Opinion & Commentary
Paid maternity leave will not fix problem parents
The release of the Productivity Commission’s draft report on paid parental leave follows Fiona Stanley’s weekend comments that up to 20 per cent of Australians “don't have the capacity to be a parent.”
According to Professor Stanley, bad parenting is caused by the fact that as a society we don’t value parents enough. Her evidence for this claim is that Australia is one of the few countries without a taxpayer-funded paid maternity leave scheme. But Australian mums and dads aren’t suffering under a miserly government—we already spend well over the OECD average on families. In terms of cash payments to parents, we’re second only to Luxembourg.
The idea that a problem as complex as family dysfunction has a single solution is ridiculous. The claim that one in five parents don’t do their job properly is wildly exaggerated and has no basis in fact.
Across Australia last year, 4 per cent of children were reported to child protection authorities. More than 80 percent of these reports were unsubstantiated after investigation. Just over half of one percent of all children in Australia are taken away from their parents and put into foster care. The obvious truth is 99 per cent of parents are fit to care for their children.
However, there is no doubt that the level of child maltreatment in Australia continues to rise. The number of children being taken into care is rising, and in NSW the number has doubled over the past decade.
Paid maternity leave can do many things. It can give parents who work the financial breathing space to take time off when they have a baby. It can also increase the chance that mothers will return to their old job after having a baby. But the idea that even bigger dollops of taxpayer’s money handed out to families will transform bad parents into good ones is entirely unrealistic.
The Productivity Commission’s report states that the objectives of paid maternity leave are to improve maternal and child health outcomes, strengthen mothers’ attachment to the workforce, and reinforce the idea that parents can balance work and childrearing responsibilities.
The Productivity Commission’s is correct to recommend a short period of universal, publicly funded maternity leave. The costs of longer periods of leave should then be met by individual parents.
But this policy still won’t make dysfunctional people parent effectively.
The idea is absurd given that many parents who neglect or abuse their children are trapped in welfare dependency. Paid maternity leave cannot prevent drug abuse, cure mental illness, or control the violent temper of out of control parents. That small minority of bad parents require much more comprehensive and targeted policies.
As welfare payments to families have increased, so have the incidences of child abuse and neglect. Clearly, generous welfare payments to families is no silver bullet. Modelling published in the Australian last week showed that four in ten families now receive so much in cash and other benefits from the government, that they pay no net tax. This incredible statistic refutes the claim that we don’t do enough to support our families. The centrepiece of the Rudd government’s budget earlier this year was the $55 billion ‘Working Families Support Package’. Under the Howard government spending on benefits for families increased exponentially.
A more effective response would be a major rethink of our child protection system. Currently, government-run child protection departments are the only way families can access the early intervention services they need to get help and deal with their complex problems. As the information leaking out of the Wood Commission into the NSW Department of Community Services reveals, the government monopoly on child protection is choking the system and families in crisis are slipping through the cracks.
What these families need is real and dependable community support. Parents need to be able to seek help directly through community organisations such as Barnados, without being reported to child protection authorities. Increasing the power of the non-government sector to help would facilitate a shift in community thinking. Rather than endlessly looking to the government, protecting children would come to be recognised as a genuine community-wide responsibility.
Over-inflated claims about the number parents who can’t cope doesn’t assist the children who are at greatest risk. One size fits all solutions for all families won’t effectively target the minority who really need help, and paid maternity won’t make bad parents good.
Jessica Brown and Toby O’Brien are policy analysts at the Centre for Independent Studies. Brown’s report Baby Steps Toward Self-Funded Parental Leave was released by CIS in September.
