Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
I’ve had this idea kicking around in my head for a while. It has changed a great deal in the time since I first had it. When I had my daughter, my partner already had a five-year-old who was living in a different state with her mother for the majority of the time. My stepdaughter’s mother, Sally, was on a single parent payment as her only source of income at the time. Anyway, when Brian looked into updating the information he gave to CSA (Child Support Agency) about his new child, we knew that this would reduce the child maintenance payments he had to give his ex-partner. This was because he now had two dependents, his two daughters. The thing is, because I was not working at the time and was unable to work because I was caring for our daughter, I was also financially dependent on Brian. However, I did not count as a dependent as far as CSA was concerned. Or, rather, I did count as a dependent for two weeks prior to the birth of our child and for four weeks following the birth of our child, so six weeks in total.
This is in contrast to the situation six years previously, when Sally first moved down from Queensland to live with Brian. She already had a son from a previous relationship and, once again, her sole source of income for herself was the single parent payment. When she moved in with Brian, as soon as she was spending more than two nights a week under the same roof as him, her single parent benefit was withdrawn. This was because Brian’s income was such that it was enough for the two of them. Sally still received child support from her son’s father, but the way child support works in Australia is that this money is provided for the child and is intended to support only the child. We don’t have the concept of alimony, at least not in the circles I move in.
At the time, I was merely struck by how completely unfair it was. When we were talking about Brian having to pay money, he was not allowed to count me as a dependent. However, when the government is the one paying the money, as soon as Sally had another means of support, they withdrew her income, the only source of income she had for herself. From the perspective I was in then, with a newborn baby and an awful lot of our household income going interstate every month, I thought that Brian should have been able to claim me as a dependent, thereby paying Sally less for his eldest daughter.
I hadn’t thought about this dichotomy in years, and my daughter is now almost seven. A couple of months ago, I was sitting at Sally’s kitchen table in Brisbane, having a chat about the vagaries of child support. Because these days we are all uber-mature and we can have these conversations. I guess a lot of factors changed my perspective, including the improved relationship with Sally, my own confidence in my relationship with Brian and my own financial security. Also, this was towards the end of the year where Rosie Batty was Australian of the Year and, as a result, domestic violence has been spoken of nationally a great deal. For any and all of these reasons, I turned the situation around and had a good look at it from Sally’s point of view, that day around 13 years ago when she rang to update her living situation with Centrelink. From this perspective, she had a 3 year old son for whom she received a small amount of child support from her ex-husband. The income she received for her own maintenance, however, was limited to the single parent payment. She moved in with her boyfriend, earlier than she would have had they been living in the same state and, because he earned a good wage, she lost the entirety of the money available to her to support herself. This made her completely financially dependent upon her relatively new boyfriend. There is no other way to look at it. All the money that she had to support herself was from the government and this was removed as soon as she and her boyfriend began living in the same house.
Now, I haven’t been paying as much attention to current affairs as I’d like to, being busy with attempting a new career, lots of volunteer work and just generally living, but I have heard a few snippets of the dialogue Rosie Batty and many others have been stimulating. From what I have heard, the answer to “Why don’t women just leave?” is fairly simple: They don’t feel they can. Women stay in abusive relationships because they have the perception they cannot survive on their own. What if this perception is accurate? It seems to me that a policy of removing all of a woman’s independent income the moment she moves in with a man of adequate means is a recipe for domestic abuse. He might not turn out to be controlling (Brian didn’t) but what if he did? When he tells her “You can’t survive without me”, it’s true. Even if he’s not violent, suddenly taking on the financial support of another person is a pretty big stress on a relationship, and I question whether relationships that are that uneven from the start are healthy.
I have a lot more I want to explore about this topic. I just think that if A Current Affair can run a poll about whether women on welfare should be forced to take contraceptives, we can have a chat about the government making women entirely dependent on the men in their lives. And whether that is okay with us.