Last night, somewhere between dinner and dishes and cleaning up the dog poo-flecked lawn, I sat down to complete our household’s Census forms only to discover for myself – and tell my country – that I am an unpaid carer.
Sandwiched between the Census questions about how I get to work and what language I speak at home were a few I took a fair while to answer.
“In the last week did Madeleine spend time doing unpaid domestic work for their household? (Include all housework, food/drink preparation and clean-up, laundry, gardening, home
maintenance and repairs, household shopping, finance management, pet and animal care, and travel associated with unpaid domestic work.)
Yes. Plenty. The dog was the least of it.
“In the last two weeks did Madeleine spend time providing unpaid care, help or assistance to family members or others because of a disability, a long-term health condition or problems related to old age?”
Yes. Often. In between everything else.
I have not run a tally or chalked a ledger or ever really accounted for the time I’ve spent caring, cooking, cleaning, worrying, doing housework, shopping, crying, sorting paperwork, managing money and sorting out tangles for family members over the past few decades, let alone the past two weeks. For the Census, I approximated the number. But it likely falls short.
What I do know is that earlier this year, I deliberately stepped back from paid work to have greater capacity to care for my Mum, who was in her final months of the long and slow goodbye of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mum died just shy of the two-week Census care window. So I didn’t account for the last weeks of her life, for the thousands of caring hours spent with her over the best part of a decade as she declined, and for the caring hours I found to fit between all my other jobs and roles, because I wanted to be there for her. I can’t account for the gulf of heart between us now she has gone, and how my life is now recalibrating around the hours found again.
Perhaps these hours will be promptly filled again because, apart from Mum, I am also Guardian for two of my siblings with long-term debilitating disabilities. So I ticked the Census boxes for those unpaid care hours too, and tallied as best I could the extra hours found to hold up the daily architecture of keeping their lives supported where and when I could.
I’m also a working Mum of four and run a busy household of six. So there was a tick there, too, for the unpaid domestic work that keeps it all upright.
None of this appears on a payslip. Most of it doesn’t appear anywhere at all. Which is exactly why ticking those boxes matters, and gave me pause to sit back and actually recognise how much of my time is spent caring for others.
The Census is one of the few places this work is asked about at all. Its unpaid-work questions lasso the whole invisible economy of the home – the housework and the gardening, the meal planning, preparation and the clean-up, the endless laundry and home maintenance and repairs, the household shopping, finance management, pet and animal care, and all the travel associated with unpaid domestic work, the helping of family, friends and neighbours, the caring for children and for those who are ill, disabled or elderly, and the volunteering in community, sports clubs and charities.
The ABS collects this data because unpaid work – precisely because usually no money changes hands – slips through the usual measures of the economy even as it holds entire families and lives and communities together, and because this country needs to see how its households carry study, work, family and care all at once.
In fact, caring, when you add it up, is enormous – and almost entirely invisible.
The last Census counted nearly 2.5 million Australians providing unpaid care. Carers Australia now puts it higher, at more than 2.65 million of us, close to one in ten. Between us we provide something like 2.2 billion hours of unpaid care a year, and if the government had to replace us with a paid workforce, the bill would come to $77.9 billion a year, just under $1.5 billion a week (the most recent full estimate from 2020). We carers are therefore, in the driest possible terms, one of the largest untendered contracts in the national economy – and most of us have not seen a cent for it.
We are also, mostly, women. Around 60 per cent of all carers are women, and we make up more than 70 per cent of primary carers, who average 35 hours a week, and more than a quarter of this segment do upwards of 60 hours of caring a week. Interestingly, two-thirds of all care hours are logged by people already holding down paid jobs, which in reality is an unpaid, unseen and unsustainable second shift that never really clocks off.
The real number of hours spent providing unpaid care or domestic work across Australia is almost certainly higher than so many of us will estimate, because so many carers never think to call themselves one – the caring is just what you do for your own and those you love, so it goes unnamed and uncounted. Care has always been done in private, by people far too busy to stop for the night and file a report.
Ticking this year’s Census box is a small act of making it seen.
I am no saint, but I’ve ticked the boxes. It won’t lighten the load, shorten the phone calls, or bring Mum back. But it will put her, and my siblings, and the husbands and wives and friends and relatives and next-door neighbours and volunteers and the 2.65 million of us doing this in the early mornings or in our lunch breaks or long after dark, onto the ledger of a nation that is finally, quietly, working out what it’s worth.