Mark Riley: Pressure on Anthony Albanese to restore Labor party’s stained legacy on single mums

When asked to name the most important moment of Julia Gillard’s short-lived but eventful prime ministership, Labor’s true believers immediately nominate her eviscerating misogyny speech.

To them, and many others, it was a defining moment in modern politics.

That serrated speech exposed the ugly and deeply gendered undertones of the vicious political and personal attacks being levelled at Gillard.

Many still herald it as the seminal moment that finally pierced the glass ceiling and propelled an emboldened women’s movement towards meaningful change.

But there was another event around the same time that the Labor faithful would prefer to forget.

It is one that has left a large number of the most marginalised women in Australian society appreciably worse off. It has also left an indelible stain on the Gillard legacy.

It was the decision to toss tens of thousands of single mothers off the parenting payment once their youngest child turned eight and force them onto the much lower unemployment benefit.

It cost those mothers about $200 a fortnight and consigned many of them and their children to lives of poverty.

Running for the Labor leadership against Bill Shorten in the weeks after Labor’s 2013 election loss, Anthony Albanese said the decision he’d been party to as a member of the Gillard cabinet was “a mistake”.

It had, he said, exhibited a basic “lack of respect” for what single mothers faced on a daily basis.

As the celebrated son of a single mother himself, this was a matter he knew much about.

Labor, he insisted, must be the party of the disadvantaged. This had to be corrected.

But 10 years on and with Albanese now Prime Minister, that “mistake” remains in place and he is under intense pressure from prominent Labor women to make it right.

Dr Anne Summers, a former women’s adviser to prime minister Paul Keating, has compiled figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to reveal that 60 per cent of single mothers are escaping domestic violence.

But she says many more choose to remain in those violent relationships knowing that the alternative is to condemn their children to a life below the poverty line on JobSeeker.

The Government is confronting them with a cruel choice, she says, of violence or poverty.

Gillard’s justification for the change was as a welfare-to-work measure, putting single mothers on a path to a job with guided employment services support once their youngest child was established at primary school.

It didn’t work.

“You don’t get people into jobs by starving them,” says Summers.

This, she says, simply should not happen in a rich nation such as ours.

Summers and others in the broader equality movement are demanding the Government reinstate the parenting payment for single mothers until their youngest child turns 16.

They none-too-subtly suggest that this issue should be deeply personal for a Prime Minister whose own journey to the top from public housing is promoted as inspiration for the tens of thousands of Australian children of single mothers living in poverty today.

And, Summers says, as hard as things were for Albanese’s mother, support then under the Whitlam government was much more generous than it is now.

Single mothers in the 1970s were paid the same rate as the pension, which is currently $320 more a fortnight than JobSeeker.

That, she says, is the difference between a life of hope and a life of poverty.

Shortly after forming Government, Albanese created a Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce to advise him on how to correct the gender imbalance on pay, opportunity and support.

One of its first recommendations in the current Budget cycle, according to taskforce head Sam Mostyn, will be to reverse the single mothers “mistake”.

It would almost instantly drag about 89,000 single mothers and their children out of poverty.

That is no small thing.

The cost? Somewhere between $600 million and $700 million over the four years of the Budget cycle.

That is not cheap, particularly in a Budget already under immense pressure.

But it’s barely one-thirteenth of what the May Budget will spend on nuclear-powered submarines.

And what’s the cost of failing to correct an admitted mistake that drives tens of thousands of vulnerable women and their children into a life of potential heartache and misery?

Certain actions define a government’s humanity.

This would be one of them.

And it might just provide the Prime Minister with a moment that women in the future would rank alongside the misogyny speech in importance.