Notes on the data: Income support

Female sole parent pensioners, June 2023

Policy context: Sole parent families who are on income support are likely to experience substantial socioeconomic disadvantage. Among different family types, sole parent families generally have the highest poverty rate. In 2013, there was a sharp rise in poverty among households with sole parents who were unemployed, reflective of the transfer of approximately 80,000 unemployed sole parents from Parenting Payment Single (PPS) to Newstart Allowance and other payments, once their child turned 8 years. From 20 September 2023, the age of the youngest child to qualify for PPS was changed from under 8 years to under 14 years.

These families continue to suffer high rates of relative income poverty, deprivation and financial stress related to low household income and net worth [1]. Their opportunities for employment or further education and training may be further diminished if they are also caring for a child who has a disability.

References

Summerfield T, Young L, Harman J, Flatau P. Child support and Welfare to Work reforms: the economic consequences for single-parent families. Fam Matters. 2010;84:68-78.

Notes: In these data (at June 2023) people eligible for a Parenting Payment Single paid by the Department of Human Services (Centrelink) comprise female and male sole parents with at least one child under 8 years of age (who meet certain qualifications). Only females receiving this payment have been included because females comprise the majority (95.6%) of sole parent pensioners (and to map females and males over the total population would distract from the figures for females receiving this payment).

Population Health Area (PHA) data were derived from publicly-available data that were already suppressed at the Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2). Therefore, if a PHA included an SA2 with suppressed data, there could be an undercount in the PHA. However, the loss of counts due to the use of this data set was negligible (less than 0.01% lost). As State and Territory totals were also provided, data in the ‘Unknown’ data row in the Excel data workbooks are calculated as the difference between the sum of the PHA data and the State/Territory totals; these figures therefore include the sum of the suppressed SA2 cells.

Data cells with counts of less than five were suppressed (confidentialised).

Geography: Data available by Population Health Area, Local Government Area, Primary Health Network, Quintile of socioeconomic disadvantage of area and Quintiles within PHNs, and Remoteness Area

Numerator: Females in receipt of a Parenting Payment Single from the Department of Human Services (Centrelink) at June 2023

Denominator: Females aged 15 to 54 years at June 2022 (population data at June 2023 not available at time of publication)

Detail of analysis: Per cent

Source: Compiled by PHIDU based on data supplied by the Department of Social Services, June 2023; and Australian Bureau of Statistics Estimated Resident Population, 30 June 2022.