I’m about to go on a year’s maternity leave, some of it paid and a lot of it unpaid. My partner’s income, our savings, and my leave entitlements, which include pretty good paid maternity leave arrangements didn’t decide for us whether we’d have a second child (truth is we desperately wanted another baby) – but it has made all the difference to whether we can stay living in our house, keep our other child at kindergarten, and feel psychologically healthy about becoming parents for the second time. We’ll find the year financially tight, we’ll probably be in a little personal debt by the end of it, but we’re expecting to survive the year… and that sense of security is invaluable when you’re responsible for two other little beings. Having been raised by a single parent I can’t tell you how much the thought of sliding into poverty with children in tow stresses me out. It is a sense of security denied to almost 50% of all pregnant working women in this country.
The sad truth is that the working-outside-the-home mothers least likely to have paid parental leave are the ones with insecure, low-income jobs (ie. only 10% of women on low incomes have paid parental leave versus 80% of those on high incomes). She is probably waiting on my table or serving me in a shop or looking after my child. She’s just as tired as I am. She wants to do the best by her baby, just like me. She will find the birth just as taxing as I do. She will be pushed to the limit by two-hourly feedings in those first weeks, just as I will be. She will have to get up in the middle of the night just as many times as I to tend to her infant.. but she is right now trying to figure out if she can afford a couple of weeks off after the baby is born and where on earth she can express and store breast-milk at work. In having paid parental leave my advantage and that of my baby’s over hers will be compounded over and over again.
Australia is one of only two developed countries left without paid parental leave. All female workers in this country, regardless of their profession and negotiating abilities deserve at least a few months to recover physically and to establish their babies. Paid parental leave is not a holiday. Women must demand not to be continually penalised in the workplace for their biology. After promising starts, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the federal Labor Government are not sticking by women in spite of the fact that paid parental leave is a relatively cheap scheme (roughly only $450 million p.a, compare this to the billions you hear of in other government initiatives), and that the proposed model will not impact greatly on women’s marketability for jobs (ie. minimal costs for employers) – it is simply not thought of as a priority to Government (of course 80% of ministers are men). If we think we deserve this then we need to say so. Other lobbyists are being very loud and very urgent about their causes with the Government. We have to speak up, this is no time to be a martyr.
Don’t watch a longed-for scheme finally arrive only to see it retreat into the background. Please consider signing the GetUp! Campaign petition. And a happy International Womens’ Day to us all.
* The paid parental leave scheme under consideration extends to adoptions, does not discriminate against same-sex couples, and can be used by parents of either gender, so technically this is an issue for men too.
You write so well. This is beautifully expressed and I shall have to get political now. I’ll be signing that petition and I will be in touch with my local member. Thank you for reminding me so eloquently why this is an important fight for everyone.
Thank you for writing this. Part of the reason I recently moved to Sweden is the parental leave available here. Absoultely phenomenal. I’m already impressed by what I see on the streets too. Men, with their small children, and no Mum in sight. Men actually taking care of their own kids, during word days, suggesting a lot of them make use of the leave entitlements here.
[…] We must not walk away from this fight […]
What are the Austrailian laws on parental leave? Basically no one in the US could manage a full year, paid or not, and still have a job to go back to. 12 weeks is the best even some of us get, and that’s only if we can afford it.
Arwyn – Good question. In Australia if it is a position you’ve held for at least a year then your employer has to allow you up to a year of unpaid leave to take care of your baby, giving you back your old position (or similar) on your return. Both parents can take this leave but not simultaneously and not exceeding the year.
The only reason I could continue with my first pregnancy is that the baby bonus (for foreigners, it’s a one off payment when you have your baby, the year I had mine it was $5000) combined with my share of my sister’s life insurance payout meant I had something to live on for a few months. Fortunately my partner’s work became slightly more lucrative after the kid came along and I stayed home longer, and relatives gave us money and practical gifts (like nappies, and a carseat) rather than heaps of toys (he still had no shortage of toys or clothes). So hey, if you don’t women to have abortions, make sure they have something to pay the rent with!
In the end, we managed, and we continue to manage, because we didn’t have much debt (just HECS) and all the other stuff we’ve been able to scrimp on. Now I just have to find a job that will entitle me to take maternity leave (or any other leave) so that I can have one for Dad and one for the Country (or is that outta style now?)
Thanks for updating on this pressing of maternity leave, which is at great risk of being abandoned, because of the global financial crises. As you say it is just so unfair that some women get it and others don’t – an the implications for the wellbeing of mother and baby are enormous! I will sign the petition as many times as i can!
Women must stay strong on this issue. It’s a man’s issue too, but for different reasons. We cannot continue to allow women to be discriminated against on the basis that they reproduce. Our children deserve better than this.
I had to go back to work when my first child was 6 months old, and when the second was 10 months old. I was forced to re-pay the paid maternity leave I did receive for the first baby as I didn’t fulfill the “bond” requirement of 12 months on returning to work (it was too stressful on my baby when I was working long days).
My employer with my second baby did not offer paid maternity leave. This employer deliberately avoids hiring women as they cannot afford the cost of maternity leave, and don’t want the inconvenience of it.
It is time that the government made good on their promise before the last election to put this into place immediately. Six months paid at the minimum wage (or as some have suggested – 80% of pre maternity earnings), linked to inflation and increased each year is just the start. Ideally the scheme should be 12 months, with employers encouraged to “top up” to pre maternity salary levels for at least 3 months of this period.
*waves at my friend Kate* Hey! I didn’t know you read bluemilk’s blog!! 😀
Makes me angry we’re still being asked to bear the economic brunt of this work. Good post.
My partner and I have had two children, without me getting any paid maternity leave from work. He had a week off each time, out of his annual leave. The baby bonus went into the kids savings accounts which were set up after they were born. We lived frugally and lagged behind in many ways, but living on minimal funds didn’t put a damper on the amazing experience of having those babies. I remember that one of the previous governmetns sent representatives to join a Global Maternity Leave Forum overseas, to debate issues relating to a global standard for paid maternity leave. All of the members sent to the forum were male. When i weighed in with my view on this country being behind with paid maternity leave rights, I was shocked to hear a female co-worker say that she didn’t see any reason why her taxes should pay for women who made a choice to have children, and if I wanted to take time off work because of this, I should not be expecting to be propped up by the government. Before we change he government’s views, we probably have to enlighten ourselves.
The arguments in favour of paid parental leave is that that upholding the private wealth of parents is deserved as a matter of course, this can be achieved through compensatory monetary arrangement and it is morally acceptable to penalise the childless to achieve this.
“Australia is one of only two developed countries left without paid parental leave.”
That ignores the rather squirmingly inconvenient truth that currently, Australia has the SECOND HIGHEST cash handouts (as a proportion of GDP) to people with children among OECD nations (after Luxembourg). http://www.oecd.org/document/4/0,3343,en_2649_34819_37836996_1_1_1_1,00.html
Indeed Australia is well on its way to bring the world’s most generous nation for handouts for people with children . http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24444063-601,00.html
With an estimated 4 out of 10 families paying no net tax (as reported in the Australian on 20 September 2008)
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/meganomics/index.php/theaustralian/comments/tax_free_middle_class) we all know WHO will be made to pay for all this. The childless.
A bonus for those who have a child amounts to a penalty for those who don’t have one. (Saying that those with children should be taxed less than the childless is another way of saying that the childless should be taxed more than those with children.) So when poor parents receive a smaller credit than rich ones, that is, in effect, the same as the childless poor paying a smaller surcharge than the childless rich.
Parents already have significant relief from the costs of rearing their children through government funding of health, education, child endowment and tax rebates for families, for up to eighteen years of the child’s life.
The burgeoning assistance paid to families should not be at the expense of other taxpayers, namely singles or childless families. Favouring one class of taxpayer over another for political gain will only fuel the tax reform debate now gathering pace in the community.
These days as we have a growing middle class and there is justifiable perception that university education should be accessible to all, yes, women are graduating from University in droves but that has not changed the fact that women give birth. And need time to recover. But having children is certainly optional. And, in our individualistic society, children are a private good. We are a materialist society and most people have consumerist lifestyles. It seems to me that these people want to live beyond their means, have their baby and someone — anyone but them — must pay.
Too many parents seem to want to have it both ways – they want the affluent lifestyle delivered by two incomes, they want kids, they want (or at least take) the perks given to them for having kids (both in the workplace and on the tax returns) AND they want to “spend quality time” with the kids. You can’t have it all.
This society has changed from our hunter-gatherer or agrarian times when people were, generally speaking, had a more communal outlook. BUT the reality is people, usually mothers, have always had to make some sacrifice when they had a child. When are people gonna wake up and realise that you cannot “have it all”?
Pay maternity leave is not really a gender issue. It is not a feminist matter at all.
Furthermore, the reality is that most women who have children are still in a relationship with the father of their newborn babies. So the proposal is not pro-women as such. It is pro- mothers and anti-single men and childless women, because the former group will be net winners, whilst the latter will be forced to pay for this lifestyle choice. For the rest, its just churn, where the money they have paid in the form of taxes is given back to them – a ridiculously inefficient outcome.
So paid maternity leave would represent an overall distribution of income away from single people and childless couples and in favour of couples and single mothers who have children. On the whole, it is therefore only very marginally pro-women. It’s far more pro-big governments, higher taxes and big spending… In many cases, paid maternity leave would mean a regressive distribution of income away from those who are poor towards those who are far less in need of it. If feminism is really about gender equality, it shouldn’t treat women who have children as a special class that is automatically entitled to income from others, regardless of need.
I am not mean-spirited nor am I suggesting that parents ought to raise children with no support at all. I am not asking that children be made to starve in the streets. I strongly believe in hand-ups to address socio-economic disadvantage but I certainly oppose handouts to the wealthy. And I am not opposed to handouts merely because I am not getting one.
Parenthood is a personal lifestyle choice, with costs and consequences, rewards and sacrifice. Provided fertility can be controlled, and abortion available where contraception fails, having a family is just as much a valid choice as not having one. That is children are a private good and their benefits are enjoyed mostly by their parents.
If a family is a personal choice, why should the childless face discrimination in favour of families? Why should the childless subsidise those who choose a different path? It could be argued that the taxes of these children will be used to supply social security to the childless in their old age. However we are already taxed for government services, and we have been repeatedly told we must provide for our own old age.
The childless are no way responsible for the arguable financial adversity said to be experienced by the child-burdened, yet the entitlement-junkies see no moral shame in exacting financial adversity upon the childless because, in their twisted logic , punishing them fiscally will address this invented or imagined inequity.
Throwing money at good parents will not make them better ones and throwing money at bad parents will not make them good ones. It is preferable that parents access social services aimed at making them better parents and I have no argument that social wealth is of long term benefit to me and society.
AND YET It seems that those who argue against the notion that children are a private good and insist they are social goods are, incongruously, supporters of private welfare – in the form of taxpayer-funded cash handouts — for parents and they seem to revile social support such as government supplied services for mothers and their children. How very odd.
Othello Cat –
I’m not going to re-hash extensive arguments here because I’ve discussed them elsewhere on this site. But briefly, in response to a couple of your arguments:
Parents bear a significant private cost in having children, you can easily locate household income and expenditure data that will show you this. (That is not to say that parents don’t also gain a lot of enjoyment and personal satisfaction out of caring for and raising children also).
Children are not ‘private goods’, they are not particularly similar to the decision to buy a dog either.
Children are not the products of choice. You can try to make conditions right for conception to occur and you can (in many instances) try to make conditions right to avoid conception but conception happens as a biological process.
Societies without any children cease eventually to exist, it is ridiculous for anyone wishing to belong to an ongoing society to claim that children, which occur as the result of biological processes involved in being human, are at all optional. If you’re arguing for mass annihilation, well then by all means try and make that argument instead.
We are all benefiting from government expenditure, parents and non-parents alike, and indeed children and adults alike. It will take you many years as a tax-paying adult to re-pay your own use of publicly provided services/infrastructure/programs/benefits etc before you even start paying for another’s share.
Interesting that you should say “BUT the reality is people, usually mothers, have always had to make some sacrifice when they had a child” and in the very next paragraph you attempt to argue that paid parental leave is not a gender issue. But, that is really by the by… I won’t tolerate a comment from you again here which attempts to tell me what feminism is about. I am a feminist woman, you are neither.
It is simplistic and incorrect to examine one transfer (a paltry paid parental leave scheme in this case) in the absence of all others and then make conclusions about the net transfer of wealth in society. Further, any consideration of taxes paid and benefits received should be considered over a lifetime, very few people, (including your quoted four out of ten families) will pay no net tax in every single year of their lives.
It is paranoid invention to claim that parents/carers are trying to punish or hurt childless and child-free people through the act of raising children.
I’m not sure where you’re heading at the end but I will say that many advocates of family tax benefits, myself included would be quite happy with a more socialised approach to costs instead of tax relief, including such things as free, high quality child care for example.
*standing ovation for bluemilk*
Not just because what you said was brilliant, but for having the patience to write it. Damn, feminism is tiring.
[…] Milk writes We must not walk away from this fight. ‘The sad truth is that the working-outside-the-home mothers least likely to have paid […]
[…] Spilt Milk . Blue milk has a post on why it’s so important to fight for paid maternity leave, We must not walk away from this fight and one on daring to want to work whilst pregnant, without dealing with sexist comments from […]
“Societies without any children cease eventually to exist, it is ridiculous for anyone wishing to belong to an ongoing society to claim that children, which occur as the result of biological processes involved in being human, are at all optional. If you’re arguing for mass annihilation, well then by all means try and make that argument instead. ”
Strawman, blue milk. I was not advocating that people cease to have children. I was pointing out that smug middle class childmakers learn to live within their means and not expect cash handouts just because they have children. The earth’s human population is not facing extinction any time soon. And the contructed hysteria over aging-population is eaily rectified by immigration — but that may require stepping outside the comfort zone and letting in non-English speaking brown people now, wouldn’t it?
“Children are not ‘private goods’, they are not particularly similar to the decision to buy a dog either.”
So you would have to agree they are public goods. It refutes any assertion that the *private* wealth of childed households ought to be compensated. So you cannot disagree that childed households should can access public services to alleviate the “costs” you claim that parents must bear. It seems that those who argue against the notion that children are a private good and insist they are social goods are, incongruously supporters of private welfare – in the form of taxpayer-funded cash handouts — for parents and they seem to revile social support such as government supplied services for mothers and their children.
Parents should be able to access social services aimed at making them better parents and I have no argument that social wealth is of long term benefit to me and society. However, I oppose the notion that as upholding the private wealth of parents is deserved as a matter of course, this can be achieved through compensatory monetary arrangement and it is morally acceptable to penalising the childless to achieve this.
“Parents bear a significant private cost in having children, you can easily locate household income and expenditure data that will show you this. ”
It’s true that losing the income for a few months is difficult if you’re used to a higher level of consumption, but the obvious solution is for the household to budget for that.
It is true that those who have families have may have less discretionary income, less free time, and more “responsibilities”. However, if the rewards of doing so were not also great, why would so many people do it? People who choose to have children are making a private choice that should not burden people who choose not to have children.
There is signicant data to show that, in the past decade, childed households have enjoyed relatively greater benefits than childless ones.
There is a great deal of evidence to show that the childless – especially singles – are directly subsiding the childed. In 2006 Dr Craig Emerson MP (Rankin, ALP) while in Opposition, showed that monies flowed from the childless, no matter how poor, into households with children regardless of need. Indeed, some $100 million in various child-related benefits went to Australia’s richest families in the FY 2004-5. That could have been 100,000 bed-nights or 100km of sealed higher-mass-limits freeway. Dr Emerson’s observations were hardly partisan. Both governments have promulgated favourable treatment of so-called “working families” at the expense of the childless. Dr Emerson is one of the very few MPs considerably brave enough to speak out on behalf of the childless. He is no ignoramus; his PhD is in economics. Dr Emerson said, “it is only a matter of time before taxpayers without children organise a tax revolt.” (See Elisabeth Coleman, “Tax Slug on Poor Singles” in The Australian, 14 June 2008)
Ross Gittens noted “The third of households with dependent children are roughly square because, though they pay a lot of tax, they get back a lot in family tax benefits, education and health care. (Sole parents, however, are well ahead.) So who does that leave to pick up the tab? At one level, the people at the rich end in each of those life-stage categories.
At another level, however, it leaves the 40 per cent of households composed of singles or childless couples of working age. They pay a lot of tax but get back nothing in family benefits and not much in education and health care benefits. ” (See Ross Gittins , “Just who is picking up the tax tab?” in The Sydney Morning Herald, June 20, 2007)
The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling at the University of Canberra (NATSEM) published a paper titled “Redistribution, the Welfare State and Lifetime Transitions” indicating that low-income single people “did seem to be the ones who were struggling”. (see http://www.canberra.edu.au/centres/natsem/home)
In essense, I am more favourable of a socialised approach towards assisting families in need and NOT private cash compensatory arrangments because smug middle-class parents do not want to adjust from their pre-natal DINK lifestyle .
Penalising middle-class childless households to cash up middle-class childed households may be good politics but it makes no economic sense. It seems that the redirection of income from the childless to the childed is, at best, pork barrelling and highly inefficient. At worse, it is bald social engineering that seeks to reward those who fit the preferred social mould (white, heterosexual and married) and punish those who have the termerity to dodge that bullet.
Oh — I am a feminist and a woman. I was not aware that it was a special club from which you had some special right to exclude me. Women can be defined as more than just incubators. I find it appalling that so-called “feminists” have attempted to dress up paid maternity leave as a “feminsist” issue with no regard for women who are not mothers. So much for sisterhood.
I do apologise for assuming you were a man. I can’t recall why I made this assumption, my bad.
But feminist, you are not!
Among your previous comments on this topic (elsewhere):
“I am angry but sexy, single gals who have not been subjected to the ravages of childbirth have something to look forward to; the neglected yet cashed-up husbands looking to find some no-strings attached “company” when wifey is fixated with bubs. ;-)”
Othello Cat,
Bluemilk’s already tried to explain her points to you, and you seem like you’d prefer to ignore them, so I won’t bother on that point.
Blue milk hasn’t tried to define women as mere incubators. Quite often, people do keep to one general topic per post on a blog. This is a blog about her feminism and a large part of that is her feminist mothering – kind of unsurprising that she is interested on the effects of maternity leave on this.
Also the original post was about the effect on lower-paid mothers, who don’t have this kind of support (paid maternity leave). Unlike almost every other developed country around the world.
You and I as childless feminists do not miss out on anything if mothers and fathers and families receive this support. In fact I think it rather benefits us; a workplace that looks after one section of workers like this is more likely to be looking after all workers with good conditions.
What you said is how I feel about this discussion – so back atcha – so much for sisterhood.
Thanks Hendo, for handling this so well in my absence.
I’m going to close the comments on this post, unless someone emails me with a burning need to make a fresh and valid point with regards to this post.
Responding to trolls is too boring.
[…] one of the reasons why the campaign for paid maternity leave was so slow to get going in Australia. A lot of women like myself, with education and good pay had already secured some form of paid matern…. (By the way, we finally got a Labor government who did in fact introduce a paid maternity leave […]
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