How removing parenting payments when children turned 8 harmed rather than helped single mothers
- Written by Kristen Sobeck, Research Fellow, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
As the government weighs up whether to extend single parenting payments to parents of children older than the present cutoff age of eight in this week’s budget, new information has come to light about what happened when the rules were tightened in 2013.
When then-Treasurer Peter Costello reduced the cutoff age from 16 in 2006, forcing single...