It was not so much the words themselves as the tone in which they were delivered. The subject was Tony Abbott’s proposed paid parental leave scheme and the tone was telling. Imagine paying women to have babies? How audacious! On Monday night’s Q&A program, the notion of providing paid parental leave to women was practically spat out by prospective Palmer United Party senator Jaquie Lamby with more than a speck of incredulity.
“…Three or four weeks before an election [Tony Abbott] promises these ladies up here that make a mint that they are going to get more money from having babies because that’s absolute rubbish just to win seats.”
I watched the brief discussion about paid parental leave and my heart sank and my head ached. Liberal Senator Marise Payne made an observation early in the program which rang loud and true.
“The other thing that I find extraordinarily frustrating about politics in Australia sometimes, is our lack of capacity to actually have the discussion and to have the debate and instead we fly to the most extreme point at a million miles an hour, and try and corner people and say this is what you must do if you even think about trying to address the problem. I don’t think that’s very constructive.”
So often it seems, you’re either for or against an issue, which is where you plant your stake in the ground and you don’t given an inch. Before we can even start a dialogue, let alone broach the substantive issues, the discussion disintegrates. Unsurprisingly, the debate is always poorer for it.
And so I watched with some dismay, though not surprise, that the discussion about paid parental leave on Monday night was so limited.
I have written before that I have issues with the government’s proposed PPL. In a nutshell my objection is that spending $5.5 billion on childcare would reap richer rewards for families, employers and the nation’s bottom line, than PPL. Rewards including increased workforce participation of women, increased productivity and an increased tax base, to name a few. I am really happy to discuss the intricacies of this in depth, to anyone, who is willing to listen.
Disappointingly, however, it’s not the intricacies of paid parental leave that need debating; it’s the existence of PPL at all that apparently still needs explaining. Thirty years after Westpac introduced paid maternity leave, not because it was a soft and fuzzy initiative but because it made sound economic sense, as a country we still can’t grasp that.
So much of the public discourse on paid parental leave still aligns with the comments Jacquie Lamby made; that it is a luxury rort in which women indulge. It is infuriating, short-sighted and another reason why Australian women are on the back-foot. Unfortunately it reinforces the recent data on pregnancy discrimination; collectively, whether we admit it or not, we really don’t like the idea of mothers working.
It is almost inexplicable that this needs explaining but women don’t have babies on their own, anymore than they have babies “to make money”. Of course there are many variations on how parenthood looks and transpires but in the overwhelming majority of cases children are the consequence of a choice made by two adults. They are not some frolic of women. Parents – not merely women or mothers – have children. That is why paid leave is available to parents, not just mothers.
But why would anyone pay any parent – man or woman – to have kids? Because as Westpac, and many other employers, discovered it makes better economic sense to pay someone parental leave than it is to let a qualified and trained employee leave the business altogether.
It’s also pertinent to note that paid parental leave is not a cash windfall that is simply banked by rich women. When a baby comes along, expenses continue. There is no corresponding dip in rent or the mortgage or household bills because a baby has arrived. Paid parental leave enables families, again not just mothers, to meet those financial obligations during the transition where one parent might be home with a new baby. A family being able to meet those obligations is of benefit to the whole economy. It’s money being spent, tax being collected and families not needing additional government support.
The broad economic rationale for paid parental leave seems absent from discussion. Another panelist on Monday night, Judith Sloan, an economist herself, said this.
” I think one of the really big problems is … that we are being asked to all make a sacrifice, to all chip in to deal with the budget problem…but then, juxtaposed against that, is a $5.5 billion paid parental leave scheme which looks extraordinarily generous and so I think the message just becomes very confused and I think politically the Government would be much easier dealing with the line that we’ve all got to make sacrifices, we have all got to chip in and not just then accept it is only about 150,000 women a year that will be preferenced by this arrangement and I think a lot of people would find that will stick in their craw when they are being asked to make sacrifices.”
It’s a valid point but what bothers me, is that there is not a single reference to the economic benefits of paid parental leave. That it is not merely $5.5 billion paid into the accounts of greedy women gleefully counting their dollars.
If Tony Abbott is serious about his proposed PPL policy, he ought to consider a campaign to sell it to the Australian public properly. To communicate and educate the electorate about the broad economic benefits of the policy beyond his favoured platitude of giving women a “fair dinkum” parental leave scheme. Of course, the added benefit of Abbott examining the policy more closely might be that he discovers he’d get a better outcome by investing in childcare.
Until that happens we are destined to keep missing the point.