I’ve long thought that the procreation fetish beloved of Duumvir $weetie the Subprime Minister had a certain resonance with older narratives of “breed ye women of Australia, lest we commit race suicide!”… So I’d like to point to a very interesting post from Arleeshar at stoush, occasioned by Family First’s new “policy” of a ten grand uberbonus for a third kiddie (should they be renamed “Family Third?). Arleeshar traces the history of such payments in Australia:
Many people may be unaware that Australia in fact introduced an earlier form of maternity payment in 1912, which was abolished only in 1978. The payment spanned and then outlived a time when the Eugenics movement had achieved considerable popularity, pre-Hitler, and the policy was originally explicitly framed as a ‘keep Australia white’ initiative.
The maternity payment was for a ‘viable’ child - a live birth - and was payable only to women who were not ‘asiatics’ or ‘aboriginal natives’ of Australia.
She traces the evolution of the policy over time, and the contemporary resonances of its resurrection:
The current baby bonus isn’t really that much different to its predecessor. In the interests of compassion, and as a nod to the notion that it is ‘instead of’ maternity leave, the baby bonus still applies to stillborn children. However, it is unashamedly about demographics, in the “one for the nation� style so famously espoused by our treasurer - not tied to work or aimed at supporting women’s equality.
It is still about race; values; but it has shifted the debate to new and more subtle ground, away from undesirable ‘race’ and toward desirable and undesirable ‘culture’. It espouses the idea that it is far more ‘valuable’ to achieve population stability through birth rather than immigration.
I blogged about it this morning [link] and simply cannot believe that someone’s recommending spending even more money on such a garbage policy.
If population growth is really what we need, and I doubt very much that it is, why not accept some of the 72 refugees that Kevin Andrews has denied entry to Australia after they were found to be legitimate refugees? We’ve got people begging us to let them stay in our nation and we don’t even have to give them $4k to do so! They can already contribute to the economy and won’t put pressure on our public schooling system in the way that an increased number of children will.
So I’m a racist for getting two lots of the Baby Bonus.
Now I’ve heard it all.
Read the post, please.
Yes, Razor, it’s all about you.
The individual is not racist for receiving it; the party is racist for conceiving it. (If it were not, then Sam’s argument above would be the obvious solution to population growth.) And sexist as well; the other main driver of a policy like this is to get more of those uppity women out of public life and back into the labour ward and the kitchen and the nursery where they belong.
I want at least 30k to pay for the nanny that would save my sanity if I had a third child.
Just to be pedantic - the baby bonus was introduced 2002? and was tested against your income prebaby (base year) and post baby each year, and paid each year until the child reaches the age of 5. It was replaced by the Maternity Payment in July 2004(?). The current maternity payment is a one off of $4000.
I’m going to give boychild a lecture when I get home, for selfishly popping out in 1997. He could have waited surely.
Pavlov’s cat wrote:
Or out of the workforce, period. I’m not sure who exactly is motivated to have more babies by being given money, but I don’t want to meet them. We received the BB for our recent arrival, but if you were trying to be financially rational about it, it just doesn’t add up. Loss of 2nd income, extra costs of baby stuff (all the things we threw out after the last one - cots, prams, bottles, nappies, clothes, nursery furniture, car seat). Career chopped at the knees (yet again). We’re lucky in that our one income is pretty good and Armidale living is reasonably cheap - but we would not have contemplated another child in Sydney, baby bonus or not.
Now, if the feds promised a sleep bonus, I’d be all over it. Jeebus we’re tired.
Following from Helen’s comment I shall give Bear an extra cuddle and some pulped pear (fave, yay!) when I get home. Good girl. And you know, birth wasn’t half as painful as people claimed, though I did bang my shin running around the bed taking photos of beloved looking like she’d been hit by a truck.
Seriously, we chatted about it recently and agreed, as I suspect most people in a similar boat would, that we didn’t need it and would have preferred that payments for those on reasonable incomes instead had gone into dealing with the attrocious childcare situation- if anything was a stronger factor holding working/professional parents back from more kids I’d like to know about it… (18 mth waiting lists where we live, just to clarify)
“Should they be renamed ‘Family Third’?”
It reminds me of a book called Ender’s Game (by Orson Scott Card). Except in that case, ‘Third’ was derogatory, because there were laws punishing families for having more than 2 kids (population control).
On the substantive point though, I agree. Arguments from Costello, Bob Birrell and others (Albrechtson?) that we need to lift fertility really come down to ‘white baby good, black baby bad’. There is no need for replacement rate fertility when internation immigration is easily available for Australia. In fact, ‘importing fully grown/educated worker-people’ is much cheaper than having to ‘grow them from scratch’.
There are probably worse ways of ensuring cultural dominance than shagging one’s way to pre-eminence.
Of course around many parts it isn’t known as the Baby Bonus, but instead as the Plasma Bonus - as befits the real object upon which the money is spent.
Maybe Family First’s policy would allow the population to buy an even grander, more massive, Plasma TV…
“Breeders Bonus”
Whats the difference between a baby bonus and government funded, paid maternity leave?
In principle, nothing. In practice (assuming AWE for women)for the six months it seems reasonable to permit women to be with their brand new, real little Australian, about $20,000 worth of difference. That’s the point of it all really. A cultural meme of ‘breeding to build the real Australia’ as opposed to policies which permit women (and their partners) to make real choices, on the basis of real, as opposed to ‘imagined’ financial security, about the number of children they would really have, all things being equal. But of course all things aren’t equal, and that’s the point.
‘Baby Bonus’ has such a lovely, one off, lottery win, ‘and here’s one for the lucky Mum’ feel about it, doesn’t it? Very different to a scheme where entitlememt to weekly income equal to forgone market income might rouse untoward feelings of entitlement and the like eh?
Even the current democrat proposal is for 14 weeks at minimum wage - which is of really of quite close value. I agree with your comments on how it could be perceived, but I’d suggest its better to get more support for it now, regardless of how its named and then after its introduced, just rename it
One advantage of calling it something other than maternity leave is the risk that employers who currently do pay maternity leave may stop doing so or reduce the payments if the government also makes a maternity leave payment.
I follow the historical sweep of the argument, but this argument is significantly overreaching.
By this logic, paid maternity leave could be racist or sexist, because it encourages childbirth of the present population mix and encourages women out of the workforce.
In fact paid maternity leave, which unless done through social security would not be available to casuals, can discriminate. Indirectly against migrant women (who are highly casualised) and indirectly in favour of better educated women (who have higher paid jobs).
But I’m in favour of paid maternity leave because it avoids discouraging women into the workforce and on career paths. Further I favour targeted maternity assistance simply because childbirth has significant ’start-up’ costs (ugghly jargon) but also is a societal benefit.
* Declaration of interest * our first is due early next year.
I see this measure more as tax relief. From what I’ve been told there will be plenty of costs and plenty of demands on my time, so in order to meet those costs I won’t be able to get a second job or innovate my way to higher earnings. A bit of tax relief might be handy … all I need to do is voice it in a focus group, and chances are it will enter the political marketplace and before you know it, my duties toward society in some general sense will be realigned to the immediate environment of my household - to some extent.
Personally, I’d be grateful for a bit of tax relief. It would make administrative sense too: instead of collecting the money and dishing it out again, why not just not collect it from certain people such as my soon-to-be self? However, that wouldn’t necessarily make me grateful to the government. See, if I get regular letters from the Strain Government claiming credit for the payment and follow-up letters from political parties wanting me to reward “their” payment with my vote. It’s apparently worth any amount of cumbersome bureaucracy to achieve this level of gratitude, apparently.
As I see it, that’s the real motivation. I disagree with the current immigration system, but it’s not necessarily true that Australia can or should rely on refugee flows as the only source of population growth, assuming population growth is what you want etc.
If it’s about tax relief, then it should come as a $4,000 tax write-off or something (I’d love to fill in the “Other tax deductible expenses” with “Child, male, $4,000″ and then attach a receipt).
You got a receipt?
With due respect, I don’t think you’re actually following the argument that’s been presented, which is that the bribe-to-breed-bonus is “not tied to work or aimed at supporting women’s equality” but “espouses the idea that it is far more ‘valuable’ to achieve population stability through birth rather than immigration” and is about achieving social/cultural ascendancy through demographic supremacy; in a nutshell: Let’s breed more people of “our sort”.
Jobby, your post immediately following mine proves my point: thanks.
As far as your second post, I think you can disagree with the argument in the original post without being sucked into its assumptions.
The cost of any proper maternity leave scheme should be borne by employers, the government (who would be responsible for ensuring payments to women not in the workforce and to top up contributions) and all employees. Fourteen weeks leave is risible, especially as six months is the recommended minimum for breast feeding.
In addition, the payment would need to be universal, in order to eliminate the discrimination against casuals and of course young women of child bearing age. There is no reason at all why those who currently enjoy such schemes should not be able to retain them, but in any case, six months paid at the a women’s full ordinary time earnings would be practically double (in time) at the very least, of the most generous schemes now applying, which overwhelmingly are enjoyed by women in the public sector and financial services.
If the cost to reproduce the workforce is to be hypothecated, it is best that it be done so in the most obvious and transparent manner possible.
Women who are currently not in any employment whatsoever should of course continue to receive the baby bonus as a one off payment, since they would have less means to make provision for the extras that having a child necessarily entails. I am not opposed to migration, but I am opposed to the sense of entitlement that some members of the business ‘community’ are rapidly acquiring, for a fully imported, franchise free workforce, whose costs of reproduction are entirely outsourced to the developing world. there is no such thing as a free lunch, and it is time some members of the deserving classes learnt that.
And it is being argued seriously that that’s a bad thing? Amazing.
Australian immigration rates are running at record levels. Twenty-five per cent of our population were born overseas. Permanent residents and a large class of temporary residents are entitled to the Family Allowance. It is not restricted to citizens. There is no social/ cultural test for receiving it, unlike the silly citizenship test. (which conjures up images of asking such questions as, “Tell me young, Sri Lankan mother, for your $4000, True or False: Murali is a chucker?”, or “For your $4000, recent fecund arrival from England, since Fred Parry was the last pommy bloke to win a tennis grand slam title in 1936, how many times have dinky-di Aussie guys won one; more than sixty times or more than seventy times?)
This one’s got to play for laughs.
Well, in principle, everything really. The one is a payment for breeding. The other is a recognition that leave to give birth is legitimate leave in the same way as sick leave is legitimate leave and that it should be paid. The former can be seen as a welfare payment. The latter would be a legitimate workplace entitlement. The former treats the issue as simply concerning the provision of material goods for the child (or possibly a plasma). The latter recognises that maternity issues are issues of employment and equality for women, and the money issue isn’t just about the child; and also, really that it isn’t just about the money - there’s a huge symbolic aspect to normalising feminised working conditions rather than just assuming that older, masculinised conditions are ‘normal’ and non-gendered (excuse mouthful of words).
One of the things about equal opportunity is that it is only that - leveling the playing field, not starting from the same position. Paid maternity leave is about the physical needs of a woman in giving birth, preparation and recovery time. While there’s a whole other discussion to be had about the pathologising of pregnancy, I truly believe that it’s legitimate to compare maternity leave to sick leave.
In practice, it depends. For instance, fourteen weeks of most womens’ salaries, if they are not casual workers, is going to be much more than $4k. That’s alot of lost income. In the absence of paid leave, and for women who do not work, the baby bonus is useful and beneficial, because money’s always welcome, let’s face it. There’s even a case for it to be continued in tandem with paid maternity leave scheme, for women without an income (although I know Natasha Stott-Despoja and others would like to means test it).
I wonder if someone could get an “advance” on the payment for IVF treatment.
So if instead of calling it the baby bonus it was called a maternity leave payment then it would be ok?
Note that Natash Stott-Despoja’s proposal is a payment independent of current income (the minimum wage). I’d also argue that paid maternity leave should still be paid to those who weren’t previously working. Their ability to do unpaid work which would have financial benefit to them (eg effort that saves you money rather than earns you money) is still restricted.
Remembering that since unpaid leave is already a legislated right, in the end both schemes, baby bonus or government funded paid maternity leave, end up with the same financial result - a bunch of $$$s from the government.
Personally I don’t really care which way it ends up getting delivered, I think the end result will be the same. I would however like paid paternity leave, but I think we’re a long way off that being introduced
The issue raised does have serious aspect. What happens if a patriotic mum and dad decide to have “one for country” but turn out to have twins. Surely the country (ie the taxpayer) should be obliged to foot the bill for the extra kid’s upkeep. $398,000 should do it. http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22439232-29277,00.html
I’d settle for a bit of seed capital.
“By this logic, paid maternity leave could be racist or sexist, because it encourages childbirth of the present population mix and encourages women out of the workforce”.
Yes, with hindsight, we can point out the racist/eugenic ideas underpinning these types of payment. But we all look to Scandinavia for their ‘progressive’ parental leave payments, but they all started out, many deacdes ago, as payments to preserve the Scandinavian race and to encourage swedish women to breed in the face of immigration etc etc. So: encourage maternity leave or maternity payments on whatever grounds are going; then when the idea has been normalised extend it to fathers and then you’ll have yourself a decent parental leave scheme.
“The former can be seen as a welfare payment. The latter would be a legitimate workplace entitlement. The former treats the issue as simply concerning the provision of material goods for the child (or possibly a plasma)”
Yes, yes, you’re right in saying they’re different. But spare us the prejudices about mothers spending their family payments on plasmas. I mean, really, where did that come from? We’ve had family payments, regardless of workforce status, for nearly 70 years. Making sure such payments went to mums rather than as tax deductions to dads in the 1970s was seen as a step forward for gender equity (’from the wallet to the purse’ I think was the phrase used) because research showed that mums as the primary carer were more inclined to spend such money on things needed for the welfare of the child.
In short, we need both: Redistribution to families with children, regardless of the workforce status of the parents AND a recognition of maternity leave as a workforce entitlement (perhaps financed in the same way as workers’ comp). It’s not either/or
I find it difficult to accept the argument that the baby bonus is to encourage the ‘right sort of people to have babies’ as an alternative to immigration (apologies if that wasn’t the argument of the original post). I’m not exactly sure what the ‘right’ sort of people are but given that so many people living here are immigrants and that the baby bonus is paid to everyone (athiests, fundamentalist Christians, Africans, Asians, Caucasians etc etc) that there’s much discrimination occuring.
I don’t think breeding is any better or worse than immigration except that if you want to have a healthy young work force far into the future then every year we would have to import young workers or people with families. However, I’m guessing that an immigration policy that discriminates on the basis of age is probably inferior to one based on skills.
Well, yes, this was a policy of the Fisher government - an ALP government reflecting the perfectly conventional socialist concepts of the era. The White Australia policy was another ALP favourite of the period. See that ‘voice of the working class’, the Bulletin, with its slogan ‘Australia for the White Man’ until 1961.
Eugenics was fashionable with socialists and communists all through this era, reaching its logical conclusion in some of the purges under Stalin (Crimean Tartars? What Crimean Tartars?), Mao (Tibetans? What Tibetans?) and of course the German National Socialists, who rather discredited it also. But this was socialist boilerplate for three generations.
And why is such a venerable socialist and ALP policy as a maternity bonus being so roundly condemned?
MarkL
canberra
It’s not about race. It’s about economic growth and the strength of the nation.
It is difficult finding, every year, 100,000 skilled workers overseas. It is impossible to replace a large decline in local births with skilled overseas immigrants.
It is cheaper to get a family to raise a child and school it locally than it is to support and train an adult unskilled immigrant. It also keeps demographics less lumpy.
I oppose population growth. It is our greatest problem.
Scale back skilled immigration; expand family reunion migration; expand humanitarian refugee settlement; and allow our population to bump along at 21 million. Fund enough education and we’ll do alright. Go with the aging of the population. There are worse demographic changes.
Why, if you oppose population growth and see it as our greatest problem do you support any immigration at all? Surely we should, according to your reasoning, end family reunion migration which is biased in favour of one class of Australian residents over another and excludes everyone in the world who is not related to an Australian resident? Otherwise you are just advocating the very form of cultural preference that Arsheleer condemns.
And why should we have any humanitarian refugee settlement program at all? Surely that involves choices as to what is desirable and undesirable and therefore, to follow Arsheleer’s reasoning, is to be condemned. Why, after all, give those people who can jump through the hoops of a fifty year old convention any more preference than any others of the billions who live lives of misery and desperation in the third world but who can’t jump through those hoops?
On your comment:
You are obviously clueless as to the number of skilled migrants who seek to migrate to Australia every year compared to the number who actually get to come here.
Nah, not unless there were leave involved
I apologise for over-use of irony.
What?
“I apologise for over-use of irony”
See http://notesonrhetoric.blogspot.com/:
“Irony: To give your comments a protective coat, it is always worthwhile intimating, hinting, allusively indicating that you are ‘being ironic’. Retroactive irony can also be used - declare after receiving criticism that your opponent has perhaps ‘missed some of the irony’ of the post. No one will inquire too deeply into ‘missed irony’ for fear of redoubling their original oversight. Note, you do not have to actually be ironic, simply append ‘guess the tone’ or ‘tongue firmly in cheek’ and your opponent will be reluctant to entangle himself in the invisible gauze spun around your words”.
Um … I might be misreading you here, but I think you’d be hard put to agree with an argument without agreeing to its inherent assumptions.
My point was more that, to engage with the argument, you have to take the argument on its own terms. That’s not being sucked in, it’s simply giving someone a sympathetic reading.
Personally, I find the original argument quite interesting, if somewhat vague and difficult to substantiate; it’s about the long-term evolution of policy and contemporary resonances with the past (dare I say ‘colonial’ past) rather than any inherent bigotry or anything.
Fair enough, most people here are more interested in discussing the current crop of ‘baby bonus’, ‘paid maternity leave’ issues. But the original argument shouldn’t be ignored, whether one agrees with it or not.
I agree with Chumpai and others about the strained argument presented here. How the baby bonus is intended to be about breeding the right sort of person, i.e. non-immigrant is a mystery since we are a nation of immigrants and will continue to be so and getting more diversely multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-racial as I touchtype, including by err, breeding which the baby bonus (sort of) encourages.
I don’t think the argument is strained at all. You have to put it into the context of the related arguments from demographic doomsayers such as Mark Steyn at the time about the “West is failing to breed and thus will cease to exist”. Its ramifications certainly weren’t lost on right wing commentators then, either in the punditariat or RWDBs on blogs.
Yes, Mark, Josephine Baker made a similar point back in her 1940 book “Fighting for life” about the link between militaristic governments and family policy:
“It may seem like a cold-blooded thing to say, but someone ought to point out that the World War was a backhanded break for children…When a nation is fighting a war or preparing for another…it must look to its future supplies of cannon-fodder…[R]ulers and governments begin to think hard about how best to conserve future citizens”
Jobby, I’m saying that you can support the various mechanisms for funding births without doing so from a racialist perspective, or even conceding that these are in any way valid. These measures are inflationary and otherwise economically irresponsible as I said, but pocketing the $ doesn’t slime you with any eugenicist nonsense.
No one has been saying it does.
Jobby and arleeshar have.
Not on a fair reading of the comments, I think.
I agree. I’ll be pocketing the money myself soon enough.
That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to seriously question the reasons behind the money being there in the first case.
Personally, I’m less convinced of the validity of the original argument than others seem to be; call me a cynic, but I think the baby bonus is more driven by values-based bribery than anything else, a way for the gummint to look like its being very ‘family values’ and ‘thinking about the children’ while chucking a few bucks around to younger voters (maybe even those elusive ‘aspirational’ voters). That said, it does provide the historical background or precedent upon which policies such as the baby bonus occur, which are always going to provide some sort of loose, framing context.
It’s not as simple as the baby bonus being ‘racist’ or anything like that. It’s an issue of historical context.
Until population growth is seen as a problem rather than an achievement we will continue to see baby bonuses and the like offered up by government.
State premiers for example still crow when their population growth rates outstrip neighbouring states. Then they are surprised when they are told they are running out of water etc. We need a new generation of leadership on this issue.
Is it really about population growth though or just making sure that we don’t end up with rapid population shrinkage as the baby boomers start to die off (even if it would solve the housing affordability problem if we end up with more houses than people!)? These sort of things are very much long term planning.
I have never said otherwise. I disagree with the policy but $ are always useful and as I said earlier in a comment on this thread, I think the bb should exist in tandem with paid maternity leave.
Just because there was a baby bonus for white women doesn’t make the current baby bonus racist. As far as I know, the policy in its current incarnation is not targeted specifically at families of a particular race or culture. Furthermore, the argument that it is trying to coax women out the workplace may be in keeping with Howard’s personal philosophy, but I don’t think the policy specifically attempts to do this. In fact, it could be seen as a recognition that in our modern society, where women do go into the workforce, and often have to do so in order for families and couples to make ends meet (the ‘family wage’ for males being long gone from as a pillar of our IR system), that bringing a child into the world can become a significant burden on time and finances, particularly if a mother or father has to take time off work. Given this, I think that the baby bonuses are quite modest, given how much money couples are likely to save if they don’t have children… I think people are by and large still having children for the same old reasons: out of love, or by accident. A payment of 10,000 is perhaps a far more realistic incentive in that light. Government’s recognizing the importance of child birth and child rearing is not, prima facie, racist or sexist… and a country shouldn’t have to rely on immigration to maintain population levels. Recognizing that is not racist. If it is, then I think the epithet is losing its meaning, and its status as something that is truly pernicious and harmful.
I’ll repeat once again - it’s important to look at the context and the rhetoric that accompanied the introduction of the policy. People seem to have a very sanguine view of the government’s motives. There’s almost no good reason from a policy perspective to prefer this approach to other things like parental leave.
Rather than seeking to encourage population growth, Australia should be following China’s lead and should be trying to discourage population growth, by placing a tax on the third child rather than giving a bonus, and by removing the tax incentives for families. This is one of the means that Australia needs to adopt in order to reduce our impact on the environment, especially our collective carbon footprint.
Couldn’t agree more Silkworm, and a Bloggers’ First Award for raising this far more pertinent issue raised by the baby bonus but which sadly is verboten everywhere even in the Oz blogosphere it seems. Which is pretty pathetic. Would love to see a proper post and debate on it once before overpopulation oblivion.
I agree, too, silkworm. As soon as you say you favour a population reduction, though, the pro-growth elements of society (usually developers and conservatives) will say one of two things; “Who are you going to kill first?” or they’ll accuse you of being an authoritarian communist.
The fact is we’ve got too many people and need to start looking at negative population growth if we’re going to have a habitable planet.
“People seem to have a very sanguine view of the government’s motives.”
Well, perhaps, Mark, but to channel Baroness Thatcher (and I promise this is the first and last time): who are they, and what are their names? In fact many people in this thread aren’t sanguine about the government’s motives. I was saying earlier you can be completely cynical about the government’s policies and even recognise that those parental leave schemes we now recognise as a progressive model (viz. Scandinavia) also started with less than pure (viz. eugenicist) motives. Take the money and run, I say. The state will always intervene to subsidise the geese that lays its golden egg, viz the proletariat, lest the golden eggs cease to come
silkworm on 20 September 2007 at 4:55 pm
jinmaro on 20 September 2007 at 5:16 pm
What about WBB wbb on 19 September 2007 at 5:32 pm? Is he chopped liver?
I agree, BTW. We have to disengage environmental arguments re. population control from the ugly nativists who have co-opted them - historically they’ve been messily tangled (e.g., Australians against further immigration, etc.). That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to parental leave, either (I’m generally an agitator for such measures; Baby bonuses, not so much.) I just don’t think having more kids is an end in itself.
I think it is reading too much into the government’s motives to conclude that the Baby Bonus in its current form aims to encourage any particular segment of the population to reproduce (as opposed to providing a more general, if marginal, incentive for breeding). Indeed if its intent was to encourage white middle-class women to have more babies I suspect it will turn out to have been an abject failure or at the very least one with a huge deadweight cost.
Women who have more children are likely to be from lower socio-economic groups, more poorly educated, with lower labour force attachment and/or living outside the major metropolitan areas. I would be very surprised if the Baby Bonus has changed any of this. So as a eugenicist policy it would have to be judged a failure.
Somebody raised the issue of whether the BB is designed to encourage women to leave or stay out of the workforce. To the extent that the government has policies with this objective, you would have to point the figure at Family Tax Benefit (especially Part B), not the BB. In reality, the BB is just a fairly typical policy compromise from a government who wanted to be seen to be providing compensation to new mothers, but didn’t want to be accused of discriminating against those who were not currently in the workforce or spend too much money either.