Repairing the damage

CHAPTER 8

If it is true that little research has been done on the causes of family breakdown in Australia, it is equally true that there has been little serious effort to analyse the interaction between family breakdown and that part of the welfare system designed to repair some of the damage done by family breakdown.  Even to speak of "repairing family breakdown" as one of the goals of the system is risky, because the relevant aims are rarely, if ever, articulated.  It makes a world of difference, for instance, whether the goal is to "repair family breakdown" or merely to "alleviate the consequences of family breakdown", yet this distinction is barely acknowledged.  The notion of "repair" here may be unpleasantly suggestive of social engineering, but the case to be argued will attempt to maximise personal liberties, while contending that it has been other kinds of social engineering that have played a significant part in causing breakdown in the family.

Before going any further we need to summarise the results of the last chapter, for -- in the absence of any better description -- it is to the situation as described there that public policy has to respond.  Marriage is still a popular institution, and most people who marry do so with high expectations of forming a lifelong and happy companionship.  There are many reasons why the period since the mid-1970s should have been a period of strong and happy marriages.  There is no reason to believe that the traditionally accepted reasons for marital failure are any more prevalent now than in the past.  Family breakdown does not appear to have strong economic causes.  It does have to do with emotional imbalances between men and women.  It tends to show up early in marriage, usually in the first ten years.  That it happens so early suggests that it may be in some way a function of personal immaturity.  It seems to have something to do with women's increased commitment to public life and the paid workforce, but after separation women are no more likely to be in the workforce than before.  It has been aggravated by the hostility of feminism to marriage and family life, but the feminist emphasis on marriage as a power struggle between men and women does not seem to describe even a majority of marriages that fail.  Conflict over children and child-rearing is not a central feature of marital failure, and conflict over the division of domestic labour seems to be a secondary problem.  The great majority of separations are initiated unilaterally by women.  Women's attitudes to the process of divorce have not been well documented, but we have good evidence that the results are usually painful to men.  Women leave marriages in part because they seek both companionship and independence, but they subsequently lead social lives restricted by their care for children.  After separation many women and children tend to suffer from low incomes arid most fall into dependence on state welfare.  Both men and women frequently remarry or re-partner not long after divorce, but these second relationships are often no more stable than the first.  Marital failure seems to be transmitted between generations, which suggests that the present divorce rate will be passed on to the next generation.

The whole phenomenon has become a burden on the average taxpayer, including those who also have a family to support and who work hard to keep their marriages together.  As we noted in Chapter One, more of the Federal family assistance budget is now spent on the consequences of family breakdown than is devoted to assisting all two-parent families, though the latter outnumber the former by about seven to one.  The social and personal costs also take the form of work absenteeism, lower productivity, legal aid and court costs, ill-health, depression, violence and suicide.

Most important of all for social policy purposes, children find divorce traumatic, and in many cases they become separated from and lose touch with their fathers, a loss which can lead to adolescent anger and delinquency.  A survey of primary school children by the Australian Institute of Family Studies indicates that more than half of all eight and nine year olds today fear the divorce of their parents. ⁽¹⁾

The most generally accredited work on the effects of divorce on children is the American research of Judith Wallerstein and Joan Kelly, who distinguish between immediate and long-term effects.  There is now little doubt that the immediate effects of parental separation are usually very painful for children.  In a great many cases, it appears, the separation comes as a surprise to the children who have little understanding of the depths of hostility that exists between their parents.  Wallerstein and Kelly describe the effect of this surprise as a period of "reactive depression".  What distinguishes their research, however, is that they have supplied some of the first reliable evidence on long-term effects.  They found that five years after divorce about one third of the children showed no adverse consequences, another third were undergoing "appropriate developmental progress" though with some lingering resentment and unhappiness, and the remaining third were significantly worse off than before, suffering from moderate to severe depression manifesting itself in delinquency, poor learning, drug abuse and apathy.  The crucial determinant was whether the absent parent had kept in touch with the children.  They summarise their position in this way:

[I]f the divorce is undertaken primarily as a unilateral decision which humiliates, angers or grieves the other partner and these feelings continue to dominate the post-divorce relationship of the divorced partners;  if the divorce fails to bring relief from marital stress or to improve the quality of life for the divorcing adults;  if the children are poorly supported and poorly informed or co-opted as allies or fought over in the continuing battle and viewed as extensions of the adults;  if the relationship with one or both parents is impoverished or disrupted;  if the stresses and deprivation are no less than those of the failed marriage -- then the most likely outcome for the children is developmental interference and depression. ⁽²⁾

We know that most divorces in Australia are unilateral and that they involve bitterness and recrimination.  We know also that relationships with at least one parent do become impoverished or disrupted:  Paul Amato found that after divorce 26 per cent of children never see their fathers, and no doubt a much higher percentage lose close contact. ⁽³⁾

Australian research on these questions has been meagre but what there is does not contradict Wallerstein and Kelly.  The most careful Australian study, Rosemary Dunlop and Ailsa Burns's "Don't Feel the World is Caving In":  Adolescents in Divorcing Families, is of limited general relevance because it is focused on teenagers.  Almost all of the families they studied involved couples who had been together for at least 13 years.  Their children had enjoyed considerably more stability and joint parental investment than is the case for most children of divorce;  and, being adolescents, they presumably had acquired some of the skills and emotional maturity to cope with the process of parental separation.  It is therefore not very surprising that, as Dunlop and Burns found, they differed little from the control group of teenagers in intact families.  Even so, when asked how they reacted to the separation commonly the responses were those of sadness, shock, and disbelief.  These are not findings which Dunlop and Burns choose to highlight, though they do acknowledge that many adolescents "had gone through a period of confusion, anger and distress when the family crisis was at its height". ⁽⁴⁾  We may presume that these effects are more acute for younger children.  Another study focused on children who were six to eight years old at the time of breakup, and found that "many children retain negative feelings about parental separation even though their life adjustment was satisfactory".  When asked to express their wishes, 40-45 per cent of the separated children wanted family changes, compared with only 7 per cent of children from intact families. ⁽⁵⁾

One response to Wallerstein and Kelly's results has been to conclude that since divorce is not universally harmful to children, it is not necessarily harmful to children, and therefore the effects of divorce on children should be regarded as a private and not a social issue.  This response is analogous to concluding from the fact that children sometimes run across the road safely without looking, that they need not be taught to look.  Five years is a very large part of childhood, and the one-third of children who suffer for that length of time are likely to have great difficulty making the transition to emotionally secure and competent adulthood.  Even those who suffer "only" lingering resentment and unhappiness are entitled to our concern and respect.  Children are resilient -- they survive wars, natural disasters and personal tragedies -- but this is never a justification for causing suffering.

If Wallerstein and Kelly's results are reliable and transposable to the Australian situation, then the divorce epidemic has to be viewed as, in general, comparable to an epidemic of child abuse.  The abuse in this case is certainly not intentional, but it may be regarded as negligent.  (The fact that a child's general competence may be unimpaired despite family crisis is not grounds for ignoring the effects of divorce -- we do not argue that child abuse is acceptable if it does not impair competence.)  The standard reply to comparisons of this kind has been that making divorce more difficult will only shift the location of this suffering back into "intact" but unsuccessful families.  This reply misses the essential point that it is their attachment to both of their parents which matters most to children, and it is this which should be jeopardised as little as possible.  That family breakdown leads all too often to social disintegration will be argued in the last part of this chapter.

The picture of the divorce phenomenon presented in the previous chapter is a composite formed from a diverse body of statistics, reportage and informed comment.  It is derived from external evidence, and it may not match up very well with particular cases.  Furthermore, it is not a coherent picture in the sense that it does not reveal any pattern or purpose capable of explaining at any basic level why marital breakdown has become so prevalent.  Taking this external evidence alone, it would be difficult to avoid the conclusion that marriage today is a source of very great confusion, both personally and as a subject for thought and discussion.  Viewed sociologically in this way, marriage failure appears to have little to recommend it.  The evidence indicates that in the majority of cases it leaves the woman worse off economically and socially;  it leaves the man and perhaps also the woman badly hurt emotionally;  and -- if we can add the evidence of Wallerstein and Kelly -- it disadvantages children emotionally, economically and (sometimes) educationally. ⁽⁶⁾

This conclusion will emerge more clearly if we distinguish sharply between family breakdown as it appears from the above description and divorce as it is quite commonly conceived to occur.  One familiar picture is that of a woman who after years of struggle finally decides to leave a man who is drunken, violent, tyrannical and mean, or some combination of these, taking her children with her.  Such men do exist, and such women still go through the same agony, but they do not account for the majority of cases.  Another picture is that of a couple who, after perhaps fifteen or twenty years together, having raised their children to an age and stage where they can understand what is happening and why it seems necessary, finally decide to separate.  As John Milton put it in the seventeenth century, "it is less breach of wedlock to part with wise and quiet consent betimes, than still to fail and profane that mystery of joy and union with a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper:  for it is not the outward continuing of marriage that keeps whole that covenant, but whatsoever does most according to peace and love, whether in marriage or in divorce".  Certainly, parting with wise and quiet consent has been facilitated by the liberalisation of divorce, but it too does not account for the majority of cases.  Both of these stereotypes involve a median duration of marriage far in excess of the actual case.  The second differs from the common pattern in being a mutual decision.  The first case is a unilateral decision, but the justification of the decision is readily apparent.  Further, if the divorce epidemic is a temporary and transitional phenomenon, as optimists prefer to believe, there is little evidence that it is likely to abate.  It is true that the divorce rate has levelled off in the last few years, but that can be accounted for partly by the declining marriage rate.  Judith Wallerstein has observed of the American situation:  "Having worked with more than two thousand troubled families since 1980, I have to say that things are not getting better and divorce is not getting easier.  If anything, it is getting worse". ⁽⁷⁾  It would be difficult to show that this is not true also of Australia.

Although marital breakdown has become such a common feature of our lives no-one has managed to show how divorce of the kind described above might be seen as beneficial.  Feminism, which has dominated discussions of "sexual polities", has had surprisingly little to say about the advantages of divorce for men, children or even women, and tends to fall back on the well-worn stereotypes rather than tackling the situation that really exists.  Liberalism, which shapes so much of our thought about moral matters, avoids the subject, apparently on the grounds that ethics should not prescribe how we conduct our private lives.  Christianity and the mainstream churches, the traditional guardians of personal morality and the ethics of marriage, appear afraid of seeming illiberal and antediluvian.  Nor can it be said that conservatism has provided any notable insight into the questions at issue, partly because the questions are without historical precedent, and partly because the ethics of marriage have been for so long articulated within a Christian framework which can no longer be assumed.  The combined forces of strident feminism and complacent liberalism seem to have silenced any more reasonable voices. ⁽⁸⁾

What is most immediately visible about the current ethics of marriage is the considerable gap between profession and practice.  The marriage ceremony in either its traditional form or in the forms commonly used by civil celebrants seems to bear little relation to the outcome of many marriages.  The couple swear to care for each other through thick and thin and for as long as they both shall live, but in a great many cases they do not manage to clear even the first hurdle down the track.  This may be because the ceremony itself no longer expresses our aspirations and firm intentions or it may be because we now find those intentions too difficult to fulfil.  Neither explanation seems very plausible.  The hurdles are no higher than they have ever been -- they may well be lower than ever before -- and people's express ambitions are no lower than in past times.

That about a third of all marriages now end in divorce is a fact which everyone intending to marry should be required to understand;  it is also a fact which bears strongly upon the way in which we as a society think about the institution of marriage.  Marriage as it exists today is (to vary the metaphor) an institution with its head in the clouds and its feet on the edge of quicksand.  The fault lies not in the institution itself but in our failure to think realistically about its capacities and purposes.  And to think realistically about this involves re-thinking the legal and social welfare frameworks within which marriage and divorce function.  The strategy of this chapter will be to discuss first the law of marriage and divorce, then to consider the system of welfare benefits and pensions, and lastly to look at the response of welfare services to family breakdown.

THE ROLE OF THE LAW

We get married in churches or in some other public ceremony, and we divorce in court.  Yet perhaps we choose these locations badly.  Marriage, it might be argued, should take place in court and divorce in church or in public.  Such a reversal might inject some salutary realism into the first act, and impose a degree of equally-desirable mutuality and respect upon the second.  We need not take this suggestion entirely seriously to see that it makes a serious point.

Part of the argument in the previous chapter was that the 1976 Family Law Act should not be seen as in itself a major cause of family breakdown:  the causes are social, not legal.  But it would be question-begging to infer from this that the Act as it stands is appropriate to the social situation.  Even very bad laws need not themselves be causes of publicly-visible distress.  The main victims of the present divorce trend are children, whose opinion in these matters is not consulted.  Nor does it follow that because there is at present no great public pressure to change the law, there is no need for intelligent discussion about what an appropriate legal system might be.  So the first questions here are legal.

The most powerful justification for no-fault divorce is that the state is in no good position to effectively determine the rights and wrongs of marriage disputes;  only the couple themselves are in a position to do this.  This is an extension of the generally-accepted principle that the state should stay out of internal family matters.  This principle is, we have argued, one which should be breached only in extremes:  the question is therefore whether divorce is such an extreme?  Clearly it is not in the case where a couple without children agree to separate.  But the matter is less clear where the interests of the children are likely to be affected by divorce.  In placing limits on domestic violence, for instance, the state recognises that not everything that happens between spouses can be regarded with indifference by society, and it might be argued that a unilateral decision to break up a relationship is comparable to an act of violence against children.  The state might decide that in some instances the interests of children who are innocent third parties may come before the interests of the parents who seek separation.  At least, the general liberal principle of non-interference will not by itself show that the state has no role in protecting those interests.

The family is a society within a society, and the act of marriage is the act of forming a new society.  This act is essentially a private act -- the role of the state at a marriage ceremony is merely to register the existence of the new society (and to see that the relationship is not bigamous).  Indeed, marriage is so much a private agreement that even this registration is not essential to the formation of a family, a fact which we and the law recognise in speaking of long-term sexual and communal partnerships as de facto "marriages".  The primary purpose of state registration is not to regulate the conduct of a marriage but to take note that children of that partnership belong to the married couple and to be on hand to supervise the deregistration and dissolution of the partnership if and when it occurs.  The essential point here is that the ending of a marriage cannot easily occur without some form of independent arbitration, though it need not be arbitration by state agencies.  The main thing required here is someone of mature intelligence whose judgement can be respected by both parties.  There is no reason why any person with the capacity to win such respect should not be able to set up in business as a private arbitrator (the equivalent for divorce of a marriage civil celebrant).  But in the last resort there is an inescapable role for the state in the ending of a marriage because the terms of the dissolution will sometimes require enforcement, if only to protect the interests of children.  This can only occur if those terms are known to the state, so all private arbitrations would need to be registered with a state office.

One primary reason why divorce is difficult, messy and so frequently unjust is that the parties themselves have never articulated the terms by which they understand their relationship to have been conducted during the lifetime of the marriage.  In general these terms have to be derived by the courts from the common assumptions of the community and from the traditions of the law, and neither of these is very helpful when the community is divided about basic tenets and the law itself has failed to adapt to the complexities of the issues.  In attempting to untangle these knots there are two methods possible.  One is to stipulate by legislation some general conception of the purpose and nature of marriage.  The other is to require the parties themselves to stipulate the terms of their own relationship (allowing them to renegotiate the terms as they find necessary).

The first approach is attractive largely because there is a framework available which seems to cover our most basic intuitions about the institution.  Marriage, we commonly think, is a partnership between equals.  Unfortunately, this assumption is not readily reconciled with the no-fault doctrine.  People's contributions to a relationship are not always easily comparable, and inequality in fact can be the main reason why a marriage is ending.  To insist that two parties are to be treated equally even when they are radically unequal in what they have contributed seems plainly unjust.

This conflict is unwittingly demonstrated in a recent book which argues from a liberal feminist standpoint for the equal partnership position in relation to property settlements.  In their conclusion to For Richer, For Poorer:  Money, Marriage and Property Rights, Jocelynne Scutt and Di Graham seek to clinch their argument that "Under a system of equal rights to marital assets, all women would be better off because all would receive 50 per cent of all assets" by describing two 1984 High Court cases. ⁽⁹⁾  In one, a successful businessman's wife was awarded 34 per cent of their combined assets.  In the other the hard-working wife of an apparently irresponsible man was awarded 70 per cent of their assets.  In a system of judicial discretion much depends on the details of these cases and different judges will reach different conclusions.  Under an equal partnership arrangement both wives would get half of the assets, which would advantage the first but disadvantage the second.  Scutt and Graham contend that both wives have suffered injustice but they do not observe that their own preferred solution would rectify one of these injustices at the same time as it would aggravate the other.  Earlier in the book they take the view that in a marriage where one of the parties believes the other is not pulling his or her weight they should either decide to leave and cut their losses at a fifty:fifty settlement or they should be prepared to put up with their partner's faults.  All of this is a logical deduction from the two starting principles:  equal partnership and no-fault settlements.  But whether it is the best way to deal with divorce disagreements is still debatable because of the apparent injustice which even Scutt and Graham feel has been suffered by the wife in the second of the above two cases.

There is no need to take a general position here on the issue of property settlements.  Property is important whether we are well-off or not, but to most of us children are even more important.  If property settlements are difficult on the equal partnership assumption, custody settlements are almost impossible.  Assets at least are divisible;  children, on the whole, are not.  There are only three ways of "dividing up" children:  joint custody;  alternating custody;  and in families with more than one child, the division of the children between the parents.  Joint custody presupposes that the parents are willing and able to cooperate, which is likely to be rare when, as we have seen, the great majority of divorces are not mutually agreed.  The law seems not to favour alternating custody arrangements, though there would appear to be something to be said in their favour.  Perhaps the objection is that switching between parents would unsettle the children, though it is not clear why this should be more of a problem than with joint custody.  The division of children between the parents has the drawback of separating siblings from each other at a time when they no doubt need each other's company, but it may be workable in some cases.  All three solutions are painful to both parents and children.  And apart from these three options there is no arrangement which comes even close to embodying the notion of equal partnership.  So much of the bitterness of divorce arises from the fact that most disputed custody settlements require what will seem to the loser a "winner take all" result.  The bitterness is compounded by the fact that the loser usually has to pay maintenance for the children he or she has lost.

The weaknesses of the equal partnership interpretation as a device for settling divorce disputes are apparent:  it can disadvantage partners of poor contributors to a marriage, and it is little help in achieving equitable solutions to custody conflicts.  Is there any better answer?  The alternative to a general judicially-imposed principle of equality in the interpretation of the marriage contract seems to be to require the parties themselves to specify more clearly the terms they wish their contract to bear.  This approach satisfies the intuitively strong assumption that marriage is an association of equals, for both partners will have an equal say in writing the contract.  But its main advantage is that it would relieve some of the enormous burden of interpretation borne at present by the courts.  It would give the judges some guidelines about how each particular couple understood the terms of their relationship.  Most importantly, it could provide guidance about how the ending of the relationship is to be conducted.

The Christian assumption of lifelong marriage and the romantic belief in endless connubial bliss -- two otherwise very different views of the world -- have conditioned us to evade responsibility for these problems, but even the mildest realism now requires a change of outlook.  Individualised contracts can easily be parodied:  will they specify who is to wash and who to dry the dishes?  But there is no need to descend to this level of absurdity.  The main points which require clarification in marriage are:  Should the marriage end by mutual consent only or can the decision be unilateral?  After what period of time is breakdown to be considered "irretrievable"?  By what criteria should custody disputes be settled?  Should all property be divided fifty:fifty?  These are matters which do vary from couple to couple and it is too much to expect the courts to be able to discover each couples' preferences.

One major advantage of individualised contracts is that, unlike the present Act, they do not require the fiction that fault has no causal role in family breakdown.  As Patrick Tennison has remarked, "In working from the concept that neither party is to be blamed for the marriage breakdown, the [Family] Court can completely ignore blame where it demonstrably exists.  In doing this it has rewarded the blameworthy and penalised the blameless in times and ways which have been a disgrace to any legal jurisdiction."  Ronald Conway adds that "Tennison's criticism is incontestable when one realises that the desertion of a spouse and children without grave reason is a breach of marriage, yet it is not regarded as such by the Family Court". ⁽¹⁰⁾  Desertion, without grave reason, which involves taking the children and then managing to get custody of them through the Family Court because the Court does not want to disturb the children's status quo seems even more reprehensible, being something akin to child theft, even though legalised by the courts.

It is of course true that in many marital failures the causes of and responsibilities for failure are complex.  Nevertheless, in some cases the responsibility is relatively clear-cut, and in others the issue is not who is at fault but what constitutes a fault for this particular couple.  A system torn between appealing to general but vague "community standards", and privately specific but publicly unspecified marital preferences, is attempting to reconcile irreconcilables.  It is a vital principle of jurisprudence that the law must be as certain as it can be.  The only way to restore some certainty is to return the onus of definition back to the marriage parties themselves.  Until this is done both marriage and the law will suffer.

Any discussion proposing a reintroduction of fault is open to the charge that it will restore all the evils of the old Act.  Gordon Goldberg, a lawyer who has argued the case for individualised contracts, answers this objection in this way:

The great fault under the Matrimonial Causes Act was that it prevented people from regulating their own affairs, so that divorce could be achieved only on certain restricted and often quite silly grounds.  The virtue of the Act was that it let people fight over the issues that really concerned them, that it made a person's rights dependent upon the fulfilment of his obligations and that it protected a person who had developed just expectations from a promise freely given in return for a promise which he or she had given.  The fault of the current Act is that it talks about rights with no question of duty and its virtue is that it lets people regulate their own affairs so that they can dissolve a marriage when they both want to.  The virtue, which each Act has and had, is that which it shares with the general law of contract;  the vice which each Act has and had is the distinction between it and the general law of contracts. ... Because the Matrimonial Causes Act was too far on one side and the Family Law Act too far on the other, what we should be looking for is a compromise and the obvious compromise is a contract;  marriage should be treated as a contract just like any other relationship between two sensible human beings. ⁽¹¹⁾

Goldberg envisages three kinds of marriage:  one, dissoluble only by mutual consent;  two, a partnership dissoluble by either party giving notice to the other (he favours a two-year notice period, but this term might be set by the parties themselves);  and thirdly, marriage dissoluble by death, by mutual consent or for just cause where just cause consists of either of two sorts of breach, "one which develops through nobody's fault which a contract lawyer would call frustration ... and one which develops through fault or default".

Goldberg would also like marriage contracts to specify provisions for custody.  It is his opinion (or it was in 1981) that "the results of many custody cases are a lottery", and he emphasises the importance of having certainty in the law.  But it might be thought inappropriate to have about-to-be-married couples discussing the post-divorce care of children they do not yet have.  (Many may not even have discussed whether they intend to have children.)  Even if we think this, Goldberg's clarification of the different kinds of marriage would seem to ease the difficulty of custody problems.  In marriage dissoluble only by mutual consent, the parties would not part unless they had agreed on a custody settlement.  In the third kind of marriage there might be a term or a presumption that custody goes to the party not responsible for a breach by fault or default.  In cases of breach by frustration difficulties would remain.  The second kind of marriage, dissoluble unilaterally (as at present), would not remove custody conflicts, but assuming that only a minority of couples chose it, such conflicts would be reduced.

One obvious objection to individualised contracts is that an about-to-be-married couple are in no frame of mind to think clearly about such painful matters.  But the terms of the contract could be re-negotiated at later intervals in accordance with the progress or regress of the relationship.  In any case, to require such couples to face the realities of the present situation from the start may well be salutary.  Divorce now has a large measure of community acceptance yet the causes and effects of divorce and breakdown have hardly begun to penetrate our common consciousness.  It seems probable that one important cause of divorce is the fact that both parties enter marriage quite unprepared for difficulties.  Anything which promotes awareness that there are hurdles to be faced at one time or another can only help to strengthen marriage.

Marriage, it seems, is an institution which corresponds to many of our most basic desires and aims.  But some of those desires are unrealistic;  and sometimes our aims change.  In many circumstances we can alter our behaviour to suit ourselves, but in marriage there are other persons -- most importantly children -- whose wishes and needs also have to be taken into account.  A legal framework which allows people to modify their relationships according to those changes is desirable, and contracts are one way of doing this.  It is, however, an important observation that the notion of contract sounds alien to the description of family life.  Family relations are essentially or ideally permanent relations, and their imprint remains (genetically, for instance) even when they become fractured.  It would certainly be better to fight the divorce epidemic by reinforcing the importance of this permanence, but that is a cultural task and cannot be achieved by public policy.  What public policy can do is fight the epidemic with its own weapons.  If marriage is to be treated as a contract then let it be a real contract, and not a mere instrument of one person's will.

Marriage is not endlessly modifiable at the wish of one party only.  Karl Marx once observed that "Nobody is forced to enter into a marriage, but everybody must be forced to make up his mind that he will obey the laws of marriage when he enters into it.  A person entering into marriage does not make or invent it, just as a swimmer does not invent nature and the laws of water and gravity". ⁽¹²⁾  About the first of these propositions Marx was right;  about the second he was wrong.  A person -- or more correctly, a couple -- may in entering marriage "invent" some of its terms.  But once they enter marriage those terms will then be as morally binding upon them as the laws of water are upon the swimmer.  And what holds here for marriage holds also for divorce.  To rethink the nature of marriage in this way is to attempt a basic change to a fundamental social institution, but such a change would be no more radical than the changes which have already occurred, and which have necessitated such rethinking.  Almost all present discussion of family law starts from the two assumptions that have been challenged here:  that it is the job of the state to standardise the terms of marriage;  and that it is never the job of an arbiter to sort out the rights and wrongs of marriage dissolution in families with children.  At the least we should be prepared to question these assumptions.

WELFARE ASSISTANCE

As we have seen, the basic causes of family breakdown are mainly personal, cultural and ideological, not economic or legal.  But it remains the case that governments can seriously exacerbate the effects of those basic causes.  The first line of public policy is legal, and we have argued that the law relating to marriage and divorce is seriously defective, leaving many families in crisis in a worse state than they were before they took their problems into the public arena.  The second line of public policy is in the welfare domain, and it will be argued that the policies we presently have here are equally inappropriate to the situation they attempt to deal with.

The 1976 Family Law Act, the divorce revolution and the upsurge in welfare spending on benefits and pensions for sole parents are, of course, all different manifestations of a single phenomenon, family breakdown.  To devise an appropriate welfare policy for dealing with this phenomenon requires some account of that phenomenon and its causes, but government policy in this area has attempted to be studiously neutral about the nature and causes of family breakdown.  There has, for instance, never been a government inquiry into the subject, though the changes in the past twenty years have been massive, and governments delight in inquiries into almost every other aspect of social life.  The closest that government has come to considering the matter is in the recent Social Security Review Issues Paper Bringing Up Children Alone:  Policies for Sole Parents by Judy Raymond, a paper which makes an intelligent contribution to our understanding of many matters related to sole parenthood but which fails essentially because its account of family breakdown is very inadequate.

The objectives of welfare policy for sole parents are not often articulated.  One attempt at such a statement was proposed by Alan Jordan in a 1982 Department of Social Security paper entitled Sole Parents on Pensions.  In his view there are six aims to be kept in mind:

(1) to maintain a level of income sufficient for parents and children to survive without undue hardship, and without undue detriment to the future prospects of the children, and (2) to raise this minimum as permitted by the prosperity of the community, while (3) not discouraging the parent's efforts to improve on the minimum and (4) minimising long-run costs to the community.  Two formal or procedural objectives may be added to these substantive objectives:  in administration of the provisions (5) to maintain equity between members of the population of sole parents, and between that population, other families and other individuals, and (6) at the least possible cost, to maintain a high degree of accuracy in determination of entitlements and making of payments. ⁽¹³⁾

Jordan makes no mention of preventing family breakdown as a reasonable policy goal, though he does observe that there is a need to ensure equity between sole parent families and two-parent families.  Discussion in recent times has focussed on (3) and (4), not discouraging the parent's efforts to improve on the minimum and minimising long-run costs to the community.  Before taking up a position on the economics of sole parenthood we need to tackle the questions of ethics and equity.

Public opinion on policies concerning sole parenthood is deeply divided, and feelings run high when the subject is discussed.  In matters which raise such passions it is often the case that there is powerful and plausible imagery at work on both sides.  The dominant stereotypes are of just the sort required to arouse such passions.  One is the maltreated or deserted wife who fights to protect and preserve the integrity of her family against a violent or negligent husband.  The other is the woman who breaks up her family for personal reasons, taking her children with her and leaving their father in the position of having access to them for brief periods every second weekend.  Both of these stereotypes contain enough plausibility to get a grip on public discussion.  The difficulty they present is that any policy designed to help the woman in the first case is likely to assist the woman in the second and thus further injure the man in the second.  And vice versa:  any policy designed to help the man in the second case is likely to hurt the woman in the first.  Two questions follow here:  One, are these accurate ways of characterising the situation?  Two, if they are, can we help those who need help without hurting others who also need it?

To consider the first question we need to return to the composite picture of family breakdown.  The relevant points are these:  Sole parents are not by origin an especially disadvantaged section of society.  Most are women who have instigated separations unilaterally;  most have done so for reasons to do with emotional imbalances in their marriages;  relatively few are the victims of violence or other forms of extreme maltreatment;  many have separated within the first ten years of the marriage;  most have taken with them young dependent children, and have managed to obtain custody of them.  There will be, of course, many exceptions to this picture, and some of them will be cases of deserted or maltreated women, but social policy needs to keep some account of the overall situation with which it is dealing.

It may seem as if the pictures at issue are somewhat melodramatic, with fully-fledged heroes or heroines and villains or villainesses.  This need not be so.  The interaction between marriage partners is notoriously complex, and it is foolish to assume that in any marriage breakup one party is innocent and the other wholly to blame.  People who commit acts of violence against their spouse or who break up their family may well deserve some form of social assistance.  But they will deserve these as persons, and not for what they have done.  It is only the act of violence or desertion which public policy has a role in preventing or restraining, most especially because these are known to adversely affect children.  A society which takes a definite stand against these acts is not lapsing into a primitive moralism;  it is merely recognising that marriage does entail some obligations and that it is not a licence to inflict pain and suffering on one another, or, more importantly still, upon children.

Policy in this area need not seek to disadvantage single parents, and it would be unwise if it were to do so, for some of them are greatly to be admired and fully deserve social support.  The aim of such a policy must be to be, as far as possible, neutral about the general phenomenon.  A neutral policy would be one which gave single-parent families exactly the same support that it gave to two-parent families.  At present, as we have seen, two-parent families in Australia get little or no support from the rest of society.  Under the present system a policy of neutrality would give most single-parent families merely a Family Allowance for each child, with Family Allowance Supplement for families with incomes low enough to be eligible.  This book has argued that this level of support is a wholly inadequate form of recognition for the work that families do.  Neutrality would recognise that two-parent families do exactly the same work as that done by single-parent families and have exactly the same needs that they have, and it would assist both equally.  Such a policy would meet Jordan's fifth objective, that of maintaining equity between sole parent families and other families.

Jordan's first policy objective was "to maintain a level of income sufficient for parents and children to survive without undue hardship, and without undue detriment to the future prospects of the children".  It is of course commonly believed that sole parents have greater needs than other families, and much has been said and written about the poverty suffered by single-parent families.  The prevention of child poverty is one of the official objectives of the present Government, and (if we can trust the standard "poverty line" criteria, which is very doubtful) most child poverty is single-parent poverty.  There appears to be an insoluble conflict between preventing child poverty and not rewarding single parenthood, at least within the constraints imposed by the present legal framework.  This tension is apparent in Jordan's paper when he notes that:  "On the one hand, sole parents are favoured.  They are the only category with substantial earning capacity entitled to income security payments free of work test.  If actually in the labour force, they are entitled to supplementation of comparatively substantial earnings. ... On the other hand, the depressed economic status of sole parents as a group could be and often is taken as evidence that they are victims of inequity". ⁽¹⁴⁾  However, it is now clear that the poverty of sole parents is not caused by pre-existing inequalities, but by the fact that they have become sole parents.

Here we need to distinguish between being income poor and being resource poor.  Sole parents may well be income poor, but they are not generally resource poor, as can be seen from their educational qualifications.  Family breakdown is today clearly the main cause of what is called "child poverty", but most child poverty is "income poverty", not "resources or assets poverty".  Jordan's Common Treasury found that the educational differences between married and sole mothers were very slight:

The differences in educational status are unremarkable overall, a slightly higher proportion of sole mothers having no formal qualification.  Looked at more closely, that small difference turns out to be interesting.  Of sole mothers with children under five, and themselves presumably younger rather than older, 47 per cent left school before age 16, as compared with 35 per cent of married mothers with children under five.  And, that disaggregation being performed, sole mothers whose youngest children are older than five resemble married mothers more closely.  We have here another indication ... that the population [of sole mothers] contains a small, fairly distinct group of educationally dis-advantaged young single mothers with young children. ... ⁽¹⁵⁾

As Jordan has observed, "The main apparent reason for sole mothers being so much worse off than other women is not that they suffer from particular disadvantages or that they choose not to work, but that they have no husbands". ⁽¹⁶⁾  They are only victims of injustice if they suffered injustice in becoming a single parent, and this is a moral and legal question rather than an economic one.  To discuss and to deal with the causes of child poverty we need to consider the phenomenon of family breakdown. ⁽¹⁷⁾  But we also need to distinguish between income poverty and resource poverty.

But if sole parents are not victims of economic inequity, are they a favoured category entitled to income security payments free of work test?  The answer to this question is not quite straightforward, because, as this book has argued, the work of caring for children may be seen as an important contribution to society.  Thus, although sole parents are not required to be available for work in the paid workforce, they are assumed to be working in the unpaid workforce.  A society might choose to make caring for children in the family an occupation deserving of social support, but if we were to do this equity would require us to do it for all who performed this work, irrespective of whether they were single or married.  It follows that payments to single parents for their work as parents are justified only if the same payments are made to anyone who does the same work.  Without equity of this sort, as at present, they do have to be regarded as a favoured category.  Until we are prepared to provide such general support for parents at home with children, sole parents should be expected to be at least partly self-supporting.  The general position has to be that society will support the children of sole parents at the level it supports all children.

Although there has been no very clear rationale for welfare assistance to sole parent families, one reason for its introduction was the absence of any effective enforcement of maintenance payments by non-custodial parents.  The failure by many non-custodial parents to provide for their children made state income support appear a necessity.  But these two wrongs do not cancel each other out:  the failures of the maintenance system should not have been remedied by conscripting assistance from intact families.  Society cannot and should not prevent couples from divorcing if they agree that separation is the best course of action for all concerned, but it can and must insist that the end of a marriage is not the end of a person's responsibility for their children.  That principle is now widely accepted and is embodied in the Child Support Scheme introduced in 1988.  The "fundamental precept" behind the Scheme is that "During the children's financial dependency they should share in [their] parents' financial circumstances just as they would if they were growing up with both parents". ⁽¹⁸⁾  To put the same point differently, parents' financial responsibilities to their children do not change when the parents cease to be married or to live together.  This precept needs now to be applied to the custodial as well as to the non-custodial parent.

While the details of the new scheme are debatable, the assumption that society is entitled to enforce support, even by use of the taxation system as a collector of payments, is not in doubt.  The scheme cannot hope to catch all defaulters, for not all non-custodial parents can be found or identified.  In such cases welfare payments will be needed at a level higher than that given to other families.  But the general rule should be to treat "broken" families no differently from intact families.  Society should require both parents to contribute fairly to the joint enterprise of child-rearing, regardless of whether the parents choose to live together.  Some sole parent families do suffer from both income poverty and resource poverty, but so also do some two-parent families;  the state should treat them each alike.

A policy of equalisation of assistance for all family forms, it will be objected, will only plunge sole-parent families even deeper into poverty, and thus harm thousands of innocent children.  But this does not follow.  There are a number of ways by which it is possible for single parents to support themselves.  Many manage to combine parenthood with full-time or part-time work, just as many married mothers manage this combination.  This solution has all the attendant stresses of maternal employment, but it can improve the mother's self-confidence at the same time as it raises the family standard of living.  To what degree this solution actually makes the family genuinely self-supporting depends on whether there are less-than-obvious state subsidies in the provision of childcare.

Having the care of children is both a barrier to workforce participation and a reason for being at home to care for the children, particularly when they are young.  But it is possible for a parent to stay at home with the children when they are young and still be self-supporting.  Parents who want to do this can be given loans (over and above their entitlements to general family assistance) to cover the costs incurred at this stage of their lives.  Such loans could be interest-free (but indexed for inflation) and repayable in instalments when the parent is able to return to the workforce.  Loans of this kind would allow single parents to raise their living standards above the levels permitted by present social security payments.  Most single parents remarry or re-partner within about five years of divorce, and will thus share in a regular source of income from which to make repayments.  And those who do not will still be likely to spend fifteen or twenty years in the paid workforce after the children reach school-age or leave home.  This solution seems the only morally neutral resolution of the conflict between the equity claims of single and two-parent families, and it is thus in keeping with the moral neutrality required by the Family Law Act.  It is also a legitimate extension of the feminist assumption that women should be independent self-supporting members of society.  The argument is not that there should be no assistance to single-parent families, only that they should get exactly the same assistance as that given to two-parent families.  (Actually, interest-free loans constitute a subsidy, but a small one.)  This goal can be achieved either by lowering assistance to single parents or raising assistance to dual parents or by a combination of both.

Welfare policy has generally assumed that if a person is "poor" they therefore need public assistance.  This argument is valid for children but not for adults.  For adults we need to know how they came to be poor and whether they can support themselves before we have a good argument for assistance.  Many sole parents can support themselves at least partly while they are sole parents, and almost all will earn enough at other times to be able to pay for their needs when they have children.  Some sole parents had poverty thrust upon them, but most seem to have chosen it for reasons which remain obscure from the publicly-discoverable data.  Most have come from economically-adequate backgrounds.  Voluntary poverty is thought to be a contradiction in terms by those few people still wedded to a naive economism, but it should not surprise anyone who lived through the 1960s and 1970s.  It is easy to think that because someone suffered a large drop in income when they left their spouse, they must have had, or believed they had, some very compelling reason for doing so.  This reasoning is plausible enough, as far as it goes.  But it ignores the fact that in most cases their spouse did not believe there was a good reason for the breakup.  Welfare policy does not need to take sides in this domestic dispute, which from an outsider's viewpoint is just one person's word against another's.  But to take a person's act of becoming poor as proof that they had no choice is hardly better than taking their word that they had no choice.

It will be objected that this interpretation of the plight of sole parents is mean-spirited and inhumane.  This objection fails to understand both the role of the state and the nature of generosity.  It is the state's first task to see that justice is done.  Misplaced generosity is dangerous just because it may exacerbate injustice.  The present system of support for sole parents does this, because it tends to facilitate family breakdown and to thus bring about unnecessary suffering to children, and because it penalises two-parent families financially.  Those who want a more generous society should look around for better objects to support.  Within the welfare field they might advocate special support for couples caught in the cycle of chronic domestic violence, or for widowed sole parents, whose situation is by definition involuntary and whose needs might well be better catered for than those of the other categories.  Or they might choose to advocate the cause of foster parents, who care for children from broken and unhappy families but receive minimal remuneration for this important and difficult task.

What makes divorce and separation clearly different from most other events for which we provide welfare assistance is that it is a voluntary act and not an accident.  It is not necessary here to claim that the relationship breakdown which usually precedes divorce or separation is wholly subject to avoidable voluntary decisions.  What is clear is that voluntariness enters into the question more than in any other welfare matter.  It is obviously unjust to require couples who stay together to pay for the actions of other couples who, in the same circumstances, choose to separate.  We can reasonably presume that all marriages are, at one time or another, subject to the sort of pressures which presently cause break-ups.  (If we had a strong causal account of family breakdown we might not make this assumption, but as we do not the assumption should stand.)  It follows that the only fair form of family assistance is one which assists all families, those which separate and those which do not.

It is sometimes argued that we need special support for sole parents on the grounds that divorce "could happen to anyone".  Since the divorce phenomenon is widespread and unpredictable this has some plausibility, but it is not a reason for supporting only families which break up.  We should support all families equally because all relationships suffer occasional crises, because staying together is socially important and valuable, and because those who stay together should not be penalised.  General family support through the financially difficult child-rearing years helps even families which eventually break up, by improving their home-buying chances for instance.  It may also help couples to stay together.  On the other hand, a system which assists families only if they break up must, in a matter which is so significantly voluntary, distort behaviour.

Full "minimum" incomes for sole parents, it has been argued, are both unnecessary (because sole parents are capable of being partially self-supporting) and unjust (if they go to one-parent families only, and not to all families with children).  It is sometimes said that, on standard liberal grounds, the state should be neutral about the form and structure of families, just as it should be neutral about how people raise their children or how many children they choose to have, etc.  In other words, the state should not step in to prop up the two-parent family, if the general trend of people's preferences is away from that form of family.  This claim may be reasonable enough but it misconstrues the real situation.  At present, as we have seen in previous chapters, the state supports single-parent families but not two-parent families.  There is no proof that single-parent families, as such, have greater needs than the traditional family.  Their special needs arise only from the failure of the state in the past to see that non-custodial parents contribute fairly to the costs of their children.  All parenting can be stressful and difficult -- and those who manage to keep their families together may do so only by means of much effort and self-sacrifice.  To say this is not to say that those who succeed in keeping their family together are better people than those who do not, only that what they have succeeded in doing is important and valuable, and that fairness or "neutrality" requires some recognition of this.  Society, though it does have a role in supporting all families, has no obligation to subsidise family breakdown.

WORKFORCE PARTICIPATION

We are now in a position to move from ethical and equity questions to economic matters, and to consider the more frequently-discussed of Jordan's objectives, "not discouraging sole parents' efforts to improve on the minimum level of benefit payments" and "minimising long-run costs to the community".  Both of these objectives are met more effectively by the policy proposed to deal with the equity question than by any other solution which has yet been put forward.  The strategy will be even more effective if sole parent families are included in a system of family-based taxation, as they would be.

There is some good evidence that the present system of payments to sole parents does discourage their workforce participation.  Judy Raymond reports that "the proportion of female sole parents in the labour force has declined from 45.1 per cent in 1974 and 47.9 per cent in 1975 to 40.8 per cent in 1985, while the proportion of male sole parents has declined from from 94.7 per cent to 79.0 per cent over the same period".  This decline might be regarded as a consequence of a declining labour market were it not for the fact that in the same period married mothers have been steadily increasing their labour force participation rate -- "from 40.7 per cent in 1974 to 50.5 per cent in 1985", according to Raymond. ⁽¹⁹⁾  Any theory of sole parent work effort must explain this simultaneous downward trend for one population and upward trend for the other, where the two groups appear similar in every way except in their differing access to social security benefits.

These contrasting trends are today not as striking as they were in 1985.  Since then, part-time work by sole mothers has increased rapidly, so that now about 50 per cent of them are in the labour force, a figure close to that for married mothers.  However, this does not invalidate the claim that sole mothers are less disposed to seek paid work than married mothers.  Undoubtedly, the biggest workforce "barrier" for all mothers is children.  In this regard sole mothers have considerably less to "overcome" than married mothers.  According to Jordan's research, whereas 30 per cent of married mothers have only one child, the figure for sole mothers is as high as 54 per cent.  According to ABS figures, sole-parent families have on average 1.7 children, and two-parent families 2.2 children. ⁽²⁰⁾  The chances that a sole mother will have all her children at school for most of the day are therefore much higher -- perhaps twice as high -- as for married mothers.  This fact makes the actual work patterns even less explicable than is commonly assumed.  These differences between married and other mothers is confirmed by the ABS Time Use Pilot Survey which shows that married mothers spend about 20 per cent more time per day on all labour force, domestic and child-minding activities than do sole mothers, despite having fewer children on average. ⁽²¹⁾

On the face of it part-time work would seem to be the best way to combine childcare and income supplementation, as many married mothers have decided.  And as Jordan has remarked, sole mothers in the work force "are entitled to supplementation of comparatively substantial earnings". ⁽²²⁾  The most obvious explanation of the fact that relatively few sole parents seek part-time work is, then, that many find they can live quite adequately on a full pension.  The most obvious policy requirement if we believe that they should become more self-supporting is to lower the level of full benefits and pensions, while reinforcing maintenance payment requirements.  The present system of welfare payments is both inefficient -- because it discourages sole parents from working when they would otherwise willingly do so -- and inequitable -- because it favours one kind of family over another.  Removing this inequity would solve the efficiency problem, because it would remove the greatest barrier to sole parents' workforce participation, social security payments.

Whatever the justice of this argument, the conclusion is so contrary to current practice and ideology that it could not be implemented without considerable public argument.  For practical purposes policy need not be as rigid as strict justice would require.  A compromise position might allow welfare payments of the present scale for a limited duration -- say for the first few months after separation.  However, some reform is also required at the point of first receiving payments.  At present it is possible for a person to obtain payments simply by presenting themselves at the counter of an office of the Department of Social Security and claiming to be separated from their spouse.  The breakup of a family, which this act signifies, is not to be treated as merely a switch from one source of income to another.  We need an arrangement here which gives some weight to the symbolic and social importance of this step.  The most obvious such arrangement would be to require couples facing separation in which one partner is applying for welfare assistance to seek low-cost marriage guidance counselling aimed at reconciling their difficulties.

PREVENTION AND GUIDANCE

So far it has not been argued that benefits and pensions cause family breakdown.  The argument has been about establishing an equitable relationship between single-parent and two-parent families, and about whether we should expect single parents to be partly self-supporting.  It was not claimed that pensions and benefits cause breakdown, because in only a small proportion of cases is there any financial advantage created by separation.  Nor has it been claimed that sole-parent families are necessarily worse as families than two-parent families, though it has been suggested that the predominant reasons for divorce are not morally or socially acceptable reasons where children are involved.  Nevertheless, there is reason for concern both about benefits and pensions as causes of breakdown and about the quality of family life which results from a significant proportion of breakdowns.  Most important of all here is the effects on children, of the kind documented by Wallerstein and Kelly.

One response to this evidence is to promote joint custody arrangements.  This seems the best way to keep both parents involved after divorce in the future of their children.  But exactly the same reasons would lead us to do all we reasonably can to promote marital stability, even if that makes divorce less readily available.  So far joint custody arrangements have not proven to be very durable, mainly because the divorce and separation were painful and unilateral.  As these painful, unilateral separations appear to be the norm rather than the exception, there seems little likelihood of joint custody becoming a common solution to the needs of children in failing families.

Exactly the same arguments that lead us to favour joint custody whenever possible lead also to promotion of marriage guidance counselling facilities.  At present Australia spends at least $2000 million annually on caring for broken families and just over $8 million on marriage guidance to help keep families together.  The twin facts that most people who divorce marry again and that second marriages fail even more often than first ones suggest that very many people want marital success but do not know how to achieve it, whatever the qualities of their partner.  Marital failure appears to be in large part a failure of understanding, but it can also be aggravated by impatience and haste.  A recent British survey of 667 divorcees found that a quarter of the women and half the men felt that the divorce had been a mistake.  They found that, once having filed for divorce, the parties did not want to admit to the other that they might be wrong after all, and they felt impelled to carry on with the process despite doubts and misgivings. ⁽²³⁾

One way to integrate counselling into the process is to require couples seeking a divorce to register their intention at the beginning of the mandatory (though often disregarded) twelve months' separation and to offer them the possibility of counselling at that point.  They might be required to attend a panel which would explain to them their legal situation and outline for them the range of advisory services available.

By comparison with the success rate of other kinds of welfare assistance, marriage guidance counselling appears to have a good track record, yet it remains the unwanted orphan of the welfare world.  One staunch advocate of marriage guidance counselling as a means of alleviating or preventing family breakdown is the Executive Director of the Western Australian Marriage Guidance Council, Jim Crawley.  He maintains that

As the rate of marital and family breakdown has increased, and as the consequences of such breakdown have become clearer, the one thing we have studiously avoided doing is to give a clear and unequivocal commitment to prevention.  Yet nothing could be more clearly in our social and economic interests, or more clearly in keeping with the espoused values and aspirations of a large majority of the population than to espouse such a policy. ... Marriage counselling is a service whose effectiveness has been clearly established by numerous research studies, and it is a service which without doubt returns ten or twenty-fold every dollar of government funding invested in it.  Yet the network of services in Australia is fragmented and under-developed.  There are frequently long -- and therefore disastrous -- waiting lists for counselling, and services in country areas are sparse or non-existent. ⁽²⁴⁾

A report on marriage guidance counselling organisations conducted by the Australian Institute of Family Studies estimates, conservatively, that every dollar spent on marriage counselling services by the Commonwealth government results in a saving of seven dollars in other government expenditure, principally in social security benefits and legal expenses. ⁽²⁵⁾

Crawley, however, also supplies some reason for scepticism about the counselling "solution".  He is as critical of the failings of the family therapy profession as he is of the wider society which refuses to take family breakdown seriously.  Family therapy, he contends, has frequently ignored the social, economic and moral predicaments faced by those families it seeks to help;  and when it does attempt to come to terms with those predicaments it has tended to adopt extremist versions of feminism which do not reflect "the issues of concern about family life of the ordinary Australian".  Family therapy tends to "rush lemming-like after the newest fad".  It is dominated by "gurus", each "with their own unique approach, packaged for the market-place", not by those "who have done the hard work of trying to develop a flexible and eclectic repertoire of theoretical insights, interventive skills and -- above all -- clinical wisdom". ⁽²⁶⁾

Fortunately, as Moira Eastman has shown, academic psychological research on the healthy functioning of families is moving towards a consensus which can supersede the exoticism and faddishness preferred by some family therapists.  The work of (amongst others) Jerry M. Lewis and J.G. Looney, Burton L. White, Salvador Minuchin, Virginia Satir, R. Blum, R.M. Blakar and Urie Bronfenbrenner, summarised in Eastman's Family:  The Vital Factor, adds up to a new "science" of the family, one free from the limitations of behaviourism and the arbitrariness of psychotherapy and anti-psychiatry. ⁽²⁷⁾  One pleasantly surprising discovery -- surprising to the researchers themselves -- is that healthy families do exist and can be recognised.  Some of the new work began from the jaundiced anti-family premisses of R.D. Laing and David Cooper but found these assumptions untenable under scrutiny.  Eastman observes that "many, or even most, mental health professionals were raised in mid-range or severely dysfunctional families and, since they spend their time treating the products of such families, are rarely exposed to optimal health in family functioning". ⁽²⁸⁾  It was also found that professionals and lay people reached very similar conclusions about the criteria and evidence of family success.  On this evidence it appears that family therapy need not be in any way an esoteric form of treatment, but one whose principles are accessible to the patient and to the general public.  This proposition is not necessarily at odds with the conclusion of the previous chapter, that the general social causes of family breakdown are little understood.  There are different levels here:  the lack of good sociological hypotheses does not show that there cannot be what Crawley calls "clinical wisdom", just as in the medical field good general practitioners need not know anything about epidemiology.  And the best potential reservoir of such wisdom is likely to be found in mature men and women who have themselves sustained families and marriages of their own over many years.

If it is true that, despite these hopeful signs, some forms of family therapy remain radically out of touch with the wishes and concerns of those who could most benefit from sensitive and appropriate counselling then it may be asking the impossible to expect government funding processes to distinguish between the genuine and the counterfeit.  What is needed is a way of both providing funding and making counselling responsive to the reality of client's lives.  If such funding depended upon success as measured by the client, and if failure to satisfy client's wishes carried a financial penalty, then, gradually, effective family therapy would prosper and irrelevant therapy would be put out of business.

The objective must be to make marriage guidance counselling both accountable to the taxpayer and responsive to the needs and wishes of the consumer.  Even those who dispute the track record of marriage counselling could have little grounds for objection if marriage guidance agencies could be expanded at no cost at all to the taxpayer.  Suppose that the average duration of sole parents on benefits and pensions is three years and the average cost to the taxpayer of each such case is $30,000.  Marriage guidance agencies could tender for responsibility for a randomly-selected number of these families.  Such an agency would provide the advice and support needed to bring back together a higher proportion of families than is presently the case.  An agency which had responsibility for 1000 families would both make a profit for itself and reduce the cost to the taxpayer if it could meet those families' needs (including their income support costs if they do separate) for less than $30 million.  Very obviously, an agency would need to be remarkably incompetent if it could not do better than this.  If it was thought objectionable to make a profit out of helping people in marital distress the use of such profit could be regulated so that a proportion of it was used towards counselling for the prevention of marital breakdown.  If it was thought that these agencies would be successful but would not provide an adequate return to the taxpayer then they could be regulated so that a proportion of their profit went directly back into government revenues.

In any case it should be obvious that much rests on our ability to encourage and support the marriage guidance profession.  Family breakdown is unlikely to go away, and it will not become easier or more benign.  The health of families is at least as important as the health of our bodies, though it has been seriously neglected by government policy for some long time.

POVERTY AND SOCIAL BREAKDOWN

This chapter has argued that the fact that marriages are breaking down earlier requires us to think of the issue as a failure of family formation.  Couples frequently do not manage to get over the first hurdles in a marriage, most of which coincide with the arrival of first children.  But though now common, this is not the only kind of formation failure.  The real complexities arise in the formation of families where the men and possibly also the women are out of work, where they may never have had a stable job, and where they may never have seen any point in making a permanent commitment to each other.  In this situation pregnancy, especially teenage pregnancy, is a passport to semi-permanent welfare dependency.  At this end of the income scale it has to be said that supporting parent's benefit is easier, more secure and financially preferable to most of the jobs available to an unskilled teenage girl.  Swan and Bernstam point out that in Australia in 1985, sixty-eight per cent of all children born to teenagers were born out of wedlock, a figure not far behind the 89 per cent for all babies born to black teenagers in the US, and a radical increase on the 36 per cent in Australia in 1973. ⁽²⁹⁾  Eighty-three per cent of all sole parents are dependent on welfare payments, so probably an even higher percentage of teenage sole parents are welfare-dependent.  Teenage motherhood is generally thought to be a main source of lasting dependency, permanently affecting a person's chances of pursuing a satisfying work career, and passing on tendencies towards dependency in the next generation.

The question of sole parent benefits for the sub-population of genuinely disadvantaged recipients identified by Jordan in his analysis of incomes needs to be considered quite separately from the general policy question.  As McCaughey suggests, this minority comes from families with a history of low educational achievement, welfare dependency, unemployment, alcohol abuse and violence. ⁽³⁰⁾  Marriages in this section of society tend to be fragile and de facto, with a high proportion of teenage and illegitimate births.  The population includes a high proportion of Aborigines.

No-one can doubt that many families in this sub-population are chronically poor in both income and resources, and that they provide a less than optimal setting for the raising of children.  However it is far from obvious that simply providing higher levels of income support will help to return them to the mainstream of society or help to increase family success and stability.  Even more important than income support is family structural support, and any income support which is destructive of family systems will be counter-productive.  Social policy here has to face the classical dilemma of seeking both to minimise the disadvantages suffered by such families and to prevent that category of family from expanding to take advantage of the welfare assistance on offer.  It was the severity of this dilemma that caused Charles Murray to conclude that the best solution was to abolish all income transfers to this population, and that caused Lawrence Mead to argue that welfare transfers must be tied to basic "civic obligations" which promote family stability and social responsibility.  Alan Jordan skates over this dilemma when he contends that "Redistribution in favour of young lower-status couples with young children ... would automatically relieve and prevent a deal of poverty". ⁽³¹⁾  Relieving and preventing poverty are two very different objectives, and there is no a priori guarantee that they can be reconciled.  Action to achieve one objective may very well militate against the other equally important goal.  Indeed there are good grounds for believing that existing policy action has already done much to aggravate the problem of family poverty in the last fifteen years.

The question of youth homelessness, which has been given great public exposure recently, gives us one window into the larger social changes which are taking place.  Young people have always run away from home, but the evidence is clear that this phenomenon is now more widespread than at any time in the past.  Most discussion of the issue has been more symptomatic than diagnostic.  The root of the problem clearly is that the traditional causes of family stress -- alcoholism, violence, child abuse and parent/teenager conflict -- have been aggravated very greatly by an upsurge of separation, divorce, sole parenthood and strained step-parental relationships.  The evidence for this claim is clear in the Burdekin Report, Our Homeless Children.  One submission to the report from a Perth group asserted that "about three-quarters of the young people coming into Home Sharers [a refuge] were from single-parent or blended families".  A Mildura submission held that family breakdown (meaning separation and divorce) "is present in the history of 99 per cent of the young people using our service".  Evidence from Darwin and Queensland corroborated these high estimates, and none contradicted them.  An independent analysis by I. O'Connor concluded that of 100 homeless youth "40 per cent were members of reconstituted or step-families and another 26 per cent were from single parent families", a ratio about three times that to be found in the general population.  Other submissions to the report described backgrounds of family violence and alcoholism. ⁽³²⁾

Clearly (although the Burdekin Report makes little of this point), one basic objective of welfare policy must be to foster stable and successful family relationships and to make those families capable of being self-supporting in the workforce.  What other ultimate objective could there be?  The American example, in which 70 per cent of all black children are born out of wedlock -- in many areas the percentage is much higher than this -- and 50 per cent are raised in single-parent households, is one which we should study carefully in this country.  The earlier part of this chapter has dealt with the larger legal and welfare framework;  here we are concerned with the work of the welfare agencies.  But how welfare agencies might achieve the above goal is a large subject, worthy of a book in itself.  (A general survey of the multitude of small welfare operations scattered around the country, comparing methods and rates of success, could be a very useful contribution to policy debate.)  In what follows the emphasis will be on basic aims and assumptions.  The nature of any would-be solution must be dictated by the nature of the problem.  Welfare agencies cannot replace families -- family acceptance and care are irreplaceable, which is why reconciliation must be a primary goal of welfare policy.

To understand something of how family breakdown produces social breakdown, consider Chris's story, as told by him with great insight in John Embling's Fragmented Lives. ⁽³³⁾  Chris's parents separated when he was ten, and he never saw his father or his family home again.  His mother joined the sub-culture of single mothers and Chris was left free to wander the streets.  Without parental attachment his greatest fear, he says, "was of being ignored and rejected by all the other kids around the flats.  So I learned to put up with violence towards me from kids and adults. ... If you have no one to care about you, you lose interest and don't bother about yourself. ... When nobody takes any interest in you, it's like being starved".  He became inured to violence:  "you see a bloke stab someone with a knife and the blood spurts out, and next time you're handling a knife in your own flat it feels strong and warm".  At school Chris was continually in desperate trouble, yet he says he and his fellow-troublemakers would have respected any teachers who were prepared to understand "how hurt and desperate he is for his mum and dad or someone like them to take him seriously".

When Chris joined John Embling's Footscray household he transferred all his anger and "mounting, directionless violence" onto Embling and the Foundation.  A safe and caring environment was not enough to settle him down.  As Embling discovered, "Here was a boy I'd spent a considerable time with who was threatening to stick a knife into my body".  In such cases, Embling learned, it is "a matter of throwing away the books, the clichés, the ideologies. ... It was necessary to get a grip on Chris's reality, so that he could feel the strength and power of another person's life and love".  At the inevitable showdown Embling could do this only by offering Chris the chance to carry out his knife threat, so calling the bluff around which Chris's self-made street-toughened life had been built.  Embling's gamble worked, and Chris became a vital member of the Foundation's team.  Looking back on this crisis Embling remarks:  "Sometimes I feel we sell our children short, even the more desperate, defiant ones, by not giving them the true, honest force of our anger and feelings at what they are doing".

Chris's story is only one of many thousands, each following what may well be a standard pattern.  Very few have such successful outcomes.  As Embling observes,

Isn't it about time that people stopped and thought about the young male delinquent -- the person our system is producing in ever-increasing numbers?  There's nothing more conservative than your standard delinquent.  He's male, racist, sexist, mostly fascist, and totally materialistic.  He's exploitative, out for something for nothing, and a quick buck.  He's no conservationist or ecologist;  he takes what he wants because he wants to.  In other words, he's the worst kind of capitalist, not an honourable, benign one, he wants easy money and pleasure. ... He doesn't fit into the open society of individuality and choice. ... He's a person of action, not of inner reflection or sensibility, a right-wing activist often frustrated to the point of anarchy. ⁽³⁴⁾

He is, in other words, someone we could do without.  It seems a reasonable social policy objective to want to avoid producing such people, as far as possible.

But nothing can be achieved unless we understand the lessons learned by Chris and Embling.  There are two sorts of lessons, about cure and about prevention.  Cases like Chris will never be cured by impersonal or purely social means.  Even in the friendly environment of the Foundation he remained just as violent as before.  Only the discovery that another person thought him worth risking life for was enough to break through his second nature of pseudo-toughness.  Only people like John Embling prepared to take such risks will succeed in making changes for the better.  All the available welfare resources should be devoted to finding, supporting and rewarding such people.  In this area everything else is a waste of time and money.  Such work will not be done by the public service, which should see its role as fostering the (sometimes erratic) efforts and talents of others outside the conventional framework of career paths and committee meetings.  But, as Embling warns, such workers risk "over-identifying, over-compensating and, sometimes, over-indulging themselves in the turmoil of the lives of the people they deal with". ⁽³⁵⁾  This can be avoided only if we grasp the nature of the emotional hungers which result from family failure.

Chris's real troubles began when his family broke up.  Before then his life may have been difficult;  afterwards it was impossible;  and the difference between the impossible and the difficult is all the difference in the world.  Once Chris gave up hope he came to take pride in his own capacity for self-destructive behaviour.  The prevention of this downward spiral has to begin with the prevention of family breakdown.  The relevant lesson here is that having two bad parents is better than having one bad parent, and vastly better than having what is effectively no parent at all.  To say this is not to roundly condemn all single parents.  Rather, as John Embling puts this point,

a strong, caring mother is capable of raising their child to become a fully functioning and loving human being, but there also need to be uncle and aunt figures just around the corner to provide another aspect of the necessary, daily, humanising contact with other people.  Even the strongest, most capable, single parent finds it difficult to give his or her child all that is needed to make a human being. ⁽³⁶⁾

Relatively few single parents are strong and capable, and few of the families that need them most have aunts and ancles who are so readily available.  Boys without fathers or father figures very often do not learn to master the art of combining strength and gentleness, a skill which they might learn from observing a father who himself may not be good at doing that.  Boys need pride, and Chris took pride in his perverse behaviour because he had no-one to show him anything else to take pride in.

Parenthood, this book has argued, is about transmitting to the next generation self-confidence, competence and respect for others.  Parents do this by showing affection, by providing guidance and by exercising authority.  Chris missed out on all three and he failed to acquire the three corresponding attributes.  Affection without authority is as bad as authority without affection, and both need guidance to give life direction.  Chris's central problem was not poverty.  None of the things he lacked can be made up for with money alone, and exactly the same syndrome can be found at all levels of society.  Had his mother been given more "adequate" social security payments her family's condition would have been no better.  It may have been better if she had been required to work to supplement the family income.  Nor would Chris have benefited from greater social expenditure on his education.  His problem at school was to find someone who would take him seriously.

John McLeod, a former school psychologist and friend of the Foundation, summed up his years of experience with the observation that "generally when a child was in deep trouble in his or her behaviour, he or she would go out of their way to take on the strongest, most visible adults available". ⁽³⁷⁾  The only thing useful to Chris and the thousands like him is adults capable of reading this message and responding with both authority and affection.  To assume that because Chris acts tough he is to be treated like a fully-formed adult is to fall for one of the oldest tricks in the book.  To treat his difficulties as economic is to fall for an only slightly more sophisticated version of the same trick.  Rather than blaming "society" for destroying the lives of Chris and his kind, we should be not be afraid to give them "the true, honest force of our anger and feelings at what they are doing" when they try to destroy themselves and others.  Only then will they know that they are being taken seriously as potential adults.  And if "society" is to be blamed then it is for not taking seriously the importance of marriage and family life rather than for any alleged economic injustices it may have perpetrated.

Having for so long neglected family needs and taken lightly family responsibilities we are now having to deal with the social destructiveness which is a natural consequence of this indifference.  We know that in the most severe cases of family failure both the criminal justice system and the conventional welfare approaches are of very little help.  (Providing the equivalent of adult unemployment benefit to homeless youth, as the Burdekin Report recommended, is likely merely to multiply the homeless population, which undoubtedly contains some who prefer the excitement of life on the streets to the boredom, restrictions and tension of life at home.)  The most eloquent and hopeful testimony given to the ABC television program on youth homelessness, Nobody's Children, came from a former young criminal.  Speaking of the army-style Wilderness Work Camp in the Northern Territory, he said:

When I first came here I had a bad attitude.  I was an arsehole.  I wouldn't do what I was told.  I hated the world and the world hated me.  Do a little while here and then you realise how good it is for you.  Not just in your head, deep down you know, deep down it really changes you.  You start caring for things.  You start respecting people.  You're not the only person in the world.  There are a lot of other people, you meet them half-way.

Welfare programs which can produce testimony like this are surely worthy of public assistance.  Not all need follow an army-style approach, but approaches which offer only sympathy seem unlikely to get to the heart of the matter.  In this case the camp provided the direction and authority and pride which had been missing from the family background.  The cost of such programs needs to be weighed against the cost of long-term welfare dependence and social disruptiveness. ⁽³⁸⁾

The worst possible approach to this issue is one which assigns the task of providing authority and direction to one kind of agency -- the police and the courts -- and the task of giving assistance and sympathy to another, the welfare system, with the two kinds of agency either distant from or even hostile to each other.  This approach, though common, fails to provide the coherent combination of love and discipline more or less characteristic of most families, and leads only to further confusion and alienation.

The destructiveness discussed here is more a male than a female phenomenon, though not exclusively so.  Severe family breakdown, apart from releasing such destructiveness, also tends to perpetuate itself in the next generation through failures of family formation.  This is not an invariable rule -- some victims respond by fighting fiercely to achieve the stability which they themselves missed out on when young -- but it contains enough truth to warrant thought about appropriate policy responses.  Discussions about whether girls do or do not get pregnant in order to get Supporting Parents Benefit easily bog down in debate about the complexities of human motivation.  A 1985 Los Angeles Times survey found that 51 per cent of the general population did not believe that "poor young women have babies so they can collect welfare";  but when they surveyed people in poor neighbourhoods 70 per cent of poor women thought that this is "almost always" or "often" true. ⁽³⁹⁾  It would be interesting to see a similar study in this country.  Nor is the international evidence here merely anecdotal.  In advanced societies non-marital fertility is very low in those countries which have low levels of child allowances (Japan, Italy, Spain, Israel) or which do not give special subsidies to unmarried parents (Switzerland, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands), whereas those which do give such subsidies have high levels of non-marital fertility. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

It does not need to be claimed here that girls get pregnant simply in order to get a guaranteed minimum income.  But there is ample anecdotal evidence that desire for a secure income and the desire for emotional security can and do reinforce each other.  Ronald Conway observes:  "Many times I have heard young single mothers state that 'I wanted to have a baby so that there would be someone to love me', with little thought in their minds that a child's reason for existence should represent something more than satisfaction of the needs of a lonely, unhappy and immature parent. ..."  He adds that "Out of such fostered and discarded child debris come the criminals, mercenaries and public enemies of the future". ⁽⁴¹⁾   Many welfare workers would agree with this general assessment.  Jeff Collman's study of outback Aboriginal life notes that, as a result of welfare policy, Aboriginal families are tending to become matricentric and to "socially repress the significance of fathers altogether".  He concludes that "Because women have privileged access to welfare resources, they have more secure domestic livelihoods than men, and men often depend upon them for their more basic requirements.  The conditions under which women acquire welfare benefits, however, encourage them to minimise their relationships with men". ⁽⁴²⁾

While it is understandable that a young mother may not wish to commit herself to a male as destructive and futureless as many now are, when the state will provide a more stable alternative, this strategy deprives the child of the essential close contact with one half of the human race.  Income support for sole parents, while it helps the custodial parent to look after the children, facilitates the phenomenon of the vanishing father.  It does appear that we are creating whole suburban areas in which single women struggle to bring up children without the assistance of men, and that this rarely provides those children with the balance they need to become successful working and loving adults. ⁽⁴³⁾  John Embling asks the anguished question:

Where have all the fathers gone?  Over a ten year period I have worked with hundreds of children and their families.  I spend most of my life with children, young adults, mothers -- but where are the fathers?  Where have they gone?  I have only known four or five fathers-as-parents, as providers, as role models, over those ten years. ... I often look around for the fathers of "our" children.  I feel a sense of profound loss, of defeat, of inhumanity, as I see men devoid of personal contact with their children.  Their loss, the loss of something central to the human process, is also our loss.  Something is being crippled, and all the money, technology, bureaucracy, professionalism, ideology in the world won't make it right again. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

The obvious conjecture is that the men are living somewhere else, quite likely on unemployment benefits.  If we really wish to prevent this "loss of something central to the human process" then we will have to take seriously the question of paternity.  DNA labelling makes it now possible to trace paternity.  There may be ways of making welfare benefits conditional upon an agreement to support rather than neglect the recipient's children.  We could also make Supporting Parents Benefit conditional upon some effort to establish the father of the children, and then make any benefits to the father conditional upon some commitment to those children and their mother.

These questions are at once both moral and economic.  It is the combination of poverty with demoralisation which has such a devastating impact in reinforcing cycles of deprivation, but we can not expect to break such cycles merely by injecting money.  It may be more effective to take seriously the moral side of the issue, or it may be that any policy which overlooks the moral side will not succeed.  On this moral issue Germaine Greer, in Sex and Destiny, quotes Stevie Smith:

Oh these illegitimate babies!
Oh girls, girls,
Silly little valuable things,
You should have said, No, I am valuable,
And again, It is because I am valuable
I say, No.

Nobody teaches anybody they are valuable nowadays. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

Teaching teenagers that they are valuable also involves teaching them to say No.  Both of these are art forms we have failed to cultivate adequately in the past two decades.  Once again we face the problem of exercising authority.  At the same time we need to teach that children are valuable, and that every new child deserves better than to be brought into the world single-handedly by one of Conway's "lonely, unhappy and immature parents".

All this is, of course, easier said than done.  A state welfare system which does not promote irresponsibility is part of the answer.  But such a system needs to be supplemented by small-scale agencies which, at their best, will provide emergency aid, financial and domestic advice (some parents are incapable even of cooking a hot meal), marital and parental counselling, employment assistance, and a community centre for self-help groups.  Some of the private agencies do perform most of these diverse functions.  Many also encourage an ethos which promotes responsibility and maturity.  To do this they need to be small and local, so that they can be accepted and respected as part of a community and so that they can know the people they are helping.  Organisations of this kind cost far less than the impersonal bureaucracies which dispense money without genuine assistance.  The first priority of state welfare policy here should be to identify and promote such organisations.  If the state continues to promote ethical irresponsibility then we can expect to have the social problems that we do have.  But if it were to support the ethical beliefs and status rewards which presently operate in ordinary working-class communities then we can hope to turn around the disintegration now so obvious.

---

ENDNOTES

1.  See Amato, Children in Australian Families, 65f.  Another but much smaller study found that 71 per cent of non-custodial parents kept "regular" contact, and only 7 per cent had no contact at all (Smiley, et al., Implications of Marital Separation for Young Children, 7).

2.  Wallerstein & Kelly, Surviving the Break-up, 316f.  Wallerstein's 15-year study of divorced Californian families (the longest longitudinal study anywhere) has concluded that there is considerable unpredictability in the long term effects:  "One cannot predict long-term effects of divorce on children from how they react at the outset" (Wallerstein & Blakeslee, Second Chances, 15;  see also 24ff and 56ff).  Since it can be objected reasonably that Wallerstein's sample (sixty relatively well-off families) is too small to support any large conclusions it needs to be noted that other studies have reached similar results.  See e.g. Hetherington et al., "The Aftermath of Divorce";  Mitchell, Children in the Middle;  and Morgan, "For the Sake of the Children?".

3.  Children in Australian Families, 113.

4.  "Don't Feel the World is Caving In", 65, 105.

5.  Smiley et al., Implications of Marital Separation for Young Children, 26, 24.

6.  The educational evidence will be discussed in Chapter Ten.

7.  Wallerstein & Blakeslee, Second Chances, xixf.

8.  In Australia almost the only honourable exception to this dismal rule is Ronald Conway, who has consistently attempted to keep alive intelligent public discussion of the subject.

9.  For Richer, For Poorer, 133.

10.  Tennison, Family Court:  The Legal Jungle, 10f;  Conway, The End of Stupor?, 98.

11.  Goldberg, "Law and Family", 71ff.

12.  Marx, "On a Proposed Divorce Law", 140.

13.  Sole Parents on Pensions, 121.

14.  Sole Parents on Pensions, 124.

15.  Jordan, Common Treasury, 1, 94f.

16.  Ibid. 97.

17.  The point seems trite, yet curiously the most recent discussion of this subject, Edgar et al.'s Child Poverty barely mentions family breakdown and divorce as a cause of childpoverty.

18.  Child Support Formula for Australia, 7.

19.  Bringing Up Children Alone, 65.

20.  Common Treasury, 1, 94;  ABS Cat. 2506.0, Figure 1.3.

21.  ABS Cat. 4111.1, Table 1.6.

22.  Sole Parents on Pensions, 124.

23.  Davis & Murch, Grounds for Divorce, 53f.

24.  Jim Crawley, "Preventing Marital and Family Breakdown", 18, 25.

25.  See Edgar, "Family Problems:  The Cost-benefits of Prevention". 43f.

26.  Crawley, "Family Therapy's Coming of Age".

27.  For one such example see Lewis, How's Your Family?

28.  Family:  The Vital Factor, 63.

29.  Swan & Bernstam, "Brides of the State".

30.  A Bit of a Struggle, Chapter Two.

31.  Common Treasury, 2, 209,

32.  Burdekin Report, 88ff.  These figures are certainly more reliable than the Report's highly-publicised but extremely dubious figure of 25,000 homeless youths in Australia.

33.  Fragmented Lives, 77-89.

34.  Fragmented Lives, 48f.

35.  Ibid. 21.

36.  Ibid. 51.

37.  Fragmented Lives, 50.

38.  For an American example, see Adams, Path of Honor.

39.  A Community of Self-Reliance, 31.

40.  Bernstam & Swan, Malthus and the evolution of the Welfare State, Part 1, 35.

41.  The End of Stupor?, 27.

42.  Collman, Fringe-Dwellers and Welfare, 121, 105.

43.  The NSW Director of Education has noted that in some of his schools 80 per cent of children are from single parent families (Pollard, "The Family and the Economy", 15.

44.  Embling, Fragmented Lives, 51f.

45.  Greer, Sex and Destiny, 80.