Three kids, a pig farm and a psychology degree As the product of a single parent family, I joined sole parents rallying around the country this month (Feb 5) to protest against devastating changes to the Parenting Payment. The Federal Government is pushing tens of thousands of single parents off Parenting Payment onto the much lower Newstart Allowance. My family knows what is at stake when you blow a $120 a fortnight hole in single parent families" already overstretched budgets. My mum tells a story about breaking up with my father and looking for urgent accommodation for my two sisters and me. She had no money and she couldn't secure somewhere for us to stay. So she left the door of one of the rental houses she inspected slightly ajar and took us back there at night so we would have somewhere safe to sleep. Some years later mum was raising the three of us while running a pig farm and completing her psychology degree, hoping to secure a better life for all of us. Around the time her honours thesis was due, she barely slept for weeks and she says her memory has never been the same since. She thinks the protracted lack of sleep did permanent damage. Single parenting isn't easy and it is not something that most people choose. Mum made it work through dogged determination, hard graft, and a period of taxpayer support via the Parenting Payment when she simply couldn't bridge the gap between income and expenses. She succeeded and now runs her own psychology practice. My sisters and I are all university educated, I'm running for the Senate in Queensland this year, and we are all working and helping to fund the social safety net that supported us when we needed it most. But it won't be so "easy" for many of today's single parents as a study by the Australian Council of Social Services in March last year found. Fifty-eight per cent of people on Parenting Payment were facing multiple deprivation, meaning that they were unable to afford three or more essentials of life such as warm clothes or medical treatment. The only group worse off was the group that single parents are now forced to join - Newstart recipients. Sixty one per cent of them faced multiple deprivation. Our Prime Minister, despite touting "Labor values," justified this change by claiming ..."it will be better for them [single parents] because they'll have a job for the rest of their lives." This comes straight from the "punish people into employment" playbook that we are more accustomed to hearing recited by the other side of politics. It's a dud argument in so many ways. Here are a few of them in condensed form: If poverty pushes people into jobs then the Parenting Payment should already be having that effect; Greater poverty won't change the fact that there are more jobseekers than vacant jobs; Greater poverty does not mean that single parents are suddenly able to work outside school hours; Many single parents on Parenting Payment were already working; Business leaders, unions, the Henry tax review, welfare groups and virtually everyone else (except Labor and the Coalition) acknowledge that Newstart inflicts such grinding poverty on people that it is a barrier to finding work. At the single parents protest in King George Square on February 5, several parents told me that they had been studying while on the Parenting Payment but they could not afford to continue on Newstart. They have been denied the pathway out of poverty that my mother walked. No, this is not about helping people into employment. It is about a soft target to help balance the books. It is about saving $700 million over four years - just under 0.0005% of federal expenditure - at the cost of enormous hardship to people already doing it extremely tough. It is about an economic approach that would have left my family stranded on the margins of society and called it "responsible fiscal management." Adam Stone is a Greens sentate candidate.