Introduction

The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) welcomes the opportunity to provide a submission to the Review of Pensions with its focus on measures to strengthen the financial security of seniors, carers and people with disability.

The NFAW is a politically independent feminist organisation, which works in partnership with other women’s organisations to achieve its aims. NFAW’s aims are: a. To advance and promote the interests of Australian women b. To record and make accessible the histories of Australian women and c. To ensure women’s achievements are handed on to future generations.

Our credibility in documenting and commenting on the impact of government policies on the interests of women and girls is well established.

When the initial policy changes known as Welfare to Work were proposed by the Howard Government we worked collaboratively with a coalition of national women’s organisations (later known as the What Women Want coalition) to analyse the distributional impacts of those proposed changes on sole parents and people with a disability.

As part of that project we commissioned research from the National Centre for Economic and Social Modeling (NATSEM) at the University of Canberra on the distributional impacts of the proposed changes on the incomes of sole parents and of people with disabilities. We were particularly pleased to work collaboratively on the last with the organisations Women With a Disability Australia (WWDA). The research reports are available on www.nfaw.org under Social Policy

We greatly regret that this Review does not encompass payments for sole parents, as we consider that some of the Welfare to Work changes have been particularly disadvantageous to sole parents and their capacity to be successful or even adequate parents.

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