BEWARE! SLOPPY TAX TALK SIMPLY DOESN’T CUT IT.

It’s no secret that single people spend a greater percentage of their income on food, housing, health, and wellbeing. Sustaining a social life is crucial, but it costs money. We know single people are charged more for travel, and have to pay for the extra things they can’t do around the house. After all, how comfortable are you asking a friend or neighbour, or busy relative to clean your gutters, or oil the decking, or hack back the invasive vine creeping over the back fence?

Single people also don’t benefit from bulk discounts at the supermarket, aren’t eligible for insurance premium, membership, and subscription discounts, and their investment in celebrating weddings and children is rarely recognised, let alone returned. So, we can’t really blame those drawing attention to this financial disadvantage by calling it a Singles Tax. After all paying extra for everything looks like, sounds like, even waddles like a goods and services tax (GST) on those who don’t have a partner or children.

However, there’s a whole lot more to this waddling. It’s not just about how expensive it is to live on one income when two incomes only just cover basic living costs. A range of policies exclude single people from tax concessions, social security benefits, and services designed to maintain our health, help us when we’re homeless, survive a catastrophic weather event, and support us when we are ageing. And this exclusion reduces the real value of the single wage even further.

And then there’s work. We all know about women’s unpaid domestic labour and care responsibilities, when they are mothers and wives. We know how employers, and the tax and social service system respond to this—albeit inadequately—through strategies to close the gender wage gap, provide access to childcare, and offer financial support. But we forget single people without children do all the unpaid domestic work in their lives, all the pet and parent care, all the life admin, then, invariably, turn around and care for themselves when they’re ill.

In fact, we imagine women who achieve a well paying career have the resources for a full and satisfying home and work life regardless of their relationship or parental status. In fact, we imagine the single career woman without children has it all. All the money, all the time, all the fun.

However, in 2017, Associate Professor Krystal Wilkinson at Manchester Metropolitan University, revealed the unconscious bias existing against women managers who remain single and childless beyond a certain age. A bias often internalised by single managers themselves, effecting their sense of belonging at work, personal wellbeing, and ultimately their productivity. So while promotion improves a woman’s financial security, she pays a deep personal cost if she is neither mother nor wife.

In 2019, Australian author Clare Payne, noted in One: Valuing Single Life, that single men and women without children are often passed over for promotion, limiting their lifetime earnings. And in November 2020, Associate Professor at Sydney University, Myra Hamilton and her colleagues, found working single women without children, across the board, are expected to fit their holidays around family preferences, and are called on to fill-in for parenting colleagues while simultaneously caring for ageing parents—often taking significant periods away from work to provide that care without any guarantee of reciprocal help from families and friends when they themselves fall ill, or age.

All this threatens single women’s work-life balance as much as their hip pockets. But, what really tips the scales, is that despite doing for oneself and doing for others, Hamilton et al. discovered the

greatest disadvantage of all, was not having an adult child to navigate the health, social services, and aged care systems or, importantly, advocate on their behalf when they are most vulnerable.

There is no doubt, the slogan, Singles Tax, has fierce descriptive power. It urges the government to take responsibility for the solution. And indeed, the government can be the hero of this piece, if it chooses. Not by doing what the slogan suggests—i.e. lifting a tax—because there is no specific tax on people who don’t have a partner or children. Such a tax would violate the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, and the Fair Work Act 2009, which make it illegal to discriminate against individual characteristics such as parental, and relationship status. And, in case you didn’t know, in Australia, unlike many countries, single, is very definitely a relationship status.

Here’s the thing. In 2023, Bridget Crawford,* at Pace University, New York, explored the effectiveness of tax tropes and warned against sloppy tax talk for advocacy campaigns. Tax talk is forceful when pointing to clear economic injustice created by tangible government duties, but this potency dissolves when pointing to the complex interplay of policies and practices that create economic disadvantage for a certain group.

An example of a sloppy tax talk is playing out right now here in Australia. Currently, in addition to corporate and income tax, producers of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) are subject to a flat rate 40% Petroleum Resources Rent Tax (PRRT) on taxable profit. Losses are carried forward, with compounding interest, against future profits. Sounds fair enough, but foreign LNG companies operating in Australia exporting all the gas they produce, pay little or no PRRT.

A national campaign for a 25% Gas Tax on all LNG exports went viral. More than 60% of our nation support it. But, when SBS reporter, Anna Henderson, asked the Prime Minister, Is the Gas Tax something you’d consider? He responded: But that’s a slogan—with respect. What is it you refer to, because no one seems to know. And he listed all the taxes LNG companies pay including the PRRT.

An excellent example of an effective tax talk campaign is, the Tampon Tax Campaign which began with the introduction of the GST in 2000. Clearly related to an unfair tax, it pointed to a simple policy action. Remove the GST from tampons. Even with this effective slogan, it took 19 years before the Morrison Government axed the tax.

In the end, lumping the economic consequences of singlehood into sloppy tax talk undermines the fight for change, and gives governments the opportunity to say: We don’t tax people because of their personal characteristics. It’s against the law—with respect.

So, what to call it? Well, in 1997, Jane Waldfogel at Columbia University, New York, confirmed what she had suspected for about five years. Despite the narrow gender wage gap of that time there was a persistent negative impact on mothers’ pay, whether they worked full- or part-time. In 2001, sociologists Michelle Budig and Paula England, at the Universities of Arizona and Pennsylvania published The Wage Penalty for Motherhood. They called it a penalty because the impact of motherhood includes financial, social, and gendered elements.

And here’s another thing. The impact of fatherhood creates a Fatherhood Bonus—the phenomenon of fathers’ wages continuing to rise from the year before childbirth for up to five years afterward. In fact in Australia today, a mother will earn up to $2 million less in lifetime savings compared to the average father. Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce Report, 2023.

So there you have it! It’s the system, not a waddling tax—a system forging a fully fledged penalty for people who don’t have a partner or children. And calling it a tax gives the permission for the government to ignore the glaring inequity and proceed steady as she goes.

*Thank you to Distinguished professor Chau-ju Chen for introducing me to Bridget Crawford’s work.

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