Opinion & Commentary
Equal help for home and working mums
The culture war has flared up again between working and stay-at-home mothers. A new low was reached last week when a stay-at-home activist told a Senate inquiry how she cringed at the sight of the ‘childcare factory with its inconsolable screaming children, non-stimulating surrounds and rationed sandwiches and baby wipes’.
This was a well-aimed dagger at the heart of thousands of working women who rely on childcare. But it was also payback in kind to the feminists who stereotype stay-at-home mothers as moping around the house in a dystopian fulfilment of John Howard's 1950s-style family fantasy.
Both viewpoints have little bearing on the decisions modern women make in the real world. We know most mothers would like to stay home in the early years of their children's lives or at least work part-time, but economic necessity and lack of choice prevents some from doing so.
Balancing work and family, as opposed to bringing down the patriarchy or defending the traditional family, is the dilemma these women face.
Yet it is the ideologues who transform the debate into a fight about the moral superiority of different groups of women. The feminist lobby will accept nothing less than paid leave as a workplace-based entitlement and the traditionalists will not accept any policy that extends more support to working women.
It isn't politically feasible to completely satisfy or alienate either side, so politicians are stuck in the middle.
The Rudd government's scheme for 18 weeks of paid parental leave at the minimum wage is under fire from family groups and even some union figures because it leaves working mothers a couple of thousand dollars ahead.
And Tony Abbott's ridiculously generous counter scheme threatened to prompt such a rebellion that shadow cabinet had to restrain him from offering stay-at-home mums a $10,000 compensatory bribe.
The culture war means both major parties play one side against the other to buy off different segments of the family vote.
The only way to end the unseemly vote-buying and contain the complex menagerie of payments is to rise above the cultural politics and change the nature of the debate, while reaching out to the broad middle ground.
This would require that all mothers and their families be treated equally, regardless of whether mum is working or at home, or whether or not one parent chooses to return to work after the birth of their child. Rather than base a parental-leave scheme around the kind of work their mothers do or don't do, we should design the program around the needs of newborns.
An increasing amount of evidence reveals how vital the first year of life is to child development. This is the crucial period when the pathways in infant brains develop. It is not surprising children thrive when they have a permanent one-on-one carer to bond with. At the very least, the evidence strongly suggests mothers should spend the first months with their babies.
The way through the political impasse is to make parental leave available to all new parents who meet a family income test, regardless of whether or not they worked in the year before their baby was born. If we retain the parameters of the government's scheme, the deal would tie up to 18 weeks of payments at the minimum wage to each newborn in Australia. The only rule would be that the parent claiming parental leave (either mum or dad) could not work while they are on the payment.
The objective is to support parents to care full-time for their newborns, regardless of their work situation. The baby bonus would be scrapped and single-income families would be ineligible for Family Tax Benefit B during the parental-leave period, which would cover much of the extra cost. The rate of Family Tax Benefit could be wound back slightly to meet the extra cost, bringing the policy in at the same cost as the government's proposed scheme. Families on income support would be eligible to receive Parenting Payment or parental leave, but not both.
The ‘keep in touch’ provisions in the proposed Parental Leave legislation could be maintained for working parents.
This broader parental ‘leave’ payment would not be a different, higher baby bonus, because the payment would be conditional upon a parent either temporarily stopping work or choosing not to work at all to care for children. It would meet the key objectives of ensuring maternal and child health, providing financial support to families, and enabling working mothers to take time away from their jobs while still maintaining contact with their employer.
It would also avoid the administratively complex situation in which two programs are simultaneously run to cater for different groups of parents.
Most importantly, the politics between the working and stay-at-home factions would be neutralised. The scheme would accommodate the diverse circumstances and desires of the vast majority women in the best interests of their children.
Jessica Brown is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies. Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at the CIS.
