PENSIONS FOR DESERTED WIVES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 185, 6 August 1936, Page 6

PENSIONS FOR DESERTED WIVES.

The effect of the Government's proposal to "enable deserted wives with dependent children to qualify for pepsions on the same basis as widows" will depend upon the official interpretation of the term "deserted," and on this point clear assurances will be expected before the proposal is accepted. Those wives with families whose breadwinner has left them, and perhaps disappeared, so that they are utterly without support and without reasonable hope of obtaining it from him, have as strong a moral claim to the State s bounty as many of those now receiving it. The State, in fact, has already conceded the principle by including in the term "widow" a Avoman whose husband is detained in a mental hospital. In practice such wives and their children do now receive public assistance in some form; the important difference is that in future they will receive it as a right.

But apart from these cases of undoubted hardship there are many others, and unless the law is most carefully drafted there will arise abundant opportunities for fraud, including' collusive fraud. Above all, Parliament should do nothing that will create the impression that if a man leaves his wife and family the State will as a matter of course support them.