Page 3590 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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Madam Speaker, in her ministerial statement on the International Year of the Family on 23 February, the Chief Minister argued that concentrating on trying to define a family leads to arguments about semantics rather than to solutions to the challenges facing families today. The International Year of the Family should be about action and not words. I accept the thrust of the Chief Minister's argument. However, there is a basic need to understand what a family is so that the right actions can be taken. This argument is well made in the paper "Varying the Definition and Weighting of the Income Unit: How Much Does it Affect Measures of Poverty and Income Distribution" by Professor Ann Harding, head of the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, or NATSEM, at the University of Canberra. In this paper, Professor Harding notes that the Australian Bureau of Statistics defines an income unit as:
1. a married couple with or without dependent children;
2. a sole parent with dependent children;
3. all other persons (who are regarded as single person income units).
In this definition, dependent children are either under 15 or full-time students in the 15- to 20-year age range. This means that an unemployed 16-year-old or a 21-year-old full-time student living at home is regarded as a single-income unit rather than as a part of the family. Similar considerations apply to the elderly when living in the homes of their children or other relatives. Despite the narrowness of the ABS definition, the fact that the ABS provides plentiful data on these income units means that they are used in most Australian studies of poverty and income distribution.
Professor Harding explores two alternative definitions of the family in her paper. The first expands the definition to include all children still living at home; and, the second, all individuals related by blood and marriage living in the same household. She also looks at weighting the income unit to see whether different approaches change the outcome. Professor Harding concluded that, depending on the definition and weighting combination selected, the proportion of the bottom 10 per cent of unadjusted gross family income represented by single-income units varied from 10 to 63 per cent. The share of married couples with dependent children varied from 16 to 56 per cent. The composition of the upper 10 per cent of family income was largely unchanged. This wide range in the bottom 10 per cent has quite different implications for social policy, depending on the definition chosen. Professor Harding stated further that analysis of poverty rates and numbers suggested that the exact definition or weighting combination used would change our image of who was poor and our perception of trends in poverty over time.
Madam Speaker, it is clear that, for the Government to support families experiencing economic disadvantage, it needs to know how many families fall into that category and what they look like. It is not good enough, in this instance, to simply dismiss concern about the definition of the family as an exercise in semantics. The Chief Minister, in her ministerial statement, said of the International Year of the Family:
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