Jo Raphael: is Working for Families payments helping our children?

Should Working For Families be stopped in favour of tax relief? Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

It's a strange world now to be bringing up a family in.

The everyday fears for children have increased many times over since the rise of the pandemic.

Many parents over generations have fretted over stranger danger, feeding and clothing the kids, their health, who they were hanging out with, who they were dating, where they wanted to go to university, and how they planned to live their lives.

Now parents have the looming threat of Covid-19-related complications, which is why it seems to me that the Working For Families tax credits are one less thing to worry about.

Working for Families tax credits are payments for families with dependent children aged 18 and under. The payments are to help people raise their family. Entitlements are based on your yearly family income and family circumstances.

We reported this week that there have been calls to the payments to be stopped and replaced with tax cuts.

In Rotorua, in the 12 months to March 2020, 7100 families received $62m in these payments. In Tauranga, over the same period, 10,900 families received $89m. The figure nationally is $2.8billion.

The question has been asked: Why should taxpayers prop up working families when it should be the job of employers to offer a decent living wage?

The Taxpayers Union says people are being discouraged from upskilling and seeking promotions because any increase in salaries or wages might affect their Working For Families payments.

I have heard this anecdotally too.

People I have spoken to say sometimes it's not worth going for full-time work or picking up extra hours or shifts, instead preferring to have the comfort of knowing the Working For Families payment is a steady and reliable source of income.

If parents do decide to return to full-time work, costs such as travel and daycare would need to be factored in. Even if 20 hours' free daycare was discounted, you would still need a job that allowed you to work school-friendly hours or a reliable grandparent to pick up the slack.

The rising cost of living and the housing crisis is on top of all this.

Some people say the hassle is just not worth it and they would prefer to spend that time with their children.

Even if from the outside it looks like our economy is robust and booming, the façade is, in my view, tenuous given the unpredictable times we live in - just look at yesterday's Covid developments.

I would prefer to know my taxpayer dollars are spent on families mindfully raising their children, rather than on a generation of homeless, latchkey kids.