@i-need-a-martini wrote:
Another good example of how people make assumption about percieved facts is the Welfare Reform thread.
The OP links to a Daily Telegraph article from a couple of days ago that makes some claims about jobless families. The article lists some statistics but doesn't reveal the source. Looks genuine enough though and I am sure the article will be copied time and time again now that welfare reform is on the federal govts agenda.
Took me a while but I found the source that the Daily Telegraph failed to mention - it is a report from 2009 that was tabled in Parliament back then. THe research was conducted by Peter Whiteford who has written fairly extensively about the need to cut welfare and is currently a consultant to the government on welfare 'reform'.
However, the statistics reported in the paper are not 100% true.
The statistic that 12% of children under 14 are growing up in jobless households is sort of true. However, many of those households intervieweed were single mothers with preschool aged children - a time when it is near impossible for many to work. Also, 15 year old children were categorised as jobless if they didn't have a part time job. So the results are a little bit skewed in my opinion.
He makes a statement like this:
Lone mothers are less likely to be employed than other mothers when their youngest child is below school age, and this is the group who have just experienced the largest drop in employment. This suggests the need to support part-time work amongst parents with pre-school children. But because these parents can receive Parenting Payments and are not required to actively look for work they may be less likely to access labour market support than parents with older children, who to date have been less severely affected by the labour market downturn.
His reforms include dropping Parenting Payments to push mothers with pre-school children into part time work.
He has an agenda. Therefore the results of his study can't be seen as truth.
Yet the Daily Telegraph used his 'facts' as a lead in to a sensationalist story about a family on welfare.
Oh, I'm sorry. They should get a free ride? No strings? Where's the other parent? Not wanting to deal with that isn't a free ride.
ogQ!(U~$(KGrHgoOKjYEjlLmS1ctBJ1K-4Uyh!~~_7.JPG?set_id=81 "i-need-a-martini"){kind=avatar}
