have been shown to improve women’s employment outcomes; on the suggested basis that women have fewer Family Tax Benefits to lose. But, high childcare costs, the threat of FTB overpayments and debts, and variable child support and employment incomes make women’s financial stability and security contingent on the reliability of casual employers or ex-partners.
Exemptions are disingenuous
All the programs examined here have exemptions or options that acknowledge the shortcomings that we have identified. However, our research finds that these exemptions are performative rather than providing true options for women. It is difficult, even impossible, much of the time to access these exemptions. For example, some women attempt to access a CDC exit or exemption three to five times before being allowed off the program. For some this process has taken twelve to eighteen months. Some have only been able to access an exit or exemption by obtaining assistance from parliamentarians. During the exit and exemption processes women are subjected to intense poverty surveillance that is demeaning and difficult. As one woman explained:
‘I ended up getting the phone call to say that I was rejected … [that] I wasn’t meeting my children’s needs and I was financially incapable of managing my finances was the reason why they rejected me. … They’ve determined that I’m not meeting my financial obligations, [but] I’ve got a roof over my head, my bills are still being paid. I told them I had savings. I’ve been living off that. So there was no proper assessment done … Instead, they’ve made defaming statements that I’m not meeting my children’s needs without any proof’ (Bielefeld, 2021).
Similarly, while women can be exempt from seeking child support, Cook’s (2021b) research has found that exemptions were not advertised to women, and that seeking child support was normalised, even for victim-survivors of family violence. Rather, at every point in family tax benefit and child support application processes, women were ushered into the arrangements that provided the most significant financial return to the state, typically at the expense of vulnerable women. If women managed to identify safer, or more financially rewarding options, they had to spend considerable time, resources and energy completing forms and assembling evidence for government, each of which acted to deter women from claiming additional funding from the state.
We wish to briefly acknowledge that the issues examined here are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how the social safety net fails women. For example, women with a disability are often unable to access appropriate payments and support, leaving them misclassified as ‘employment ready.’ Recently arrived women are barred from nearly all social supports, making them vulnerable to family violence and modern slave practices. Women with acquired brain injuries as a result of family violence are particularly vulnerable to the coercive practices of ex-partners, Centrelink and the child support scheme. Increasing levels of female incarceration rates fail to understand the unique patterns of offending for women, leading to increased trauma and alienation.
Why is this acceptable?
The social safety net is deliberately compromised through a range of embedded policies and practices. This disproportionately creates a crisis for women – compromising their safety, increasing their financial insecurity, reducing their employment options, entrenching disadvantage across the life course, and compromising the wellbeing of the next generation.
All of these issues are underpinned by the erroneous and harmful assumption that women’s care work is effortless and costless and is able to be compartmentalised within discrete decisions, practices or locations. As such, the complex system that is Australia’s social safety net – with its dogged focus on increasing women’s employment – is designed to ensure women’s financial insecurity, as it will never provide for the lived reality of women’s care. The reason that it is acceptable to ignore the work of care and blame vulnerable women for their income insecurity is because care work lies out of scope of the masculinist focus of Australia’s overwhelmingly male-dominated parliament and government. Until care comes to be seen as a social issue for our nation, the single mothers who head Australia’s most impoverished family type will be framed as being personally responsible for their poverty.
Ensuring women’s financial security through an adequate income, paid in a non-stigmatising way, removing the surveillance of the state as embedded in mutual obligation requirements, and eliminating the suspension of payments could make all the difference. The Coronavirus Supplement and the relaxation of mutual obligations during 2020 was a welcome change for women – providing them with the scope to look after their children and make long-term plans. Policy choices are not set in stone; we can have a more supportive safety net if there’s a will. Like our physical infrastructure, it should be unacceptable to have a social safety net that is designed to fail.
This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.
Posted by @SusanMaury