Bouquet: The Federal Treasurer has made a commitment to paid parental leave. $544 per week ( the minimum wage) for 18 weeks for primary caregivers whose income is lower than $150,000.
It’s about time. But there’s the rub:
Brickbat:
The scheme must be introduced in a measured and responsible way, particularly taking into account the global recession, so the scheme won’t begin until January 2011.
The cost is estimated to be about $450 million per year.
There were a couple of plausible start dates the Federal government could have chosen, and plenty of other possibilities. The ‘sensible’ start dates would have been 1 January 2010, or 1 July 2010 (the start of the government’s financial year. But the government has chosen to delay PPL by between 6and 12 months. Using say 5% as a discount rate (official cash rate of 3%, plus the usual 60 basis points margin, plus doubling that to allow for governments all over the world looking to borrow money at present, giving me 4.2%, and rounding it up to 5% just to be very cautious, which represents my former auditor’s soul making itself felt), I estimate that based on the time value of money, and using a standard present value calculation, the delay will save the federal government between $11 million and $22 million.
I can’t see any good reason for the delay. If saving $22 million is so very important, couldn’t it be done elsewhere in the federal budget?
Save the Children has just rated Australia as one of the best places in the world to be a mother. It’s number 3, behind Sweden and Norway, and ahead of Iceland (4), Denmark (5), New Zealand (6), and well ahead of the United States (27). The place where it needs to be better is in paid parental leave.
And while I’m handing out the brickbats, it seems that the sole parents pension will not be increased in the coming budget. That’s another measure that will impact much more heavily on women than men. And it will impact very heavily on the children of sole parents. Save the Children ranks Australia number one in the world in terms of the status of women, but a woeful 27 for its treatment of children (PDF – 3.7MB). Surely ensuring that sole parents are adequately supported would improve this ranking.
Between the delay in paid parental leave, and the predicted failure to increase the sole parents pension, it looks as though this government doesn’t really want to support mothers at all. Or maybe it just sees them as their most expendable group of supporters.
2011? That has nothing to do with the budget more to do with an election.
Deborah, the 2011 start-date is pure political/electoral bastardry and nothing to do with “fiscal prudence”. It puts the parental leave start-date beyond the next federal election, which forces the Coalition to adopt paid parental leave as a “me-too” in their electoral platform, because it would be electoral suicide to oppose it at the ballot box.
1 January 2011 for parental leave is an attempted wedge on the Coalition, nothing more. Labor will be hoping for some ill-disciplined remarks from the likes of Nick Minchin or Andrew Robb to exploit as signs that the Coalition wouldn’t implement the leave payments. Of course, Minchin and Robb are too disciplined to hand Labor such an electoral gift, but a rabid back-bencher might not be so smart.
Humungous, expensive and gorgeous bouquet: they (finally) seem to be officially calling it ‘parental leave’, not ‘maternity’ or ‘maternal’ leave.
the 2011 start-date is pure political/electoral bastardry and nothing to do with “fiscal prudence
Swann did say himself that it is for reasons of fiscal prudence, but if it is really for reasons of electoral prudence, then that is deeply cynical.
Or just sensible. I don’t see how you can possibly say they’re not interested in supporting mothers at all. It would have been so easy right now not to do anything at all, but they have. Congratulations, is what I say.
Anyone able to do a snapshot of full time employment for younger ladies before and after this comes in?
I mean in any realistic quantifyable way? It is a “nice” thing to do, but add it to the thousands shovelled out (Yes thats Johnnys fault) in payments for just dropping a sprog and its a serious cost to the taxpayer.
I dont have kids, I wont be having any. Why should I subsidise someone elses?
I dont have kids, I wont be having any. Why should I subsidise someone elses?
Because you live in a society. Suck it up.
You might want to subsidise them because you want a workforce around when you need it in your old age – it’s got to come from somewhere.
Forcing the coalition to support parental leave before the next election goes some way to ensuring that it will become established and accepted in the longer term.
But that is in itself a good thing, surely, however it might have been achieved. Not least because once they committed to it they could never get away with going back on it. Neat. But I think their motives are probably mixed, as motives usually are; I’m prepared to believe this government really does believe in parental leave and aren’t just doing this to be cynical and opportunist, which is what people seem to be suggesting. Isn’t there a bit of post hoc, propter hoc-ish fallacious thinking going on here?
Partly because kids are neither luxuries nor commodities and partly for the same reason we all subsidise each other’s stuff. (NB I don’t have any kids either.) Like I’ll pay taxes to train athletes if other people will pay them to support the arts. Swings and roundabouts.
I dont have kids, I wont be having any. Why should I subsidise someone elses?
Because children aren’t consumer goods. They are citizens and permanent residents and residents of this country, and like every other citizen and permanent resident and resident, we support them as needed.
If you can’t afford children – either financially or because you prefer your career (either partner’s) over being a full-time parent (at least for awhile) then it’s simple: don’t have them!
Well for one thing, those kids will grow up, and pay for your pension.
Actiually Lefty, I dislike that argument. It could be the little buggers decide not let us have a pension at all. It also leaves room for people to argue that they’ll put that money in super and pay for their own pension. I think the argument is that people should be supported in their choice to have kids, just as we support people in many of their other choices. I also think having kids is just another choice, no more or less meaningful than anything else people might do in their lives. But if people want to do that, I’m happy to support them with my taxes.
I’m also a bit disappointed with 2011. But I have to admit, its a very clever way of extracting bipartisanship.
And on that: why not make the Libs pin their colours to a mast on such a keystone issue? And why not get a mandate from us directly?
Either way, they really are whipping Talcum pillar to post.
Lefty E,
If parental leave is not available and that’s the deciding factor in whether a couple have children or not, then perhaps it’s best they don’t.
Except in the case of a person who prefers career to children, I doubt the lack of PPL will stop couples having children. It didn’t stop my partner and I, nor did the fact we chose to live on a low single income till our children left school because we wanted to bring up our children, and be there for them, not leave it to strangers in a childcare centre.
PS In our case I, the father, became the full-time parent while my partner pursued her career (which I’m glad she did because she earns more than I ever would’ve.)
Hey Mole, you were a kid once, right? Have you paid your parents back the $500,000 they spent on you? And what the money the state spent to provide you with education, health, welfare and safety. Probably another half a mil.
If you want to complain about kids getting subsidized, pay your own subsidy back first.
I presume, like most of us, it was Mole’s parent’s choice to conceive him and bring him into the world, not his.
Sure Fine, thats another good argument: but I could just as easily have said “roads” or “police”. The fact is we will need a younger generation of taxpayers across our life cycle – any way you slice it.
And yes, Sans Blog – I would also hope none of these schemes become ‘deciding factors’ in anyone having kids.
As any parent knows – any money we receive is a joke compared to the outlay! That’s not what its about.
Sans Blog: the expense starts after birth. He chose to eat, right?
Now you’re being silly, Vibenna. Mole was left with no choice, something his parents did have.
Expenses start when you buy a car too and you know that at the time, but you can choose not to buy the car in the first place and therefore not have the expense (and plummeting depreciation).
IMHO it’s a generous ‘means’ test to offer this to parents earning less than $150 000 pa. That must be the definition of a ‘working family’. Wish I had been worth three grand a week. Expect a birth spike in the summer of 2010-11.
Pablo, after tax it would be closer to $2000pw. Still nothing to be sneezed at!
To all the posters doing the old “Because its for the future” shtick.
I dont care. I support my partners child on my wage while shes a full time mum and domestic goddess (her words not mine).
I pay taxes for education and other basic services.
I dont support taxation being used for subsidising peoples options. That includes
Elite sports. (the institute of sport etc) A waste of money.
The arts. If its good it will pay for itself, if not I dont want to pay for it.
Theres little I want the government to do other than the basics (theres plenty of room for arguement in that as well). I dont want to subsidise people having kids. If you want kids, save your money, (and your holidays/day off in leui etc) and do it on your own nickel. You have months to make arrangements, do it.
So without some nebulous threat of “there wont be any kids for your old age” what reason do i have for wanting to support others lifestyle choices?
BTW my Father is currently making a partial income from a business of mine and I hope to be well off enough to offer my mother at least a granny flat when her boyfriend dies. I really want little “assistance” from well meaning busybodies.
Mole, please wipe the chips off your shoulder.
As the old judge said: “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society”. And last time I checked, a civilized society includes art, and sport, and children.
You’ve made a ‘lifestyle choice’ to live in Australia. If you’d like to live somewhere that no pseky government will legislate for you to subsidise other people’s existences, I can recommend Haiti, Somalia or Chechnya.
Love it or leave it, Mercurius? That’s a slogan I see a lot on car bumper stickers in Sydney’s ‘Shire’ and south-western suburbs. Usually a tatty Aussie flag stuck on the window pillar too.
Sans Blog: Saying Mole had no choices is straightforwardly wrong.
I support this in principle, but of course we are all ignoring the slight problem of global warming and the pressure that all these extra consumers place on our environment.
Any measure which encourages people to have more children is bad public policy.
Hey, Mole, I got a great idea. Lets close the public (ie government funded) school system and privatise the unis. After all, educating all those kids at our (I don’t have kids either) expense is just a waste of taxpayers’ money, isn’t it. Chances are if we live in a country of unfit, uninspired morons it’ll be more peaceful, right? An, what’s more, we’ll pay less tax, eh?
Sans Blog @ 25. I have seen those bumper stickers too. Although quite what they have to do with my comment or Mole’s country of residence is a mystery to me.
I was merely applying Mole’s logic about ‘lifestyle choice’ to his own choice of lifestyle — namely its location. All quite fair, I would have thought.
No-one has to ‘love’ Australia. And Mole doesn’t have to ‘want’ to subsidise anybody. But as long as he chooses to live here, he’ll have to take his lumps, or convince people to overturn the legislation. Democracy’s a bitch, ain’t it?
FWIW, I haven’t children and I don’t want ‘em. But I’m glad that I live in a society that will soon make it possible for people who have newborns to spend a few months at home with them without dropping below the poverty line. That’s a society that I think is worthy of the term “civilisation”.
Paul Burns
Now thats not what i was saying.
Basic services= fine.
Subsidising children as accessories so certain socio economic groups have an easier time of it = not so good.
vibenna
So why should I pay for you or anyone else to have paid parental leave? Its a reasonable enough question I think. Ladies have full control (or should) over their fertility, so whats the hassle with planning the childs arrival as I said before?
Mole, I think I’d much rather live in Mercurius’ version of Australia, than yours. It’s a fairly ghastly sight. And I’m also someone who’s childless and happy about that.
31. I understand, the concept of planning/saving and taking responsability for the future is intimidating for a lot of people.
Much better to let the government worry about thing like that.
What is so good about the government taking your income and then “blessing” you with it when you meet their arbitary guidelines?
Anyway if kids are so valuabe why not more of a push for adoption over abortion? (a bit of a straw man I know)
Back on topic, this is all about the politics. The scheme is the top story on the 7,9 and abc radio news. On mothers’ day too.
Likewise i think it’s fair to say the ETS is more about politics. Both of these issues are good for the government to bash around the head of the opposition.
Added to the way
the governmentJulia Gillard has played issues such as IR and school funding (remember the stink at the end of last year between Gillard and Pyne), it think it is fair to say that ATM the government is about the political equivalent of the Australian cricket team under Steve Waugh.Hey mole. Even if you have the money to pay for it someone elses kids will be the ones you need to look after you in your dotage and produce the goods and services that you will desire after you can no longer make a contribution.
There are selfish as well as altruistic reasons for contributing to the care of other people’s children.
Yes, but that isn’t why people have kids! They will continue to have them regardless of PPL, baby bonuses etc.
Having children is essentially a selfish act and today too many children are ‘handbag accessory children’ particularly to career-minded parents. Why have children and dump them in full-time child care at 6 weeks like so many I know have done or at 18 weeks when the PPL cuts out. As Mole says plan better, save more or consider not having kids.
Pavlov’s Cat @ 3 – They might be calling it parental leave, but its effectively maternity leave. Its going to be a very rare case where a father is able to access the parental leave scheme, especially if the mother wants to breast feed. A real parental leave scheme would allow for the leave to be taken well after the baby is born or not have a requirement that only the primary caregiver can access it.
Y’know, the conversation about whether or not we should have paid parental leave, or education systems, or childcare subsidies, or family benefits, or whatever, has been had lots of times on this blog already, and there’s always someone who pipes up to say, “I don’t want to pay for other people’s kids.” Whatever. The three basic responses have already been rehearsed on this thread i.e
- the prudential response (where do the workers and taxpayers of the future come from
- there are lots of things we subsidise that we may not use ourselves, so why not subsidise parents and children
- children are citizens too.
Do we really, really, really need to keep on going over this ground? Perhaps you could take that part of the conversation back to whichever threads they have occurred on in the past. I’m really interested in trying to understand the federal government’s motives for delaying PPL, especially when the fiscal costs are minimal.
Before we do that I must take issue with Sans Blog
not leave it to strangers in a childcare centre
Please, don’t insult our intelligences with this Current-Affair level thinking on LP. Of course they’re strangers the day you meet them. Your own parents were strangers the day you met them. Your grandparents didn’t live nearby? Strangers. Your best friend the day you met him? Stranger. Spouse? Totes stranger.
Childcare as “leaving ones’ child with strangers” (OMG Rhymes with DANGER!!!11) is a creaky old piece of deliberate fearmongering which anyone with half a brain can see as the dogwhistling crap that it is.
As you were.
“I understand, the concept of planning/saving and taking responsability for the future is intimidating for a lot of people.”
Because that isn’t the reason there’s parental leave. Strawman number one.
And as you said, the rest of your argument is also the proverbial strawman, so why bother?
Chris at #36, my point was not so much the ramifications on the immediate literal/physical level but rather the more abstract point that language really can change reality. If it’s officially called ‘parental leave’, then that changes the official wording of the national norm from ‘Mothers look after children’ to ‘Parents look after children’. And any change in official language that defuses sexist thinking about gender roles is a Good Thing IMO.
Deborah, I answered your question in comment #2. The timing of the program is all political, even if the original motive for it is sound, for all the reasons that I and several others have hashed out in detail early up the thread.
Sorry the rest of the chatter isn’t what you were looking for, but your original question been answered and nobody’s put up any serious dispute about the politics of it. That’s why the discussion of the politics is brief.
As for this:
That’s an interesting view, Sans Blog. And your evidence for it is…? Something you saw down the mall that raised your hackles?
Sans Blog, it must be nice living in your world where all the women have full control over their fertility, mistakes never happen, and everybody is able to plan with full 20/20 vision for what the future holds, nobody gets laid off, nobody gets seriously ill, house prices are stable, interest rates don’t fluctuate, nobody’s biological clock runs down, and the unexpected never happens. Please send the rest of us a postcard some time. Just address it C/- The Real World and it’ll get to us.
As you, Sans Blog, have children of your own, you should really know better than to lecture others about how to raise theirs.
And Mole, the childless-by-choice like you and I should also know better than to lecture other people about how best to raise their kids. Angels fear to tread, and all that. I haven’t kids and the last thing I would presume to do is know how others should raise theirs.
And once again, sorry Deborah. Perhaps you can see from all the men who have very strong opinions about this, the politics of this is also tied up to a considerably higher degree than 50%, by what men think is best for child-rearing. Are you really surprised?
“Childcare as “leaving ones’ child with strangers” (OMG Rhymes with DANGER!!!11) is a creaky old piece of deliberate fearmongering which anyone with half a brain can see as the dogwhistling crap that it is.”
And that’s a typical response of the guilt-ridden people who have dumped their babies into commercial cribs.
You really think that Eddie and his ABC child centres and his very underpaid staff really gave a damn about the kids?
the prudential response, the wonders of immigration, which we are assured we cant function without anyway.
there are lots of things we subsidise that we may not use ourselves, If its not a core government servicethen its debateable if it should be funded.
children are citizens too, Which is a reasonably meaningless statement. They are citizens whos best interests should be served by their parents.
As for the reason for the delay, pure politics, absolutely nothing else.
Deborah, I answered your question in comment #2. The timing of the program is all political
Whatever, Mercurius. Perhaps then we might be interested in wondering why the federal government feels that it can brush off the women and men who will have children in the coming year. And while it’s at it, brush off sole parents too. These things seem to me to impact more on women than men, due to the reality of the gender roles men and women occupy in Australian society. Maybe they’ve simply calculated that women will vote Labor anyway, so they don’t need to worry.
Reading the comments here, you’d think the Government had decided against paid parental leave.
Mole, a huge change has happened in the workplace in the last 30 years. I think the figure is around 70% of women of child-bearing age are in the workforce. Even more importantly, their incomes are a vital part of a household’s incomes – not a little extra income for a better lifestyle. Sooner or later, government will have to respond to that reality.
I already subsidize other people’s kids – schools, family payments (which your family probably receives), a thousand other things. If you were to go through things carefully, you might discover you were subsidized by others, too. Unless, of course, you were raised on a deserted island by dingoes.
I’d like you to answer this for me. Our economies continue to grow year after year – excepting years like this one in recession. As a whole our societies continue to become dramatically richer. We can easily afford things like parental leave. So why do some people want life to be a miserable grind when we can opt for a more civilized existence?
41. Im suggesting it is their responsability to look after their children, plan and make comprimises if they have to. I wont lecture others on their chioces with their kids, but if my taxes are going to pay for an extention of welfare Id like to be convinced of the neccessity for it.
39. So enlighten me what is the great reason behind this policy if it isnt to subsidise children still futher?
Every action has a consequence, why should the government intervene in this issue?
And quite frankly I am a little tired of “Think of the chilllldren!!” being dragged out for every policy in an attempt to shut down rational debate. This is a subsidy for parents, not kids.
Sans Blog, what planet are you living on! Mother’s aren’t, for the most part, going to work because they’re career-minded. They’re working to put a roof over their family’s head!
Deborah, please, when it comes to the timing of the program, the only “women and men” that the ALP were thinking about were the women and men who sit on the benches opposite themselves in the House of Representatives. And attempting to wedge them, or at least guarantee that this is one piece of legislation that the opposition can’t oppose without donning concrete boots electorally.
I don’t think your other speculations hold water. If the ALP “simply calculated that women will vote Labor anyway” they’d never bother to campaign at all, since they’d have an automatic 50.1% of the vote, right?
However, I’ll stick my neck out and venture to suggest that there is at least one, and possibly even more than two, women who will vote for the Coalition, regardless of the timing of a parental leave scheme.
And I’m really sorry about the sanctimonious crap about child-rearing that Sans Blog has spouted here on your nice pristine thread. Really, I’m embarrassed for him and sorry if I’ve encouraged any of it.
Given how rapidly the world is moving towards overpopulation (if it’s not there already), I’ve never really understood the “We’ll need kids to look after us when we’re old.” argument.
I think too many people are looking at this from a capitalist “incentive” point of view, by seeing it as a mechanism to encourage people having more children. I’d be surprised if it had all that much effect on the birth rate. I’d rather look at an issue of quality over quantity, in that the more financially secure the family is, the better a kid will turn out.
I welcome the change.
Mole said “Basic services= fine.
Subsidising children as accessories so certain socio economic groups have an easier time of it = not so good.”
Well, Mole old bean, there’s a lot more than paid parental leave you’ll need to be winding back: primary schools, children’s hospitals, childhood vaccination schemes, child care, foster parent schemes. What about high schools? Or is it only infants and pregnant women you decry?
Happy Mothers’ Day!
The answer?
“As a whole our societies continue to become dramatically richer.”
Id be inclined to change to “As a whole our individuals continue to become dramatically richer”.
Do yopu believe the government can make decisions on rearing your or most other peoples children, (and I deliberately exclude ferals and unfit parents), why such faith in a system that hasnt done to well in planning infrastructure, roads, essential services for decades. (both Lab and Lib)
And how do you suggest the government “fixes” that reality? By taxing the childless more to make up for the income lost by the 2 income family becoming a one income one?
OK Sans Blog, we get it already. You’re a much better parent than everybody else. You’re parenter-than-thou and we’re frankly in awe of how parentastic you are.
Please read the comments policy. LP is not a forum for people to work through their personal issues. If you wanna lord it over everybody else about how you’re the parentiest parent since parents ever parented, please go start a daddy blog.
Just take it elsewhere, this isn’t the place for it.
Yes, the world is already overpopulated, and global warming has made this overpopulation a major problem. This is the inconvenient truth that we would all rather ignore while we discuss peripheral and pretend that population and environmental catastrophe have no connection.
“Perhaps then we might be interested in wondering why the federal government feels that it can brush off the women and men who will have children in the coming year”
I imagine they feel they can delay it because people might understand that government revenue has collapsed and it’s a good thing that finally an Australian government has come to the party on this, even though it has to be delayed a year. And yes, that probably is politics. But blame the Coalition for that, not the government.
50. All those you mention are what Id include in basic services.
And what makes them more basic than being able to afford to put a roof over your families head and food on their plate while you care for a new born?
Although if the “commercial cribs” jibe was a plea to abolish private provision and replace it with community, council and public childcare – Im all for it!
Almost as bad as the with private health insurance rebate, there’s another one of the rankest policy disasters of the Howard era: childcare for-profit.
“LP is not a forum for people to work through their personal issues.”
No, it’s a forum where if you don’t agree with the philosophy expressed by the most of the people here you’re not welcome. Your very personal attack @ 52 is evidence of that. Perhaps a perusal of the comments policy by yourself might be in order?
LP has never been a blog that welcomes the dissenting voice.
Desipis
We dont live in Victorian England, the constant use of hyperbole to “Think of the Chiiiilden!” is silly.
If you have kids, or multiple kids you may suffer a drop in living standards. Thats normal. Taxing others so you dont suffer a drop in living standards isnt.
I might sign off on that note, if I came across a bit nasty on this I apologise, but I am yet to be convinced subsidising other peoples children/life choice is in my, or any other childless persons best interest.
The money is taxed from people and given back to another self selecting group…
Well hell, what’s wrong with your blog, Sans Blog?!
(Mon dieu, comment peu m’amuser)
Pavlov’s Cat @ 40 – I agree on where you want to get to, but it also pretends to offer something (practical support for fathers to be the carer) when it doesn’t. In practice it does very little to help encourage the involvement of fathers with bringing up babies.
Deborah @ 44 – I think its clear that Labor want this to be an election issue. They want it to appear to be “at risk” so people will be afraid that the libs just might not do it even if the promise to do so. The amount of money involved is so small compared to the amounts the are burning elsewhere.
OK, Mole.
Thanks for the clarification.
You’re not being nasty, you’re entitled to your opinions on how taxes should be spent….. More on rail, less on roads is a personal favourite of mine (for example).
Paid parental leave is a good plan, I think. My breeding days are gone. But I can’t see why parental leave provisions (currently) vary so much from one employer to another….
“Encouraging people to have babies”? I don’t think so: that was the Free Plasma TV Scheme, wasn’t it?
We’ve always welcomed the dissenting voice. There are thousands of them in the archives.
What we don’t welcome is the sanctimonious voice that goes out of its way to cast aspersions and make pejorative statements about how other people raise their children.
The reason you’re not welcome has nothing to do with disagreement and everything to do with the boorish and insulting manner in which you opined that people who use childcare are “guilt-ridden”, that they’ve “dumped” their children into childcare, that they’ve had children for “selfish reasons”, and the children are “handbag accessory children”.
I think you’ll find your views are unwelcome not only at LP, but also unwelcome everywhere outside a smug, self-satisfied little circle of back-slapping pious people-like-us. So sorry we couldn’t roll out the red carpet to make you feel more welcome, but your manners don’t warrant VIP treatment.
Oh, sorry. Was that a “personal attack”? Call the WAAAAAMbulance. You should’ve thought about that before you mouthed off about “handbag accessory children” being “dumped” by their “guilt-ridden” parents. Take it to 2GB.
Mole,
It seems like it’s you who are holding onto the Victorian ways. A society leaving it up to the parents to do things all on their own is not ‘normal’.
I like this idea that having children is a selfish act … but by that logic so is breathing, eating and defecation. How dare you put a strain on our ecosystem! Pay for your own ecosystem, damnit.
being born is a selfish act. i can think of a few whose retrospective abortion…. ummmm …. better leave it there
This to me represents a perfect example of media management. Laurie Oaks is tipped that it would be worth asking a question about something nice for mums in a horror budget. It just happens to be mothers’ day. With a big announcement, from the government, all comments on the Sunday morning shows from the opposition, featured on the news, are reacting to the government and well down in the reports.
Plus there are a number of mothers’ day fun runs on today, a perfect opportunity for female politicians (e.g. Jenny Macklin and Julia Gillard who i spotted on the news) to be out providing sound bites amongst the happy, mainly female, masses.
On the other side, Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb were on Insiders and Meet The Press, not exactly the best female-voter-friendly heads to be on the evening news. This also successfully neutered the stories in the papers about the lack of an increase in the single parent pension.
Following on from the point that Adrien made, and the questions that have come up about who will look after us, pay taxes to pay our pensions in our old age.
Heck, we have six billion of us in the world.
A minor adjustment to the immigration program would provide us with all the famblies in the world of whatever age group.
Why do we need to do anything to encourage people to have more fossil fuel consumers?
Next, even for those who reckon it is a good idea, it seems to me that if the Government gives us $2000 per kid per delivery, then it needs to spend a further $20 to administer the distribution, and a further $20 to collect it (assuming that those in the tacks office and cntrlnk don’t do stuff for free). And who do they collect it from???? Erm…*drum roll to heighten suspense*….US!!!
That’s right! If you are an average taxpayer, and the Government ‘gives’ you $2000 – it has to take $2040 from you in taxes somewhere (or somewhen) else.
Gosh. Who’d a thunk it?
At the very least, it would be a good idea for the Government to give some nodding acknowlegement to the environmental issues.
Mole @ 59
“The money is taxed from people and given back to another self selecting group…”
Well, if it was, it might make some sense. (Not talking about the justice of it of course).
However, if you think about how many people actually never had kids, it is a small part of the demographic. Then if you think about those who have not had kids and cut out those who have so little $$ you couldn’t tax them anyway. Then you think about those that have not had kids but are so rich they can afford the smart accountants so as not to pay tax. The conclusion I come to would seem to be that it is basically those on the incomes of $50-150k who will be paying for this anyhow. So who the heck is actually going to be better off if it gets up. A $2000 cheque followed by a furrowed brow wondering why bracket creep has increased income tax by $2040. *snirt* I bet that’s why it doesn’t come till 2011. Bracket creep will have taken it away from us all before we get it. LOL!
What Mercurius at 8:17 pm said.
Well I suppose that proves politicians act like politicians.
So what else is new? Paid Parental Leave. Something that has been talked about for years and finally agreed upon…. and still there’s cause for a whinge.
Mercurius, I was going to point out that “dissenting” = / = “being a dick”, but you have done it so well there’s no need.
Apropos all the shmibertarians on this thread who oppose subsidising the “personal choice” of these child-having women with “their” taxes. You fail to take into account the fact that one of the core reasons for having parental leave is for the parent not to become deskilled and fall out of the workforce, becoming vulnerable to a period of unemployment and then reentry at a much lower level. So… The tax the government will get from these mums will be much higher than if they had not had parental leave.
If you’re the cheeto-stained sprain of shmibertarian / Young Liberal, she’s probably paying more in tax than you are.
Erm… I meant Strain, not sprain!
*Retires, injured*
Well if we don’t have kids at some point the country comes to a halt and the lights go out. We need engines to replace the old engines and preferably good well tuned ones. There are only to sources for these, make your own or get them overseas, doesn’t matter which. But you still have to spend money to turn them into productive engines that lets you drink water from the tap and buy food at Woolies. I guess you could just import foreign ready made and tuned engines and gradually replace the current population as it dies off and have no kids at all.
I tend agree. The Govt has taken the opportunity to use this issue to enhance its reelection chances if the Opposition fight it or, to ensure its permanency if they go along with it, which they probably will.It is a win win situation for the Govt using it like this.
It’s been pointed out in the US that there’s a strong link between bankruptcy and having kids. So a lot of other people benefit from a paid parental leave scheme aside from parents. In fact, some have said it would pay for itself.
I feel sorry for some people here. Apparently parents are selfish, only interested in their careers, are raising ferals, and are unfit parents for not having a large stock portfolio (apparently only the wealthy have a right to breed).
I must live in a parallel universe. The mums I know have jobs – not careers – and they have them to pay huge mortgages for ordinary suburban homes and to put food on the table. And aside from the selfish gene thing, I don’t know how anyone could describe being covered in vomit, changing nappies, and then worrying for 20 or 30 years as selfish.
For a smallish amount of expenditure parental leave really brings out the irrational side in some. I used to think it was a misogynistic thing, but maybe some people are just anti-people, full stop.
And Mole: how is the government offering parental leave telling people how to rear their children? You’ve lost me there.
“and today too many children are ‘handbag accessory children’ particularly to career-minded parents.”
Look children a wild generalisation, be careful you don’t know where its been.
Crikey! Way to turn a welcome – if overdue – measure into a topic for brain degreasing.
Well, yes, Ginja, I think you must live in a parallel universe compared with some of the negative, misanthropic contributors on this thread. And on others too. I love your sweet reason and clarity on so many issues. (Thank you, particularly, for your defence of Robert Manne, and elsewhere of the ALP.)
My own experience tells me that having children is a biological imperative. There’s something leming like about it all. I’m sure some people do have children by choice, or not for that matter. Yet there’s something very clinical thinking about children in terms of social capital, particularly needing them to be the tax payers of the future to look after us in our old age.
Anyway isn’t there an argument that a major reason for over-population in third world countries is because large families guaruntee poor parents care in their old age by surviving children? Increasing affluence brings down the birth rate apparently. What does that say about Australia needing parental leave and other family friendly policies so that an aging population will have healthy taxpayers to service and support them? That doesn’t wash with me. How about about our wanting our kids to grow up emotionally healthy, so giving them the best possible opportunities from birth on is the right thing to do? Staying close to a reasonably rested Mum who’s not worrying about her pay packet is a pretty good start.
Still, for me in retrospect that biological urge which resulted in so much blood, sweat and tears through labour and beyond were well worth it even if there was no parental leave, decent child care or tax concessions all those years ago.
It’s been a great Mother’s Day.
Marks @ 68/69, that’s contradictory nonsense.
Ok, I should put a minimum of effort into explaining why…just for starters:
1) Say we accept the rest of what you said is true.
2) How many kids do people have in a lifetime?
3) How many taxable years do people work?
Your bracket-creep argument worked out to ~$50-100 extra a year, not $2040.
Ok Sally, so you believe that if the Government gives you $2000 that somehow it does not have to collect $2000 PLUS admin fees? Seriously?
How simple is that proposition?
Next I have no problem with somebody arguing that parental leave is something they want or that is really good to have. However, I am arguing that there is no way that you can argue that it is anything other than a churn of money from the average taxpayer to the average taxpayer – less admin costs. Let’s call it what it is – a recognition that most people are clueless about how much it costs to have a child until they have them. Most people do not budget enough and get caught short. So what the Government is actually going to have to do is raise taxes so that people get the $$ in a lump, but then pay it back PLUS admin Plus interest probably over a longer time.
I have no problem with people thinking that they are getting something for nothing. Lots of us do that. It is self deception though. However, if people wish to fool themselves, that is their lookout. I also don’t get too fussed about the injustice of single people and childless couples having to fund those who wish to have children – after all, those who are childless can retire years earlier and enjoy the superannuation tax breaks. What price an extra five years of prosperous living?
Also, we all have our little guilty indulgences – so it is often helpful if someone who does not have children and wants to do some four wheel driving – then hey, the FWD driver can point to their virtue in not having kids. Other people’s indulgences are always a good excuse for our own.
However, I really did think people here were a little past being fooled by middle class money transfers.
So people are in fact not getting something for nothing; so why are you getting so bent out of shape about it?
I’ll try again.
1. We all agree that global warming is the greatest crisis facing humanity?
2. Overpopulation is a major contributing factor to global warming.
3. We therefore as a matter of policy should not be encouraging measures that encourage people to have babies.
I’m not totally convinced that PPL does encourage people to have babies, but it certainly doesn’t discourage, which in a rational world is what all governments should be doing.
I don’t understand why people don’t want to discuss this issue, and instead get sidetracked by emotive nonsense.
Mind you when I last visited a trendy cafe near my place and saw Jeanette and Trent with baby Tabatha rolling up in the 4WD pram with built in DVD player and order Tabatha a ‘babychino’, I couldn’t help but think that this was maybe accessorisation taken too far.
Being the recipient of benefits while being raised by a single mother I’ll have to refrain from commenting directly on child payments as my viewpoint is likely to be biased.
However I can’t see why Turnbull hasn’t turned this around to benefit them.
“Well the government might be excited about maybe possibly offering paid parental leave in the far off future. The fact is if the Coalition was still in charge Australia would have been in a better position financially to offer it right now.”
Note, the above manages to guzump the policy, question the timing without actually making a promise to deliver it and kick the government for ‘poor economic management’. Their favourite meme. I came up with that in two minutes. What the hell are Turnbull’s media guys doing? Playing another round of golf?
I think the fact that they never looked like the were going to offer it while they were in office, would be the obvious return-gazump.
My ‘umble, as you said, I’m not sure that Parental Leave actively encourages people to have kids. I think it more likely that it offers support to people who were going to have kids anyway. I didn’t like the Baby Bonus because it was just so blatantly about encouraging people to breed, without ever addressing negative consequences.
Helen @ 72 said:
That may be true for parental leave which we already have (theoretically), but it doesn’t require paid parental leave. If we were serious about the deskilling problem there would be a requirement to return to work within a fixed period of time or lose the payments.
There are I think however good reasons for financial support for parents to relieve some of the pressure to return to work quickly and instead stay with their child for at least a few months. It can be seen primarily as a benefit for the child rather than a benefit for the parents.
Fine @ 86 – apparently the baby bonus isn’t going away – it’ll be worth about half as much as the paid maternity leave though its not taxable, so how much more the leave is worth will be quite variable between families as the paid maternity leave is taxable.
Not only that but the instant Labor got in they made the BB worse by means testing it in the wrong direction. If you want to encourage people to have kids it is sensible to encourage those well-educated highly paid types who might not otherwise do so. Hopeless Centrelink cases will breed regardless. Costello didn’t care who you were as long as you pumped out the kiddies, Labor took exception to supporting wealthy women with children. The very idea!
Labor are determined to repeat their mistake with this ‘parental’ leave. The more money you lose by leaving the workforce to raise your child, the less likely the government will assist you. Outstanding.
They should really look at the Finnish model for this, we’re all being taxed that highly anyway, so why not have some of the social benefits?
I’m all for parental leave, even though I don’t have, and, except in one or two moments of extreme sentimentalitythat only lasted for a day or two, have never really wanted them. But one thing worries me constantly about kids today, which I think Governments of any colour have to take into consideration if they’re going to introduce measures that might encourage more kids. (I say might, because kids just sort of pop out, anyway, don’t they?)
The thing that worries me is if we don’t do anything serious about global warming NOW, what kind of world are we going to leave the poor little buggers?
btw, the policy is a wonderful wedge.
“I think you’ll find your views are unwelcome not only at LP, but also unwelcome everywhere outside a smug, self-satisfied little circle of back-slapping pious people-like-us. So sorry we couldn’t roll out the red carpet to make you feel more welcome, but your manners don’t warrant VIP treatment.
Oh, sorry. Was that a “personal attack”? Call the WAAAAAMbulance. You should’ve thought about that before you mouthed off about “handbag accessory children” being “dumped” by their “guilt-ridden” parents. Take it to 2GB.”
FTW!
brisbanedavey, you’re wrong about Finland, but then we shouldn’t be surprised, since you’re wrong about everything else.
Marks@81,
You seem to have a rather simplistic small-government view in that any taxation is either ‘churn’ or ‘wealth distribution’. Are you willing to acknowledge that with something as complex as society that the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts? What about that the ‘value’ of the whole can increase (or decrease) depending on how things are balanced and organised?
If you blindly class people in a way that is orthogonal to the mechanism proposed of course it’s going to just look like movement solely within a class, or ‘churn’ as you like to call it. The flow of money would be from people without babies to people with babies. Yes, the membership of each of these classes is temporal and if you ignore timing the net effect over a lifetime may seem to be nil (or negative with your admin costs). However, most people who have raised kids (or anyone with life experience in general) will tell you that when you get money is just as important as how much money you get.
Patricia WA, thanks for that. What a kind thing to say.
The arguments against parental leave are identical to those used by crusty old right-wingers against the age pension – it will just discourage thrift and personal responsibility. And just like the age pension, when parental leave is introduced we’ll wonder how we ever did without it. Right-wingers will pretend that they were for it all along and wouldn’t dream of abolishing it, parents will lead a more civilized life, and the broader economy will benefit, too.
And we already pay for parental leave – the public service, military, corporations, have had it for ages (and at a much more generous level). Even one large supermarket chain now has it. Why not just extend it to mums on much more modest incomes, to parents who really need it.
Bit late coming, but something posted on Mefi recently provided a great antidote to libertarian types, and I think it’s appropriate here:
Love it.
Patrickg, I was actually thinking of that very post when reading through some of the responses here. Thanks for saving me the copy and paste.
For those who are worried about the possible effects of universal paid parental leave on population, it is worth remembering that one of the two OECD countries currently without such a provision (the US) has the highest fertility rate in the developed world whilst the other (Oz) also has a higher fertilitiy rate than most developed countries which, as we know, has been on the increase in recent years. There are a range of factors affecting fertility rates in societies at similar levels of economic development, and in none of the developed countries with universal paid parental leave has the fertility rate exceeded replacement levels since the introduction of such policies.
Desipis @ 92.
Sorry – you have put me in the wrong pigeon-hole.
I am quite happy to have Government at a big size – but doing stuff that others cannot, and efficiently.
In this debate, everyone thinks it’s triffic because the Government is giving them something. For freeeeeeee! Hey, do I have a bridge/insurance policy/used car for you! Yup plasma tv, no down payment and no repayments for two years! Freeeeeee! Or as good as.
From Hardly Normal and Leakonyous I expect such stuff – not from my government. PL means jack unless it comes with enough information that people can actually accurately cost what it is going to mean for them.
Now, if you are happy with paying the extra admin charges plus interest (since you want to spread it out over a working lifetime is how I read you), then fine. But I bet you don’t know how much you are up for. Interest over that sort of period can easily double the cost of the program. Then of course if you are earning over the average, then you pay even more under a progressive taxation system such as we have. So at say for example for someone on $90k per annum, they might find themselves paying cost of pl plus admin cost, multiply by two for interest, multiply by 200% for progressive tax scale. (a rough check of the tax scales tells you that someone on $90k pays about that much more). ie you get $1000 in a lump and you pay $1020*2*2 = $4080 per $1000. Do you think that ok? Or would you rather save up and pay $1000?
You can put me in the box of wanting good information to make informed choices and not wanting to join a cargo cult of people believing that those Gods in the Big White Plane in Canberra are just going to give us a ‘free’ PL system – no more to pay, drive away. *snort*
A debate where there are some actual costs might be more conducive to an informed outcome. Having said that, if the Treasurer puts out the costs and how it will affect the average fambly in costs and not just the benefits, then good for them.
patrickg @ 94 – that might be true for the US, but I think its quite a different in Australia.
Just in cash payments welfare spending is more than 60 billion a year. $20 per person would only raise about $400 million – revenue from income tax is about 200 billion. I’d estimate $20 is probably one or two orders of magnitude out.
Marks, here’s $20…
Chris, you committed a rookie mistake in assuming that money goes in = money goes out. Not so. Much like a large bank, a govt takes our money and invests it, loans it, spends it, etc. As a result (and I did do the maths once, many many years ago, long since forgotten), it’s more like 1 tax dollar in = 40 tax dollars out.
*Note, that money is for illustrational purposes only. I can’t remember the real figure, it’s surprisingly high, however.
This idea is seriously screwy. Surely, we should be paying heaps of chicks NOT to breed. Call it the “No Baby Bonus”!
patrickg – If they can get such fantastic returns why don’t they just borrow money at 7-8% from overseas instead of using taxation?
The budget goes to some lengths to take into account financial investments that the government makes and even then I don’t think revenue from income tax is less than 20% of all government income. I still think you’re at least an order of magnitude out, probably more if you only count people who pay tax.
Surely, we should be paying heaps of chicks NOT to breed.
Gah! “Chicks!” What a puerile word to use.
And in case you haven’t noticed, it takes two people to “breed.” Leave off with sheeting all responsibility for having or not having babies to women.
Sure Chris, I’m totally prepared to accept an order of magnitude. As I say it was a long time ago.
Let’s replace welfare in this particular instance with “parental leave”, and everybody wins.
Ive always found one key libertarian assumption very simplistic: the idea that pre-tax money is “yours”, just cos you earned it.
Lets get real: *AS IF* the prevailing level of taxation is not factored in to markets assessments of an appropriate wage!
Cut tax and expenditure: my guess is your wage would also go down. There is an inherently social component of wage earnings factored in. Some if it was never really intended to be yours, in other words. And you really *wont* earn any more if we abolish it.
Im not sure ive put that as clearly as an economist might be able to – but it strikes me a lot of the talk of “MY HARD EARNED BLER BLER” has always been complete guff.
Marks@97,
You’re still assuming there’s no indirect fiscal benefit to the government from such a program. I’m talking lower health, education, policing, etc costs because the children of working class families grow up in a more financially secure environment.
Chris@98,
Even at ~$3000 a year I’d consider it pretty good value because it’d keep the 1% unemployed (assuming miraculously more efficient economy due to lower taxes) from being so desperate they’ll start robbing/mugging/rioting just to survive, which would probably cost more in the long run from policing, medical and compensation anyway.
Paul Burns: “I say might, because kids just sort of pop out, anyway, don’t they?)”
- yes, you’ve got the basic biology of sexual reproduction correct
patrickg @ 104 – yea, parental leave is dirt cheap and I think easily justified at the cost.
LeftyE @ 105 – there are two different core assumptions that people bring into these debates. As you say one assumes that your pre tax money is yours and the government should need to justify what it takes. The other assumes that any pre-tax money is the governments and you need to justify what you are allowed to have
Can I also point out that the ability of a society to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next is surely the ultimate public good, which will be underprovided (both qualitatively and quantitatively) if the cost of such provision is to be borne by individuals in the form of income foregone, career disruption, employment insecurity, etc.
And I’d like people to re-read this.
106 @ desipis – yes I’m not arguing its not good value, just that $20 was wildy underestimating the real cost of paying someone to shut up
And of course in practice its much less than $3000 for most and much much more for a minority.
there’s cheaper ways of making someone shut up
Given the fact that we are going into massive deficits and debt my question is where are they cutting to afford to pay for this?
What about stay at home mothers and the self-employed? Do they get anything new to make up for this?
What should happen is that all the child related welfare should be abolished in favour of income splitting for families. Families should be taxed as units, not individuals as is currently the case.
The ALP are being cute delaying this to the next election cycle but I just don’t think it is a war winner. I wouldn’t change my vote over it either way. Anyway, they can say they support it and then change their policy after the election. Works for Kevin.
Can anyone explain the means test here? If A and B are parents, then A is entitled to 18 wks @ min wage provided s/he is primary care-giver for that time? And B’s income is irrelevant?
And if A was not in work prior to the birth?
One problem with occupational parental leave is that (mostly women) on casual or fixed term employment almost never received it. That was certainly my wife’s experience, whilst I was only ever entitled to 2 weeks paid ‘paternity’ leave (and due to teaching demands only took one week of that across two births).
graeme – you have identified the Oppositions problem – how can anyone say they do or do not support this without the detail?
How long does a female have to have been employed to be eligible? What if you are made redundant while pregnant? (and didn’t know you were up the duff at that early stage?) Do you start getting it if for medical reasons you need to stop working a few months before the birth? Does it only start after the birth? Are you entitled to it if you have a stillbirth and for how long?
So many questions?
Helen @ 99
Make it $40,000.00 and you have a deal – that is what it is likely to cost those above the average income over their working lives.
Oh and in return, I shall send you the Harvey Norman Catalogue with the “36 Months Interest FREE” special.
Many very worthwhile and useful products and you don’t have to pay anything for 36 months!!! A great guide for those who want something and aren’t the slightest bit interested in how much they might have to pay for it, are irritated by various consumer affairs departments that dare to warn how costly they are compared to payment up front.
Marks, what’s this ‘interest’ you keep talking about? The government don’t have to borrow to fund the scheme.
Ignoring the obvious fact that tax revenue also comes from other sources ($73b in company tax, versus $117b in personal income tax), 10 million workers pay an average of $25/year. That’s $1000 over a lifetime, and all very much interest free.
What about the hundreds of millions of dollars in income foregone by women over their working lives due to childbearing? A woman would be lucky if she only lost $40,000 – that would be one year at less than the so-called average full time wage.
and your $40,000 seems a wild exaggeration to me. If your poor hypothetical rich bloke is paying that just for maternity leave, dear god what’s he forking out for Defence toys? Quelle horreur.
As I argued on an earlier thread about PPL – this is a big win for small business in medium-long term, as small business were already finding it hard to compete with the many large firms now providing employer-paid parenting leave.
Obviously, large companies have done their figuring more completely than some posters here about the cost-benefit of retaining female staff.
And FTR this legislation has nothing whatsoever to do with individual women having children. It has otoh, everything to do with running an advanced economy within a social democratic country in the 21st century and therefore how do we organise our workforce around our very high female participation rates while accommodating proper arrangements for the birth and on-going needs of raising children etc.
2009 is the 30th anniversary of the introduction of unpaid maternity leave. Some of the arguments above are thirty years old, and were wrong back then.
Razor, it was 12 months continuous employment to be entitled IIRC. And proportionally paid (not time obs) for part-time & casuals. Also wonder about self-employed and stay-at-home mothers in respect of the baby-bonus/parenting leave…ie what is going to cut in where, and what will be means tested etc…..Possibly the delay in it’s introduction is in relation to mooted changes to the baby-bonus? The ‘baby bonus’ is a de-facto paid parenting scheme combined with 12 months unpaid maternity leave. I haven’t kept up on this, or many other issues lately.
Razor, my other concern was technical in respect of firms being re-compensated after the fact – re: cash flow issues for very small enterprises.
Looking at the legislation would be helpful… as always.
Thanks for that link Paul @109.
What a shame this thread had to degenerate into yet another “I don’t want to support OP’s lifestyle choices!” stoush.
A lot of that discussion made it sound like this scheme will only benefit “middle class career mothers” (and there was a certain resentment directed at that strawmother) but it seems to me that a lot of women in career type jobs, in the public service and academia already have, and better, parental leave and that this scheme is more egalitarian as it provides a basic wage for people who don’t have the privilege of working in the jobs with generous employers.
Be nice if it were 26 weeks, rather than 18, (in terms of babies having a primary carer home for the first full six months, I’m thinking of time benefit rather than monetary benefit)but still its a good start.
jo @ 118 – it may not be that big a win for small business as large employers who currently have paid parental leave will probably pay it in addition to the government payments. Receiving employer paid parental leave doesn’t disqualify you from getting the government payment.
Rayedish @ 119 – In terms of time there is already a right to 52 weeks of unpaid leave, though longer would be nicer – I think the standard for public servants is 2 – 3 years and some teachers get up to 4-5 years.
Rayedish, you’re right: many professional women already have paid maternity leave, reasonably generous too. Now a more basic scheme is to be offered to the majority who don’t. Quelle horreur!
Was there a complaint about the former? Private companies would have paid it out of earnings from their customers (an indirect tax, if you like). Govt depts, unis etc, out of tax revenue, fees & charges, indirectly.
OT
‘Every kiss is a conquest of repulsion’ Sartre said with his characteristic tendency to put a positive gloss on things.
– Raymond Tallis, “The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head”, Yale University Press
I can’t believe no-one until now has commented that looking after children is actually hard work, and it’s about time traditionally “women’s work” was actually valued, and paid, instead of being taken for granted and not paid.
I am already entitled to paid leave, which I have no intention of utilising, but I think this is an excellent thing for other women, and an excellent thing for society.
Chris – you are underestimating the effect of the ‘nothing’ compared to ‘something’ factor.
Many working mothers already choose to work (and/or for some time) in businesses which, while not paying the big salary and providing the big perks do not then expect the big hours, but there is a point however, where you have to pay the bills etc, so a paid parenting leave scheme, added to whatever other employer or unpaid leave options is certainly a better package than without.
Employment and career choices become a whole lot more complicated when children & potential children are involved, esp. for women.
While we’re at it, lets ensure the work men traditionally do around the home is paid too. If someone mows the lawn, fixes the car and paints the house do they get a government handout too?
Yeah, strangely our gardener, mechanic and handyman do get paid.
Jo @ 123 – certainly its better than nothing. But from what I’ve seen generally speaking the larger firms are better at providing flexible working conditions for parents that smaller businesses. Perhaps because with a large pool of employees its easier to get employees to fill the gaps and match with people who want to job share.
Rebekka @ 122 – I think if that was what was being argued then the parental leave would be paid to all primary carer parents regardless of whether they were previously employed.
And the gardener, mechanic and handyman around this house doesn’t get paid. But then again he’s not particularly competent at it either
We pay our nanny better than the lawn mower man.
“I can’t believe no-one until now has commented that looking after children is actually hard work, and it’s about time traditionally “women’s work” was actually valued, and paid, instead of being taken for granted and not paid.”
Wait, so if you’re not paid, it isn’t valued? A strange sense of value, I’d suggest.
Government-paid parental [note: not maternity] leave makes some sense. But a need to ‘pay’ parents for raising their own kids isn’t a good reason for it; that’s middle-class entitlement politics gone mad.
As for the appeal to gender inequality, if we are going to adopt stereotypes, then what about ‘traditional men’s work’ around the house? Paying me to mow my own lawn, clean out my own gutters, wash my own car, etc would be utterly ridiculous, and yet no one is suggesting that such work is undervalued or taken for granted (either by society as a whole or by women in households).
BBB
I won’t link, I’m too disgusted, but The Australian has an article on Google news about how hardly anybody will object to paying for high quality journalism on line. I like the line about high quality journalism. Guess most of Rupert’s papers won’t be going on line anytime soon.
btw, he doesn’t own The Guardian, does he? I hope not.(They’re free on line, as you all know.)
FFS, I can’t believe that some people are equating child rearing and housework, of which women still do the vast majority, with mowing the lawn and cleaning the gutters on the weekend. When you are waking up in the morning, putting on a load of washing, hanging it out, getting the kids up and ready for school/daycare, making lunches, feeding animals, putting out rubbish, and other general household tasks every day, then I fail to see the fucking equation with mowing the lawn on the weekend. And you wonder why we think this work isn’t valued.
oops! Comment 129 was supposed to go on the Murdoch/Pay-for-the-internet thread. Sorry.
Not just that – historically, the work women have done every day (not just fixing the car or woodwork, which are occasional activities, otherwise you’re doing it for some reason other than necessity); has functioned to free up the main breadwinner, usually the man, to be the “good” employee and come to work every day without having to worry about who is looking after the children, the laundry, the cooking, the food and grocery shopping, the cleaning and so on, as well as keeping track of kids’ tests, homework, vaccinations, dentists, sports, and then next day it all starts again…
Women in the workforce isn’t considered a matter for comment any more, but workforce rules and conventions still predicate quite a lot on the perfect employee who has a wife. So, two things still need to happen.
Men doing more of the invisible work that the household fairy used to do.
Workplace conventions changing to acommodate the family responsibilities of both male and female workers.
I think there is a useful distinction to be drawn between work that is valued and work that earns money.
In general, what one does purely for self or family would be unpaid, however valuable. What one does to bring value to others attracts pay.
PPL is not about putting the work of child rearing in either category. It’s not about merit, it’s not about commercial/public vs private value adding. It is utilitarian. It’s about encouraging and preserving earning capacity economy-wide in the present and near future – i.e. the parents’ – while creating more (and better) for the longer term – i.e. the kids’.
The connection with gendered housework is utterly non-existent.
Mindy @ 130 – when you’re doing work primarily for yourself or your family (housework/mowing the lawn, household maintenance etc) how you value I think is really only an issue for your family (we just treat as hours spent doing stuff rather than saying one is more valuable than another). I think childcare falls into a different category because there are clear benefits to society and so there are good reasons for external support.
Helen @ 132 – I think the former will improve as the latter does. My wife and I work for the same company, which compared to others is quite flexible when it comes to family friendly working conditions. But its still much easier for my wife to get the conditions she needs than it is for me. A bit surprisingly I’ve found that the male colleagues with older or grown up children are the most accepting of the flexibility I need. Perhaps they’ve had more time to be reflective on the effect of conflicting demands of work and home.
One barrier to fathers being able to participate as much is the inability to share parental leave (the “primary carer” requirement). The other is timing of the rights to when parental leave can be taken, especially if the mother is breastfeeding (people warn you that babies may refuse breast if bottlefed, but no warned us they might refuse the bottle if not regularly exposed to it).
If you want fathers to participate more then they need the right to take parental leave 12 months after a baby is born. If you are able to give men the ability to take reasonable long periods off at home looking after their children then you will see a more balanced results in housework as well.
FDB, srsly? You think raising the next generation doesn’t “bring benefit to others”?
You just illustrated exactly how connected with gendered notions of work the whole thing actually is.
sorry, benefit should have read value.
You think raising the next generation doesn’t “bring value to others”?
At the risk of being made a pariah at LP
I actually think that’s a valid point and one that every parent should consider very carefully when six months are up and they are considering launching junior into the wider sphere to cope pretty much with the feeling that he is on his tod. I don’t know what the answer is to the question of who should look after infants when parents have decided, or more correctly have had it decided for them that they need two incomes in order to survive. I think as a statement it is on a par in the insult stakes, with the suggestion that seems much more readily tolerated, that people shouldn’t have children in the first place for the sake of the planet.
I feel a great love and concern for babies under two because of their incredible innocence and complete vulnerability, which I don’t feel is widely enough understood or appreciated by society in general. Once their little ego emerges at around two years old, I’ve gone right off them as an admirable species, and by that age they have individuated enough to know they are not actually an appendage of their parents’, but a whole little entity of their own (and its pretty much all me, me me, ad infinitum.) While two years old is still pretty young and vulnerable, this would be a better time to hand them over to professional day-care child-wranglers IMO.
There is just so very much we don’t know about our bodies and our minds. But what we do know (and are at a complete loss to fully explain), is that love is universally the most important ingredient in the mix for all of us at any age. No one other than a parent can love their child with the same bond, (for better or for worse) and this to me, is the elephant in the room when we decide as a society that it’s quite OK to put very young babies into childcare centres, whose primary concern is for their financial bottom-line.
And way back at #9 PC re the Coalition.
Hmmm. More outrageous things have been known to happen under a Coalition government. Don’t count your chickens until the first budget speech after the next election.
Mindy,
The point is that they are all things you do for yourself (or your family). People get paid when do things that aren’t for themselves. The people you do the work for are the ones who pay you for the work. The people that benefit from what was traditionally “women’s work” are the family. If you were to take a purely employment based perspective you could argue that the breadwinner should be paying a wage to the homemaker, and there are probably couples out there who operate as such, but I’m not sure we really want the government regulating the internals of our relationships.
The only other option that makes sense is that the kids pay the parents. Since the kids have no income of there own this would mean loading them up involuntarily with a massive debt once they grow up. They’ll either have to pay off before they have kids of their own leading to the average parenting age being a decade or so later, or just use their kids’ payments to pay it off and be no better off anyway.
I’d also argue that less than 2/3rds is not a “vast majority”.
Helen,
You say all that as if you expect ‘going to work’ everyday is just all so easy and simple.
As long as women do more of the invisible work that causes money to magically appear in their bank accounts, I’m sure there’ll be no problem. Since the total hours spent doing either paid work or house work is about the same between men and women, the balance should be kept.
Again, it’s important to see the balance needed in that the family may need to accommodate more workplace responsibilities or lower financial rewards.
Of course it does. It means there’ll be workers around to pay taxes to pay for pensions. Which is why child raisers are eligible for an aged pension the same way as retired workers are.
“The people that benefit from what was traditionally “women’s work” are the family.”
That’s RUBBISH. That’s as stupid as saying the only person who benefits from earning a wage is that person and their family, without looking at the fact that they pay tax, that the money they earn circulates through the economy, etc etc etc.
SOCIETY benefits from the “women’s work” of bringing up children. You can’t have it both ways – either society benefits, in which case the people who do it should have their contribution recognised, and maternity leave is a long-overdue way of doing this, or it’s “just” the family.
I don’t, Caroline. There’s a difference between recognising the importance of parenting in the very-early-childhood stages and making some kind of value judgement about childcare. A paid parenting leave scheme, in fact, is partly an explicit recognition about the importance of child-parent contact—I don’t buy the argument that it’s just about women in the workplace and maintaining skillsets. It is, but not entirely.
It’s true that childcare workers are extremely underpaid. I think that the fact there are still workers willing to take it on despite the pay (and the attitudes of people like Sans Blog) is evidence to their commitment and professionalism, not venality.
Desipis, I like many other women do far more than 2/3 of the housework and work full time. In fact, if you count the hours I spend child raising/doing housework etc and the hours I spend at paid work, I have two full time fucking jobs. And there are a lot of women out there just like me.
Its not just my family who benefit from my “women’s work”. You obviously missed Helen’s point that employers also gain from “women’s work” because it frees up spouses to work and not have to worry about starting their “other” job when they get home. That’s why we say women’s work isn’t valued because people like you refuse to accept that it’s not only our bloody families who benefit. How hard is it to get that?
“You think raising the next generation doesn’t “bring value to others”?”
Perhaps I should have said “directly bring…”, but in any case I mentioned that at the end of my 2nd para.
My whole point was to separate this argument about PPL from arguments about paid housework. I don’t think it’s reasonable to pay someone welfare for cleaning their house, I do think so if they’re leaving work for a while to raise a kid. Not because they ‘deserve’ it for having one, but because major benefits accrue society-wide from children raised in a loving environment, especially during very early development.
@FDB – I’m not arguing for paid housework and I don’t think anyone here is. I’m arguing that it is undervalued by society because it doesn’t attract a wage and has generally been the realm of women. Comments about how it’s ‘just for your family’ illustrate that.
We are in furious agreement that PPL is a good thing.
“major benefits accrue society-wide from children raised in a loving environment, especially during very early development.”
…and of course from whoever leaves work to do the raising (i.e. me in 9-12 months, fingers crossed) being able to keep their job (fingers slightly less vigorously crossed).
Mindy,
Sounds like you’re far from the average women then. The stats say that for everyone women out there like you, there’s either a man who works just as long and hard, or there’s a women who does very little at all. Government policy should be about the typical household and not the exceptional anecdotal cases that get noticed. If you feel as if you’ve got an unreasonable work load then perhaps you should change some things in your life rather than expecting government handouts so you can continue to pretend to be superwoman.
If having a supporting spouse at home enables a worker to perform better than they will presumably be paid better, and a significant portion of that pay will be being spent on the supporting spouse leaving them better off anyway.
Yeah, I was specifically referring to the “women’s work” of raising children, not to housework per se. Although I find your use of the term “welfare” dubious as it implies something for nothing.
How are self-employed mothers (like my wife) going to be treated by this scheme?
And how much do child raisers benefit from society? You gain access to schools, health care, policed streets, safe reliable food supplies, roads and public transport to enable you to travel, protection from foreign invaders, etc. Are you prepared to pay for all that out of your maternity leave since presumably you won’t be paying taxes from a wage? You’ll be paying multitudes of the normal rate too, since each of your kids gain all these benefits as well.
” The stats say that for everyone women out there like you, there’s either a man who works just as long and hard, or there’s a women who does very little at all. ”
WHAT STATS? Please post a reference -= I don’t believe there’s any such statistic from a reliable source.
You can’t just make things up and then think you can say there are “statistics” and that that makes such tripe believable.
Dunno Razor.
If she’s paying herself a wage, and can get a locum, it might be hunky dory.
Razor, stay-at-home mums will still get the baby bonus. But savings from the baby bonus for working mums will pay for much of this.
That’s what’s so ridiculuous about the heatedness of this debate – we’re talking about a smallish amount of extra expenditure in the scheme of things.
One reason I favour paid parental leave is that, unlike the baby bonus, when money is paid out in instalments there’s a much better chance that money will be spent directly on the needs of the child and on basic household expenses – not on flat screen TVs (which according to cynical Tories is all people spend money on nowadays). You’d think frugal Liberal types would be for that.
Rebekka@150,
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4102.0Main+Features40March%202009
The time spent doing either paid work or housework is more or less averaged at 50 hours a week for both men and women. Essentially if you’re doing 80 hours a week, there will be a women out there getting by doing 20 hours a week.
“Essentially if you’re doing 80 hours a week, there will be a women out there getting by doing 20 hours a week.”
Yeah, that’d probably be a woman with no partner and no kids. The link you posted specifically said
“The transition from living alone or in a group household to moving in with a partner increases the amount of time women spend on household work. (Endnote 4) In 2006, women aged 20-49 years in couple households without children did almost six hours more household work a week than those living alone or in group households. In contrast, moving in with a partner did not significantly affect the amount of time men spent on household work.
Women living with partners spent considerably more time on domestic activities including cooking, laundry and other housework such as cleaning, compared with those living alone or in group houses.”
A $150,000 limit for the primary carer!?
So hubby can earn $1 million a year but if you earn $140,000 you still get paid maternity leave? What a rort.
That’s not middle class welfare, that’s welfare for the stinking rich.
There are two slightly disturbing assumptions running through many posts here. The first is that it does not matter who nurtures a new born baby. It would be completely inappropriate for a mother to abandon her new born baby, so she can race back to the office, BMW tires screeching, while somebody else looks after the child, even if that somebody else is the father. There is no more important bond than a mother’s, and for a woman, her child. So, we should not encourage this devaluation of maternity, by dissolving it into “parental aleave,” especially given the large and growing number of women having babies without involving the father.
Secondly, all this talk of “unpaid labour” is wrong. Women in relationships with men who choose home duties own fifty percent of the household’s total wealth and income. So while she may be swanning around at home, having her nails done, botox, lunching with the girls, and playing tennis, while hubby works 60 hours a week to bring home the bacon, 50% of that bacon is still hers!
There are two slightly disturbing assumptions running through many posts here. The first is that it does not matter who nurtures a new born baby. It would be completely inappropriate for a mother to abandon her new born baby, so she can race back to the office, BMW tires screeching, while somebody else looks after the child, even if that somebody else is the father. There is no more important bond than a mother’s, and for a woman, her child. So, we should not encourage this devaluation of maternity, by dissolving it into “parental aleave,” especially given the large and growing number of women having babies without involving the father.
Secondly, all this talk of “unpaid labour” is wrong. Women in relationships with men who choose home duties own fifty percent of the household’s total wealth and income. So while she may be swanning around at home, having her nails done, botox, lunching with the girls, and playing tennis, while hubby works 60 hours a week to bring home the bacon, 50% of that bacon is still hers!
Let us hope those above equating motherhood with hiring a gardener never have children themselves.
Oh f* off Myrtle. I wasn’t *equating* motherhood with hiring a gardener. I was pointing out that work traditionally seen as “women’s work” is undervalued compared with work traditionally seen as in the make domain.
Biology != destiny. You can take your sanctimonous idea that women who go back to the office “BMW tires screeching” or who want something more to occupy their brains than spending 24×7 with a small person who can’t hold a meaningful conversation, and you can shove it.
Myrtle, honey, try rewriting the above without all the emotive language and button-pushing and we might bother taking it seriously.
Caroline, I’d like to go into your stuff in more detail on another thread, but 1) have you ever had direct experience of a child care centre as a mum or an alumnus? and 2) referring to ABC Learning as the definition of “child care” is like referring to Perez Hilton as the definition of “writer”. No one who cared about the subject agreed with child care for profit, so that is a little bit out of the ballpark.
last sentence was missing some words. Should have read:
“You can take your sanctimonous idea that women who go back to the office “BMW tires screeching” or who want something more to occupy their brains than spending 24×7 with a small person who can’t hold a meaningful conversation, as morally inferior to “proper” women who fulfil their biological role of changing nappies that apparently men are incapable of, and you can shove it.”
I knew it would turn into this sort of argument. As Ginga has pointed out we’re really only talking about a very modest (not in the Swiftian sense) scheme. There’s really no fuss to be attched to it.
As for the housework argument, this might be amusing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25love.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
Ah yes, another child-hater.
No Myrtle, I don’t hate children. Children are lovely. But I’m an adult with a very intellectual bent, and the idea of spending most of my time each day with a person who can’t have an adult discussion doesn’t fill me with thrills and make me feel like I’m fulfilling my ultimate womanly destiny.
What I do hate are people like you who think your choices are the only choices and who presume to judge other people.
Greenslime attack?
Yes, Mindy, that seems appropriate!
Yes, most possibly!
Would people perhaps like a new post to get all het up about child care, because it’s not really on topic. And
we’re really only talking about a very modest (not in the Swiftian sense) scheme.
Holy FSM Fine!
I should hope not – but don’t give the no-tax crowd ideas!
Razor, answers to most of your questions can be found in the Productivity Commission’s draft report:
29/09/2008 – Paid Parental Leave: Support for Parents with Newborn Children
The Opposition have had 7 months to review and determine whether they support this or not.
Ah yes, another insufferable sanctimonious judgemental prig (oh, sorry, dissenter.)
Myrtle if you’d been paying attention up-thread, you’d know that someone who’s rushing back to work with their “BMW tyres screeching” is probably working in a well-paid position in a large corporation that already pays maternity leave because they’ve done the cost-benefit analysis and realised it’s better for the company bottom line.
Other people who go back to work sooner than they might like are leaving their kids with their sister, or mother, or friend, or (horrors!) child-care worker because the fecking lights will go out if they miss a paycheck.
Now why don’t you think factory workers should get access to the same kind of schemes as the barristers and finance jockeys enjoy?
This may be news to you, but this scheme is going to vastly improve the quality of life for many new parents and their children compared to what they have now: a hardscrabble, unstable, and difficult start to life because of restrictive parental leave practices that impact on most women far more onerously than on most men.
And if you’ve got this far in life without learning that it’s extremely bad manners to judge others and s**t on them from a great height because they live a life of which you don’t approve, then maybe you should’ve listened more to your mother about what constitutes a socially well-adjusted and charitable disposition.
Thank you Mercurius, that’s just what I wanted to say only I was spluttering with anger and it didn’t come out quite so coherently.
I blame the fact that I’m a selfish child-hating bitch.
You’re welcome Rebekka. This thread has been fun — it’s like playing Whack-A-Mole at Manly pier.
Frankly, I don’t care if folks like Myrtle never understand and never learn. If their side of politics doesn’t ever get a good understanding of why they lost government, they’ll never win it again!
*Applauds*
Rebekka @ 154 – And yet the average time spent working (paid or unpaid) for men and women ends up the same. Which I think was the original point being made. It may be due to men with families doing more paid work (a second job to help support the family finances is not that unusual) or perhaps women doing more work that men at one point of their lives but doing less work at other times. But either way, on average it ends up about the same. Of course individual households will vary.
Sometimes I’m ashamed to be Australian – hang on I’m not!
Don’t worry about Myrtle, probably Greenslime in yet another pathetic disguise.
As for the rest, they either cannot or refuse to understand the obvious, which is if it doesn’t encourage people to have babies, it’s got to be good for the country and for individuals. Can’t believe that it has attracted the sort of controversy shown here. What a joke!
“Rebekka @ 154 – And yet the average time spent working (paid or unpaid) for men and women ends up the same. Which I think was the original point being made.”
No, Chris, that wasn’t the original point being made. The point was about women in relationships with kids, and how much housework they do. Mindy said she did more than 2/3. The link was posted as a claim that this was “above average”. For women with kids this is *not* above average, as the statistics actually show when you click through.
Averages overall include single people and people in relationships with no kids.
btw adrian, (apart from, yet again, having to apologise for my shoddy grammar! I seem to be averaging a clanger per comment) the draft report gives consideration that the scheme should not irresponsibly ‘encourage people to have babies’ etc.
Yes, I’ll concede that it’s unlikely to have that effect, which in my view was the only aspect to warrant controversy. It seems to me that all the other objections seem to be rationalisations trying to justify some ideological or gender based prejudice.
As 4 Corners demonstrated last night, Australia is has some serious problems regarding gender inequality, as if we didn’t already know.
Sally r @ 168 – That Report may be the basis for the policy but until the Bill is relaeased we don’t really know what is being proposed. The devil is the detail.
For instance – the Baby Bonus. Not much has been said about the fact that the report is saying get rid of the Baby Bonus for employed but not those without an employer. Is that ALP Policy?? We don’t know.
Are you better off getting baby bonus and FTB especially if you only want to take say 8 weeks off? Is there an opt out?
The report also recommends employers have to keep paying the 9% S super for long-term employees – is that ALP policy?
Your smug response rally shows just how uncertain this proposal really is – until we see the supporting Bill.
If you go further into the stats, it’ll show that full time employed fathers do 2:38 hours:minutes of domestic work & childcare (1:19 + 1:09) per day vs full time employed mothers do 4:51 (2:34 + 2:17). So that means mums do a little under 2/3rds of the work on average, or an extra 2:13 hours:minutes.
However when you look at the time spent doing employment related work, the fathers do an average of 7:28 work related hours per day, however mothers employed “full time” only do an average of 4:50 per day, or 2:38 less work.
So overall the full time working father’s still come out working more than full time working mothers.
Reference: ABS 41530DO001 How Australian’s use their time, 2006 – Table 12
Rebekka @ 175 said:
Actually she said:
And if you look at the table for both parents working fulltime, 2/3rds of the housework done by women is the average, not far more than 2/3rds.
Note the total hours worked by men is about 73 hours and by women 74 hours. So even with both parents working fulltime and the women doing more household work, the overall (paid+unpaid) hours worked is about the same.
She’s right in that the average mother who is in fulltime paid work ends up with the equivalent of two fulltime jobs, but then so does the average father. Bringing up children seems to suck up pretty much all available spare time.
I’m assuming for the sake of argument that desipis and Chris actually have a point beyond idle chatter and quotation of irrelevant statistics. If so, what is it?
big assumption, Adrian.
Rebekka @ 182 – you were the one who asked for the statistics @150
adrian, just the point that those whining that mothers work so much harder and therefore deserve fists of cash from the government aren’t supported by the statistics. Which is separate from the argument that it makes economic sense to ensure that families are financially secure.
I think you are drawing a pretty long bow there Chris. Many fathers may feel like they have two full time jobs, but when you do the breakdown of what they actually do, compared to their spouse I think a lot of men would be surprised at how much their spouse does that goes unnoticed. Until she doesn’t do it of course.
So don’t do it
Way to completely miss the point desipis. Have you actually read the comments? It’s not about money, it’s about recognising and valuing (in non monetary terms) unpaid work.
The summary of the ABS publication Desipsis cites is here with all of the tables/spreadsheets etc.
As always it’s more complicated: time spent by fathers on childcare is predominantly spent playing/reading/talking to children, while mothers do more of the physical work of care. Furthermore (from the summary):
I don’t know whether this is irrelevant or not. I’ve lost track
Mindy @ 185 – I agree that many men, unless they spend sometime without their partner but with their children, would be surprised. I work from home so I have a pretty good idea of what is going on in our house. And at times it does feel like I have two full time jobs, but I knew it was going to be like that when we decided to have children and I’m not complaining.
I think its a self reporting study, so its possible that men are over reporting and women are under reporting. And even then time reporting surveys can be difficult to fill out accurately. If I’m working in my office but also have my daughter with me in the room playing with toys am I working or am I providing care for the child? (Some would say neither
Or if I’m eating dinner looking after her while she’s playing is it classified as leisure time or is it childcare? My wife browses the internet while breastfeeding – is that leisure or childcare?
Working from home is a completely different ballgame though Chris. I would guess that people in your situation do more simply because being there unless you have superpowers you can’t ignore whats happening around you and still work. Whereas fathers who work outside the home seem to have an uncanny ability not to see mess, snotty noses, shoes all over the floor etc.
“I don’t know whether this is irrelevant or not. I’ve lost track”
You make your own relevance when a thread gets to this point Liam – you know that.
I didn’t so much as ask for statistics as ask if someone was going to claim “statistics prove that x” that they post a link to the statistics they think prove their point.
In this case, the statistics proved nothing like what depsis actually said anyway.
Can you describe what you want? A closer relationship with your kids? More control over how the household is run? Equal rights? A special day just for mothers?
True, all too true. You know what I like to do when a thread gets this mature? I like to give people unsolicited advice about their parenting. It always goes down well.
You’re ruining your children’s futures parenting them alone, mums and dads reading. What makes you think you’re qualified? Who gave you a licence to reproduce?
Stick your offspring into a properly accredited childcare or long day care facility right away. Stimulate the economy, do right by your young future consumer. You know it makes sense.
I have, several times. Maybe if you read the comments?
“Can you describe what you want? ”
How about an end to patriarchy? I’d be happy with that.
I have oh mighty panamanian birth canal. What do I do now? The little buggers still won’t eat their vegetables.
Razor, my response wasn’t trying to be smug. You’ve asked valid questions, and I suggested where to find answers. The draft report contained many ‘recommended paths forward’, and swathes of it can be dismissed from what the Government has already announced. It’s not that difficult to see what’s yet to be finalised (the details).
By all means, you and the Opposition should be putting your reasoned concerns and ideas forward, and commenting on what you think would work best, and what you think would be flawed. It’s false, however, to suggest there’s no detail for you or the Opposition to work with at this stage.
If you have outstanding questions you want answered, so you should be asking them, but then why not also have a stab at answering them yourselves? In that way, you and the Opposition might both come across and appear to the public as effective contributors to the debate…
FWIW, and I could be wrong, but I haven’t heard the Opposition saying ‘this is policy on the run’, or ‘there’s no detail in their policy, so we simply can’t comment properly’ in the media. Their initial response (like that of many people) has been ‘why is it being delayed by a year’. The Government’s response to that has been, ‘so we can finalise the details’.
Mindy – yo are nto on your Pat Malone there. Grating them up in the Bolognaise sauce worked a treat last night.
Have you tried deep-frying them in shortening or ghee? Battering them with egg and breadcrumbs like little broccoli schnitzels? Coating them with jam, cream and caster sugar? If none of those work, MSG and chicken salt are a surefire winner.
If those all fail, you should really consider feeling bad about yourself as a parent. Very very bad indeed. Everybody else’s child eats their raw, fresh, locally produced organic vegetables and asks for seconds, before they clean their own faces and ask to be put to bed.
Miami – my kids actually do ask to go to bed! But they rarely eat their veggies.
The only thing I can see you asking for is acknowledgment that mothers work harder than fathers, and as I pointed out the statistics don’t support that position and therefore I think it makes for an unreasonable request.
An end to something that’s a poorly defined, vague, unproven, abstract concept. Uhh… sure.
Giving unsolicited advice to others about child rearing is one thing, but the childless screaming at those actually raising children is disgusting.
Mindy @ 190 – I think fathers in my type of situation do more because its easier for them to do more compared to those who don’t work from home. Its pretty easy for me to put a load of washing on during a break and then hang it out at a later break. In fact its easier for me to do it than for my wife if my daughter is having a clingy day. Similarly for cooking if I choose the right recipes. I also have the flexibility to make up for lost time during the day by working at night.
Get fathers more flexible working conditions and you’ll see a change in the balance of who does unpaid work. But there’ll probably be a financial cost to it, and fathers may have to accept lower wages for more flexible conditions.
Patriarchy is an archaic notion in the Australian context.
Heaven forbid! A value judgement! I am to suppose that you’ve never made a value judgement Liam?
And that’s a bit of no-brainer not to mention a strawman argument. Obviously the employees of for-profit childcare centres are not the ones being accused venality.
No Helen on both counts. Which I suppose in many people’s eyes, makes my observations utterly invalid.
However, I think citing ABC childcare centres is perfectly valid given that they were one of the most dominant providers in the country and in many towns the only one.
“Patriarchy is an archaic notion in the Australian context.”
Myrtle, I feel confident that a highly trained, scientific mind, such as yours, trained in higher reasoning (characteristics which I do not dispute – Im sure your word is good) will – by dint of instinct and long training – shortly offer compelling empirical evidence in support of this bold assertion.
I look forward to it. I can only assume it has been held up in moderation owing to weight of evidentiary links embedded therein.
“Patri*rchy is an archaic notion in the Australian context.”
Myrtle, I feel confident that a highly trained, scientific mind, such as yours, trained in higher reasoning (characteristics which I do not dispute – Im sure your word is good) will – by dint of instinct and long training – shortly offer compelling empirical evidence in support of this bold assertion.
I look forward to it. I can only assume it has been held up in m*deration owing to weight of evidentiary links embedded therein.
“An end to something that’s a poorly defined, vague, unproven, abstract concept.”
Oh, you mean like motherhood, masculinity, democracy, that sort of thing?
It’s easy, of course, to say those sorts of things when you’re on the receiving end of the privilege it generates.
I think it’s up to the people that claim something exists to provide the proof that it does. Is there a widely accepted set of measurable criteria to define whether a society is a “patriarchy”, or the degree to which it is a “patriarchy”?
It’s also easy to erroneously assume that the experiences you have can be projected across all society as though its some form of universal pattern, particularly when the selection bias of those who you share those experiences with reinforces such a perception.
Ok Desipis, lets kick off with:
70% of Australian parliamentarians are men.
Men hold 66% of all seats on Australian government controlled boards and bodies
In May 2008, women earned 83.8 cents for every dollar males earned.
There is a gap of almost 7% between median starting salaries of female graduates, aged less than 25, compared to male graduates
In the private sector, women hold just 8.3% of board directorships
Women hold just 10.7% of all executive managerial positions in the private sector
Only four of the top 200 Australian companies had female Chief Executive Officers in 2008
These are Australian government statistics.
Now I’m ready for the case in the negative.
But you know what, I’m not holding my breath. Not after the big-talking, no follow-up, evidence-free, pre-enlightenment ad-hom freakshow that certain LP threads have descended into today.
Lefty,
So you’re saying that a “patriarchy” is a society that statistically perceives men to be better performers in leadership positions than women?
*closes mouth, wipes 1000 yard stare, turns to camera 2*
“Okayyy… thanks Desipis. You have one ‘pass’ left. Now over to our next contestantttttt….
Myrtle!! Welcome to tonight’s LP Mastermind. Your special subject was ‘science’.
Your answer?”
@202 Wrong again Desipis.
Lefty,
Sorry, I’m puzzled as to what the gendered bias in selecting leaders has to do with acknowledging the value of housework & raising kids.
Minday,
Care to point out a particular comment where you cover something I haven’t mentioned?
@ 216 You keep missing the point. Or deliberately misunderstanding? I don’t know, and I’m going to leave it at that.
Me too Mindy! I’m in no mind for asinine wordplay posing as debate.
Now that budget night has come and gone…
Pav gave the Rudd government a bouquet for including fathers in the Parental (not Maternity) leave scheme. Not having had time yet (Work, home, school meeting) to have a look at the actual budget papers, I’m a bit confused by where Dads stand in the government scheme.
The AGE says:
So, fathers were only to get two weeks of parental leave anyway?
But then further on in the same article, Elizabeth Broderick says
So, are Dads allowed to take parental leave if they are the primary carer? or not? Also, the news reports I’ve had time to read (not many) appear to show that the terminology has changed back to “Maternity” leave, it appears, making the scheme more gendered than it really needs to be. If so, that’s a pity.
As a stay at home dad ( business on the side ) let me just say the arguments about housework are a bit ridiculous. I do virtually all the housework, inside and out, so my wife and I can enjoy the weekends. I can do it in under 3 hours per week – and our home is tidier than 90% I’ve seen. The cooking takes another half to one hour per day, max. I got our kid to do his own washing at twelve so we each do our own.
Raising a child was also a breeze – and fun as well. A mate of mine is in the same situation and I can truly say that his daughter and our son, both now adults, are two of the best adjusted kids around.
So stop whinging people and get a life.
And so modest, too.
“The cooking takes another half to one hour per day, max.”
Mmmm yum, daddy, noodles in a cup again.
Er, no joe2. Pasta once a week. The sauce is often from a jar but I have some great simple recipes for pasta. Bacon + black olives, yum. With a greek salad on the side.
Helen – just say’in, that’s all. I’ve seen my fair share of whinging and 90% of the time people have made a rod for their own backs.
“Me too Mindy! I’m in no mind for asinine wordplay posing as debate.”
*slinks off disappointed*
To Mr under-3-hours a week,
So, you do it all in under 3 hours per week?
Laundry (washing, drying, sorting, making sure all family members have the requisite items of clothing on appropriate days and are putting it away), cooking, food shopping and putting away of same, shoe cleaning, bathroom cleaning, stove cleaning, toilet cleaning, washing dishes and pots, wiping of flat surfaces like kitchen counters and kitchen / dining room tables, putting out rubbish, putting out recyclables, bringing ditto back in again, putting out and cleaning compost bin, floor sweeping, floor mopping, cleaning of windowills (forget windows except once in a blue moon), picking up endless stuff that’s in the wrong place, trying to find places for things that are in the wrong place…
Plus:
the child wrangling, including the school notes, the location of the elusive clothing items, the lunches, the little friends coming over and the making of sandwiches/jaffles, the homework, the teaching them how to eat in a relatively civilised manner, teaching them to clean up after themselves, coping with illnesses, injuries and minor disasters…Also pets, the feeding and exercising of…
Plus:
the outside: the weeding, watering, mulching, pruning, planting, removing, more weeding, gutters, mowing
Plus:
The dentist, the immunisations, the parent teacher interviews, the school assemblies, the school working bee, etc.
(This is not “whinging”, it is a description of what we all do, give or take one element or another. For a disabled kid, multiply exponentially.)
U. R. Superman Dude!
Unless, of course, as you’ve mentioned your child is grown up, your past feats have taken on a somewhat rosy tinge.
Peter’s suffers from that common human trait known as self-delusion.
er.. as does Peter.
Helen – indeed I do, except a lot of that stuff is making a rod for your own back. Clean shoes!!!! Are you joking. Stop mothering your kids and let them grow up. At about 5 they a perfectly capable of cleaning their own shoes. Sheeeeesh!!!!!!
My son made his own lunch by 7 or 8. He did his own washing by 12. The toilet takes 5 minutes twice a week. The bathroom 15 once a week.
I already said that cooking wasn’t in the 3 hours. Groceries are another hour but I do it at night when it’s quiet so it takes me an hour, sometimes less. We all figure out the shopping list over dinner. Its a printed list that organized by aisle that changes only slowly. At the shops I can get most stuff in less than 40 minutes. I buy in bulk stuff that we go through a lot of, so as often as not all I have to get is fresh stuff. It’s called being organized. Being disorganized means doing it on saturday morning which is as silly as it gets.
And you don’t have to tell me *how* to clean a house. It isn’t rocket science. And if you don’t put stuff in the wrong place you don’t endlessly have to pick it up.
And yes I do the weeding outside as well – and look after the pool. Once you get it under control weeding takes about 10 minutes once a month. I can spot a weed a mile off because we don’t have any. Remember the old saying “1 years seeding 7 years weeding??”
The funny thing is the biggest whingers usually have the untidiest houses!
BTW Helen. I said I did the house-work in about 3 hours per week. If you consider raising kids ‘housework’ then that is your problem, not mine.
If you don’t like washing dishes, why not get a dishwasher??
Good news, folks! Peter’s autobiography How I Learnt To Stop Whingeing And Get A Life is now available in good bookstores everywhere.
It’s scintillating stuff and sets out in great detail just how wonderful he is. Reviewers are raving, with one saying “Thank to Peter, I’ve learnt how to combine the pleasure of putting everything in its correct place with the fun and laughs of a labour-camp commandant!
It’s hot on the heels of his breakthrough best-seller The Good, The Bad and The Smugly.
Also, he’ll soon be appearing on the Australian versions of So You Think You Can Whinge and Extreme Housekeeping.
And if that’s not enough Peter for you, he’s also announced the title of a forthcoming new epic in 7 volumes, entitled Self-Praise Is No Recommendation.
Dang. Then he’ll be too expensive. I was going to hire him at my place. For three hours a week, natch.
I was going to get him to train my children. I bet they’d eat their vegies for Peter.
Well *my* gardening and childcare takes less than an hour every week. Of course, I live in a unit and have no children. The efficiency is incredible—there’s no excuse for anyone else
Anyway, back to lecturing parents about their failures in bringing up their offspring.
Peter has had enough of that fussy old slow food movement. He is to soon launch “Pete’s Three Ingredient Recipe Book”. It should be a winner for all you busy homemakers.
Mindy @ 232. Unfortunately my son is a fussy eater. It was one of my failings. He used to nearly starve on school camps, more or less refusing to eat the slop served up. Most of the other kids didn’t mind or so I heard. One of the probs being a good cook I guess, apart from my partners jealous coworkers when she said what was for dinner.
Jeez you lot are a pack of whingers.
Bet you are a whizz in the cot too, Pete. Over and done with in minutes.
Time is money, joe2.
I think everyone’s being a bit snarky about Peter. Frankly I envy his ability at housework, although I have no desire to emulate it – after all, my cleaning lady gets all the cleaning done in about 3 hours every Monday. That doesn’t include dishes or ironing, btw.
Yes apology Peter, I’m just a jealous guy.
Not only whingers, but jerks too. Who would have thought? It’s usually the grumblers complaining they’re ‘too tired’ for fun in the sack. As you can see, not a problem here.
I’m curious as to the extravagant banquets people are preparing for themselves that they need to spend more than an hour of their time to prepare and cook it.
…or how joe@222 can take half an hour to make 2 minute noodles
I like to cook each noodle individually, desipis. We jerky, whingey, grumblers make a point of it. They take a lot of time to unknit.
I’m guess you wash each thread of your clothes separately too. All that extra water and power usage must be great for the environment.
I like to coat each noodle individually in a mix of lime juice, soy sauce and palm sugar with a litle bit of fresh chilli and fish sauce. If marinated for 32 minutes exactly and cooked in extra virgin olive oil, it makes quite a delicious treat that all the kids love.
With washing, I find that the best results are achieved with chlorine and other contaminant free water, so I use filtered water only. You may be amazed, since you are apprently curious by nature, what a difference it makes. Clothes last so much longer, and although the filtering takes some time, it is really worth it.
You have to, of course use French detergent, which is 50% extra virgin olive oil apparently.
LOL = FDB @ 224.
yeah I know. After saying that I found I had nothing further to contribute.
Kulcha-jammer sniffz spraypaint, hitz own billboard.
Helen @219,
The latest report was published yesterday to:
12/05/09 – Paid Parental Leave: Support for Parents with Newborn Children
Either partner can take the 18 weeks parental leave, or they can share it between themselves if they’re both eligible (both work), non-concurrently, in one continuous 18 week block within the first 12 months.
Note though (if I’m reading correctly): normally (she’s alive, has custody, her faculties etc), the mother must 1) be eligible in the first place, and 2) give consent to “transfer the leave” to be instead taken by the father, or the same-sex partner…
There was also proposed to be an additional 2 weeks paternity leave, that could only be taken by the father/same-sex partner within the first 12 months, concurrently with the parental leave or not. I don’t see why the father/same-sex partner wouldn’t have been able to take a total of 20 weeks leave. I also don’t see why the mother shouldn’t have become eligible for that 2 weeks, if the father/same-sex partner was acting as primary carer. The report itself identifies additional problems, so I’m not surprised the Government has scrapped it.
Thanks for stopping by Peter to give us whingers and jerks a piece of your mind. That’s what LP is here for, after all — a pristine electronic whiteboard for you to fling s**t at (I bet it only takes you 3 minutes to clean it up, too).
It was bracing, it was improving, and now it’s over. As is your grace period.
So basically it’s transferable maternal leave set up to screw over parents who choose the old school model of dad at work and mum at home with the kids? Lovely.
Thanks for that Sally R!
SallyR – the restrictions on the leave go a long way on explaining why people describe it as maternity leave rather than parental leave. Whilst its technically possible for fathers to take it, very very few are going to in its current form. The concurrent restriction is on of the biggest obstacles – its not possible to share it so one parent gets it 2 days a week and the other 3 days a week. But even the unpaid parental leave rights has this problem too.
desipis, no maternal leave scheme benefits mothers who don’t work. Instead you would qualify, as you do now, for the host of other Government support schemes. I don’t see how that screws anyone over.
It’s a bit like saying that pension payments ‘screw over’ those who are under 65 going on 67.
I think taking the paid maternity leave disqualifies you from getting FTB B, so for stay at home mums who qualify it’ll be almost the same since they’ll get the baby bonus as well.
The fact that if mum works and dad stays home with the kids the government offers to pay so that both can stay home, while if the dad works and mum stays home with the kids the government says tough luck, seems like it discriminates against a traditionalist lifestyle. It also seems to encourage the perception that raising kids is “women’s work” as it’s obviously important enough to pay for mum to be home, but not dad.
Try reading for meaning desipis, it’s really not too hard if you try.
“Instead you would qualify, as you do now, for the host of other Government support schemes.”
If you ask nicely I could even enlighten you as to what they are.
BTW, I tried a ‘traditionalist lifestyle’ once, but unfortunately the antique furniture and manicured gardens proved beyond my budget. Still, I did learn to mow the lawn, weed the garden, clipp the hedges (topiary being a speciality) and clean out the fountains in less than 35 minutes on average. It’s amazing what you can do when you try.
Which government support schemes are available to families where the dad works and the mum stays at home, that aren’t available to families where the mum works and the dad stays at home?
The housework argument is fascinating. Helen do you really do that every week? Honest question and I’m not having a go. I’m just fascinated by what people think is a reasonable standard of tidiness. I don’t have kids so there’s a lot I don’t have to do. But I do my housework in a couple of hours a week – washing, sorting, cleaning toilet and bathroom. sweeping etc. I admit, I have low standards. I’d only clean windowsills every couple of months and vacuum every couple of weeks. I never iron. One of the issues I’ve observed is that women do tend to have much higher standards of house proudness than men do. But, I honestly don’t know why women so often do so much housework, when so much of it seems unnecessary to me. Perhaps this comes from my Mum who taught me that if you have a choice between having fun and doing housework, then have fun.
Fine – Everything apart from wall cleaning and windows, which I’m very bad at. I don’t do SOME of those tasks in a week, but it makes the house a bit grotty. My tradeoff is that when I’m on my deathbed I won’t remember my clean windowsills, I’ll remember my conversations with interesting people like you guys, among other things, like dog walking and riding and playing music (if I can remember anything at all). But if it gets too bad, there’s a definite discomfort factor. And most of these tasks have to be done, yes. If you have two kids and a man in the house and noone notices the toilet… eww. And I’m in the minority having only one (toilet).
However – much of that HAS to be done. The laundry is like a huge sausage machine which has to be kept going, and I don’t use a dryer, so I have to put a bit of thought into it. Note I didn’t mention ironing, I do a bit with tailored pants for work and a best garment or two. Beds, I also missed, and keeping track of the multifarious adult-and school-related paperwork – those are a pain. I’ve been meaning to do some housework posts – it’s a fascinating topic.
Sorry, Deborah, for the threadjack. To bring it back somewhat on topic: When you’re on maternity leave, because you’ve just given birth, the housework and baby-work tends to TAKE. OVAH. (Nappies, anyone?) Therefore, a period of paid at-home work, you know it makes sense. And Desipis, “leave” inherently pertains to working people, so you know, can’t do much about your complaint there. If you’re already able to support your spouse (ie. fortunate) and you have the baby bonus, you’re pretty well supported in the budget.
Yeah, toilet definitely an every day job for me. I think kids create a huge workload when it comes to housework. It’s really interesting. Anyway, it’s also not the point when it comes to parental leave.
Agreed Fine. Housework is what you make of it ( though I probably have higher standards than you – maybe an hours worth ). A life spent doing housework is a life wasted I say. Having said that, the trick is to minimize it, usually by reducing clutter and not (s)mothering kids and teaching them at an early age to start looking after themselves. Very young kids used to milk cows so it’s likely they can clean their own shoes and make lunch.
Agreed Fine. Housework is what you make of it ( though I probably have higher standards than you – maybe an hours worth ). A life spent doing housework is a life wasted I say. Having said that, the trick is to minimize it, usually by reducing clutter and not (s)mothering kids and teaching them at an early age to start looking after themselves. Very young kids used to milk cows so it’s likely they can clean their own shoes and make lunch.
This housework crap is just a big lie perpetrated by feminists determined to ‘prove’ that all guys are lazy scoundrels.
The waambulance crowd is also forever trying to make out that raising kids is ‘so hard these days’ – also rubbish.
This housework crap is just a big lie perpetrated by feminists determined to ‘prove’ that all guys are lazy scoundrels.
Helen – haven’t you heard of disposable nappies ? Everyone else has.
One of your more coherent offerings peter the pumpkin eater.
I wouldn’t mind betting you have neither kids nor spouse.
Pumpkin Eater, don’t use my comment to beat feminists over the head. Being one myself, I don’t take to it kindly. My comment was an enquiry about perceived gender difference. It specifically wasn’t about blaming anyone.
Disposable nappies – does the environment mean anything to you at all? Nah.. okay.
Helen,
I think it’s clear that things you label as housework go well beyond what is required for a functional household; you spend extra time and energy to achieve a cleaner/neater/more organized household for reasons of self satisfaction/pride/etc which makes it more of a hobby than a chore. There are quite a few things that I do around the house that take time and energy and that I feel are necessary but that wouldn’t affect my ability to function if they weren’t done. I’m not sure people can justifiably complain about excessive workload when they are the only ones with the expectation that the amount of work be done in the first place.
My complaint is that working fathers (apparently) aren’t going to qualify in their own right for leave under this scheme. I’m not complaining that that non-working mothers don’t get leave.
Fine @ 265 – Drifting further off topic, but I thought it was found there was very little difference in the environmental impact of disposables and cloth nappies. Depends a bit on how you clean cloth nappies and using a nappy service is meant to be best for the environment but expensive.
Desipis, clean underwear, done dishes, a floor which doesn’t coat your feet with grit and a toilet which isn’t streaked with shit (hey, a poem) isn’t exactly the epitome of house proudness, you know.
This, I note, is the latest antifeminist talking point. “You can’t complain about unequal housework load, because we don’t see the housework, and we get on just fine! Just like back in the day when were in the share house with the rugger blokes!” Another post in the making.
You may be right, Chris – I’m certainly no nappy expert.
Desipis, you’re drifting into silly territory. As I said, I hav low standards. Other peoples’ are even lower, many peoples’ are far higher. Who gets to define what’s necessary and what’s a ‘hobby’? I bet you think your housework standards are definitive.
Funny as well as “silly”, Desipis. The “hobby” routine is a dead set crack up. Next time I feel like a broken skull, and I see my dearly beloved running around with the vac, I will wish her “all the best with your hobby today, honey”. Then seek medical attention.
Helen, I’m talking about the perpetually clean windowsills, made beds, things always put away, the vast majority of gardening, etc are all about vanity and not about function. I’m surprised the dedication to housework given how obviously it’s cultural trend that clearly reinforces the ‘patriarchy’ through apparently obligation to have unnecessary household standards. Look at what Rebekka quoted @154. People moving in together should result in less total work yet women somehow find an extra 6 hours of work to do each week. Men keep consistent which shows that it’s not just a matter of men dumping the work on the women.
Who got to define that housework is such a noble endeavor? If there’s an objective reason why housework is important then that should be used as a criteria to determine what’s important housework and what’s not. For example things that might impact other aspects of life could be considered important, e.g. hygiene, nutrition. You need to eat decent food and be healthy to be able to work, shop, socialise, etc. But no one is going to perform badly at work or get fired because their windowsills are dirty, or their kids beds weren’t made.
Living alone, housework is a bit of a lifestyle choice ; sometimes I choose to live in a spic and span environment that lasts for about half a day, and at other times . . .well who’s there to GAF? Living with others my standards tend to rise, possibly out of a sense of not letting morale collapse too much, or maybe just out of respect. Living with a defacto I just do it and rarely grumble because I don’t have a come-back line that a S.O. might argue, and has; that he happily lived like a pig in shit before, ipso facto housework is my issue alone. Frankly, with a companion like that, as Loudon Wainwright III would lament, I’d rather be lonely. If someone could suggest a killer come-back line, I’d appreciate having one up my sleeve should the need ever arise again.
[comment redacted]
Goodbye cruel world!
*Ticks off bingo square or two*
If clean windowsills don’t turn you on – then clean them as a demonstration of your love & commitment. And don’t move into a place with gloss white woodwork.
wbb @ 275 – you just need a few cats – they dust windowsills for you and then clean themselves afterwards
Yep, Chris. The answer, for this and pretty much any situation, is cats!
No, it’s dogs!
Fine #261
I go to the toilet every day too.
Another aspect of the housework issue that I’ve found since marrying and living with my husband rather than my previous house-to-myself status is that any mess in the house is assumed to be my problem or fault.
This comes from friends and family… even though if when they pause to think about it, we are equally responsible for the mess.
I guess its one of those things where women do tend to do more because it is so expected that they will and should. My impression is this is slowly changing – I don’t seem to have as much of this to deal with as my mother or grandmother – but its very much still there.
There are some vastly different attitudes to housework. My previous partner felt that I was calling her incompetent when I suggested getting a cleaner. We both worked full time, but she still felt that people would think she was lazy not to do it herself.
My present partner rang all her friends to tell them about the idiot who asked her if she was OK with keeping the cleaner when she moved in.
Domestic patterns laid out during the time when mothers were housewives haven’t been fully modified yet. Until that happens there will be more to be done than there is time to do it. Much of the housework that is still the social norm is incompatible with couples working 80 hour weeks. Not to mention that there are many more “leisure activities” nowadays that we believe we must partake of.
Auskick – who started that? Stolen my Sat morning. Auskick used to happen in the b’yard or street. No parental input reqd.
“My complaint is that working fathers (apparently) aren’t going to qualify in their own right for leave under this scheme.”
Possibly because they haven’t just squeezed a baby out of their vagina “in their own right”. Sheesh.
“Look at what Rebekka quoted @154. People moving in together should result in less total work yet women somehow find an extra 6 hours of work to do each week. Men keep consistent which shows that it’s not just a matter of men dumping the work on the women.”
Two things – one, men *say* they keep consistent. Doesn’t mean they are actually still doing as much housework (there are widely acknowledged problems with women under-reporting and men over-reporting domestic work in these studies) and two, it doesn’t mean men aren’t MAKING MORE MESS, and so increasing the total amount of housework that needs to be done, instead of it remaining constant. If they live on their own, perhaps they use their towel for a week. If they live with a woman, perhaps they think that since someone else is going to wash it, they might as well throw it in the washing basket and get a clean one after two days. Or just leave it on the bathroom floor and get a clean one, since someone else will pick it up after them.
MsLaurie, “any mess in the house is assumed to be my problem or fault”, preach it sister.
If squeezing out a baby is so much work that a woman might need significant time off work, isn’t it possible that this same worn-out woman could do with support at home for a significant amount of time? Or do housewives have some sort of magical ability to bounce back that working women don’t?
That’s not to mention the fact the men I’ve worked with that have had babies were run down to the point of uselessness for the first month or two anyway.
And women *say* they do more.
Reference?
6 hours more mess? Come on, I mean there are probably some slobs out there that could manage that, but six hours on average?
Perhaps its the woman throwing the man’s towel in the wash every two days because that’s how often she washes her towel.
“A substantial amount of time spent on child care activities is recorded as a secondary activity.”
You’re quite correct, Liam, way back @ 188.
Desipis, to produce a 25 minute/day differential in ‘favour’ of the father, chose to quote:
1) Only the statistics for full-time employed men, versus full-time employed women.
2) Only the statistics based on what the respondents declared as primary activities.
If he’d quoted primary and secondary activities (he does realise why this distinction was made in the questionnaire, yes? If he’d like to debate the ABS’s choice of methodology, that’d be far more interesting than debating the argument he’s built solely upon his hand-picked results – but then he’d necessarily have to admit his entire argument is flawed), he would have arrived at:
2:12 per day more work for the mother (who has children *under 15*, whatever that has to do with maternity leave).
(Desipis also neglected to mention the statistics show that, as a father’s working hours decrease, his leisure time increases, while, as a mother’s working hours decrease, her leisure time *only barely* increases.)
whatever that has to do with maternity leave).
Well it is and it isn’t – it’s all part of the continuum of workplaces basing the “good employee” as someone who is free of domestic responsibilities and the difficulty for women in a society where we are assumed to be the nurturers. But in relation to maternity leave it is drifting off topic a little.
Because the context I was quoting for was that the “double shift” done by mothers is shared by fathers, in that the total time spent “doing things for others/the family” was about the same.
You’re misinterpreting the statistics. Women don’t magically fit 32 hours into a day while men only magically fit in 30. That number means women take longer to do each task (possibly because they’re multitasking) and thus its possible that it feels like more work. If you spend an hour caring for a child while doing housework, but only achieve the same as you would in half an hour without the child, you haven’t done an hour’s worth of housework. You’ve done half an hour worth of housework with the remaining half an hour spent caring for the child. You might however fill that out as an hour spent with the primary task of housework, and another hour with child care as the secondary task.
This 2 hours is about the time difference in working hours, thus the time the mother would be at home with the child(ren). If you look closer at the data you’ll see that the 2 hours can be mostly explained by extra time spent minding a child with a the balance covered by play/read/talk with a child. I really don’t consider that doing housework with a child in the house can be counted as twice as much work as regular employment.
Find some statistics for hours done by parents of new borns and I bet they show that regardless of who is working both parents do ridiculous hours and both could do with a break from their regular duties, sharing whatever they can’t take leave from.
Helen
We have DOCS to save children from non-nurturing mothers.
“If squeezing out a baby is so much work that a woman might need significant time off work, isn’t it possible that this same worn-out woman could do with support at home for a significant amount of time? Or do housewives have some sort of magical ability to bounce back that working women don’t?”
That is completely incoherent. What on earth is your point?
“(there are widely acknowledged problems with women under-reporting and men over-reporting domestic work in these studies)
Reference?”
There are many. Here’s just one. http://www.springerlink.com/content/c10424443u847374/
If you want more, there’s this awesome thing called google. Suggest you use it, since it’s not actually my job to educate you about gender inequity.
“6 hours more mess? Come on, I mean there are probably some slobs out there that could manage that, but six hours on average?”
This is getting off-topic, but it wouldn’t remotely surprise me. That’s less than an hour extra a day, and when you consider things like people who live alone eating toasted sandwiches for dinner (as I often did when I lived alone) and women feeling the pressure to cook an actual dinner once they’re living with a man, which realistically would take up an extra half an hour at least, plus time to wash dishes etc afterwards, then yes, six hours a week seems entirely plausible.
Besides, for most middle-class mothers, there is not much squeexing involved in c-section.
Rebekka,
Quotes from that link:
See my comment #287.
If your argument is that women underestimate while men overestimate then your link doesn’t support your claim. If your argument is that such surveys are not an ideal source of data then I’ll agree. If there are better sources of data then we should use those. What shouldn’t happen is making government policy on the basis of stereotypes.
I’m not saying it is. I’m just asking you to back up your claims with evidence before I accept them.
But Rebekka, many women do have the agency to negotiate these domestic tasks eg – if I’m cooking dinner, I’m not doing the dishes. And many couples do exactly that. Imperfectly of course, but just saying women feel pressure to still perform domestically doesn’t explain all that much, IMO.
What is interesting to me is wbb’s comment.
“Domestic patterns laid out during the time when mothers were housewives haven’t been fully modified yet. Until that happens there will be more to be done than there is time to do it. Much of the housework that is still the social norm is incompatible with couples working 80 hour weeks. Not to mention that there are many more “leisure activities” nowadays that we believe we must partake of.”
Why do we still operate in a way that assumes one half of a couple has nothing to do all day except the housework?
Greenslime attack up thread!
As a bit of light Saturday catch up reading i’d like to the thank the RWDBs for such inadvertent entertainment. Surely the comment of the year goes to Desipis @ 213
Never before have i found one comment to be so informative in the context of the whole thread.
Sorry about going a bit ‘meta’ but i really have been enjoying this.
It was refreshing to see someone using it in a meaningful way, as opposed to the all encompassing justification for blaming all men for everything I’ve more frequently seen it used as.
Desipis, you should have left it as it was, your effort @ 295
isn’t nearly as funny. That joke is way too old to be funny.
Desipis, you’re going to have to provide some evidence to back up that claim @295
@Helen
Sorry, Deborah, for the threadjack.
Actually, I haven’t been by for a few days, because I’ve been frantic with marking, and childcare, and keeping the washing going, and doing a bit of it ahead of my usual schedule because my husband is going to be away for a while, and he and I needed to make sure he had enough clean shirts / socks / underwear to take away. Plus I’ve had to go through my children’s wardrobes to sort out what needs to be replaced for this winter, what can be handed down, what should just go to the recyclers. In between we’ve had to manage optometrists and orthodontists appointments, and the usual sports practices and games and after school lessons (minimal – only one each). All while I’m doing some part time teaching, and organising a bit more for the second semester. I’ve also got some on-going nagging concerns about my younger daughters’ progress in learning to read; they are both doing very well in maths, language comprehension, argument (of course!) but their reading is lagging. It’s about on the slow side of normal for their age, but well out of kilter with the rest of their academic achievement. So there have been a couple of parent-teacher discussions this week. Plus I’ve done my usual volunteer work at my girls’ school. I’ve also had the regular housework to do, and the standard menu planning and supermarket shopping. It all takes masses of time. You see, I run the household. My partner does a lot, but what I’m talking about is all the mental work of organising and keeping track of what’s going on in our house. Parenting takes an awful lot of time and effort, and most of it is never recognised, because on a day to day basis, it’s usually women’s work.
Now, where were we?
Desipis @ 287,
“That number means women take longer to do each task (possibly because they’re multitasking) and thus its possible that it feels like more work”
No, that number means that full-time employed mothers perform more tasks during a day (precisely because they’re multitasking), and says nothing about whether or not each task takes longer, or ‘feels like more work’.
“If you look closer at the data you’ll see that the 2 hours can be mostly explained by extra time spent minding a child with a the balance covered by play/read/talk with a child.”
The balance was not covered by ‘play/read/talk with a child’.
“I really don’t consider that doing housework with a child in the house can be counted as twice as much work as regular employment.”
You’re simply assuming, for your argument’s sake, that full-time employed mothers marked child minding as a secondary activity, whilst performing housework as a primary activity. Why ignore the equally strong likelihood, based on the statistics, they marked child-minding as a secondary activity, during their leisure time?
(Once again, as an aside, note the same statistics clearly show that fathers have more daily leisure time.)
Deborah, but why do you run the household? This is what I’m trying to understand. I know it’s women who run the household generally and do more than their fair share of work, but in all honesty I don’t understand why women agree to it. For instance, why do you need to make sure your husband has clean clothes when he goes away? He’s an adult. Surely that’s his responsibility. I just don’t get it. I’m honestly not having a go, but I’m curious.
You didn’t read carefully enough, Fine. I said that “he and I needed to make sure…” It meant that I had to juggle around my regular washing routine in order to be sure that he had enough time to get his clothes through the washing machine too. We need a regular routine, because we have a household of five people, and a front-loading machine, which is excellent with respect to low water usage, but wash cycles take nearly two hours.
As for why women agree to it, it… happens. That’s what gender roles are all about. And it takes a hell of a lot of time and effort and anguish to fight against them and rework the world, even within your own household.
I’m honestly not having a go, but I’m curious.
Really.
Yes, really Deborah. This is what makes it so hard to talk about. Because you immediately think I’m having a go at you, even though I’m not. What I’m trying to work out is why it ‘happens’, not deny that it happens. And just to say gender roles doesn’t explain much. This wave of feminism has been occurring since the late ’60s, so why is it still so hard to renegotiate these roles within a relationship? Why is it so hard for women to say ‘no’ to the second and third shifts?
It’s not the role in toto. It’s the elements that make up the role. One partner often has different expectations about what the domestic role should consist of. There are some things one or the other will not do regardless of their gender politics – while the other wants to see these things done – regardless of their politics. These “optional” tasks do not usually balance each other out. I know of no solution.
eg I won’t make fairy cakes to be taken to school for b’days. Not worth the candle. Wife disagrees. Her sense of social community and standing at the school. A sense I don’t have. For me to share in this part of the workload would require me to change my way of being. Won’t happen in the few short decades given to me to evolve in that direction even if I could be convinced of its desirability.
Couples need to be clear-eyed taking their relationship in the procreation direction. The demands are urgent, unbending and not easily shaped to your will.
Fine @ 302 – I think some of the gender stereotypes get set/reinforced when the mother takes maternity leave. Its easier for her to interleave much of the housework with child care. And then the balance of housework doesn’t get properly reset when she goes back to work fulltime.
However I think its also worth noting that a male working fulltime has paid work on average 52.5 hours a week, whilst a female working fulltime has 32.5 hours/week (which is a bit strange in itself – but I guess there is a specific definition for fulltime which is not 38 or 40 hours a week). So the time pressure from paid work would impact on time available for housework disproportionally (on average) on males compared to females.
Because of history, many blokes just do. not. get. it. when it comes to the amount and the kind of work that most domestic things take. A couple I know who have been married for many years have been at loggerheads for a long time over the house cleaning. Both have good, rewarding fulltime jobs. She doesn’t care if the house gets messy; he hates it; she says if he wants a higher standard of cleaning then he can do it; he says okay then, they will get a regular cleaner in and he will pay. (NB this would not leave so much as a dimple in his income.) She points out that a regular cleaner has to be administrated: to have the key left out regularly in an agreed place, to be scheduled, trusted, paid (as in ‘given the money’, usually in cash), rung up, listened to, substituted for when ill, etc etc etc, and that it is she, not he, who will be doing all of that. This is a variation on the theme of what Deborah rightly calls ‘the mental work of organising and keeping track of what’s going on in [the]house.’
Fine, a big part of this is that most houses only have one washing machine, one (if any) dryer, one oven and so on, and everybody doing their own thing make no sense and is staggeringly inefficient as Deborah points out — there have to be communal arrangements.
Also, the home is not a workplace and different dynamics are in play, to do with emotion and privacy and quality of life. I don’t know about you, but in the relationships I’ve been in, I’ve actually been quite fond of the bloke in question and haven’t wanted to torpedo the whole relationship over the question of who cleans the toilet. Same goes double or triple for children: women pick up the second and third shifts partly because they don’t want to short-change their kids. If I had kids and I thought their peers were going to give them hell over the absence of fairy cakes (and as we all know, this is more than likely; wbb, where do you stand on that?), then I would stay up and make the fairy cakes. I’ve been a feminist all my adult life so I know perfectly well what the arguments are, and the conclusion I came to over twenty years ago was that the nuclear family as we know it and true gender equality in daily life are mutually exclusive.
I’d buy a packet of something at Coles if I thought that. The kids aren’t the problem. It’s us parents trying to keep up with each other and with demanding ghosts from the past.
In most cases, yes.
PC, the other problem about cleaners, in my experience, is that you end up cleaning up before the cleaner arrives so that the true messiness of your house is not on view to the cleaner, or so that the cleaner can get a reasonable run at it.
Best money you can spend is on house cleaning even if it only enforces the discipline of the pre-cleaner tidy up.
Brian @ 307 – we used to have a cleaner and joked that what we really needed was a tidier to come through just before the cleaner did
I might have just been really lucky but I never found having a cleaner to have that much overhead (and I was the one who looked after that part as I had a cleaner before my wife and I met). Cleaning services do police checks on their employees, you can set up automatic payments by credit card or direct deposit, and you give them a key and its up to them to find a replacement if the regular person can’t make it (they notify you though). Pretty much zero hassle once its all setup. Much much less hassle than actually cleaning.
Brian, yes, a common problem! Actually, the distinction between ‘messy’ and ‘dirty’ is probably the first one that needs to be worked out by people sharing domestic space. My housework practice is strictly according to a priorities list — anything that might die and/or begin to smell if neglected gets attended to first, and everything else is negotiable. (There’s also the inimitable ‘If it moves, feed it; if it doesn’t, dust it.’)
If for any reason — war, marriage or anything in between — I ever find myself cohabiting with any adult(s) again, there will be a carefully-worked-out housework roster on which hated tasks have been swapped for less hated ones. I will do the ironing of anyone who is willing to do my share of cleaning the bathroom.
hmphh, I’ve asked no-one for evidence of their own experiences, so I don’t see a need to provide evidence for my own. I am however open to the fact that my experiences don’t represent the norm.
Sally R,
It’s a time use survey, it’s all about how long people spend doing things, not how much they actually achieve. I’m sure if you divided the employment time up into things like “core role, follow instructions, deal with co-workers, time management, paperwork, etc” there’d be quite a bit of overlap of primary and secondary producing higher totals for the primary & secondary tables.
I wasn’t ignoring it, however I don’t consider the mere presence of a child to be particularly burdensome.
And curiously, not even a portion of the shopping time is included as leisure.
Fine,
I’m seeing a parallel between this and the cliche Nice Guy(tm) behaviour. Essentially they spend a whole lot of time doing things for someone else that they were not asked to do, nor are these things really required or noticed that much and yet feel like they are entitled to something in return.
not even a portion of the shopping time is included as leisure
Doing the supermarket shopping is not leisure. Neither is shopping with children.
however I don’t consider the mere presence of a child to be particularly burdensome
That’s nice. However there are very few babies and toddlers who are merely present, scarcely any primary school age children either, and teenagers have a presence all of their own. The fact is that an adult must be present in order to care for a child, and even if the child is capable of playing outside, or reading a book, or entertaining themselves, an adult must be there to deal with emergencies, until that child is quite old. Even then, if you leave the child on her own, you must have back-up strategies in place – a phone number where she can reach you, neighbours she can go to for help, rules about how to answer the door and the telephone. None of this happens by chance, or by wishing it were so. It all takes time and effort.
A virtual housecleaning for whoever can identify where that comes from, sans google (or any other search engine).
Is it The Women’s Room? I know you were talking about that one last week. I still have to track down a copy.
Funny you should use this example – I went grocery shopping on the weekend while the 6yo played outside while Dad built the pergola, and the 3yo had a sleep. (Should I count that as leisure time since I had a lovely uninterrupted grocery shopping experience?) When I got home the 6yo had just been sent inside to check on the 3yo by Dad, who hadn’t been inside at all since I had left.
No – not The Women’s Room.
Leisure? In the aisles?
Shopping for anything but discretionary purchases is by definition a chore. The supermarket is a tedious chore. The supermarket with other people is an aggravatingly tedious chore. The supermarket with other people and their children is a special brand of Hell, and I can think of no better visual/aural contraceptive than pushing a trolley through Bi-lo on a weekday after school.
Can I have another go Deborah and guess “The Slap”?
As many guesses as you like, Mindy! It’s not The Slap either.
Let me know when you want a hint…
Hmm…
Dunno, but I’ve just finished The Dispossessed and it reads very like La Ursula.
I don’t recognise it and I’m resisting Googling it but it sounds non-Australian and set in a non-contemporary period but written post-feminism, by a woman, very well, so I’m guessing Margaret Atwood. Couldn’t say which one, though.
Unless it’s the new A.S. Byatt?
Despisis, that was a particularly cloth-eared and obtuse refusal to understand what the whole NiceGuy™ dynamic is all about.
No, doing more than your share of work and getting resentful about it may not automatically mean that the work in question is not required. Real-life example: If my partner finishes the dishes in record time and I start putting the stuff away and I discover food smears and lumps on practically every utensil and piece of cutlery, I then have to decide whether to harsh the household mellow by demanding he fix the problem or harsh my own mellow by doing it myself. But I think you would hardly be silent and uncomplaining if you ate somewhere where the utensils were all crusted with the last meal’s food. And there is a health and safety element there.
But the NiceGuy™ dymamic is a totally different area and you are simply trying to be too cute by comparing the two.
FDB is getting close. It is indeed Ursula Le Guin, but not The Dispossessed (which is in any case told from the p.o.v. of Shevek (a man).
Liam @ 316 – in the survey its not defined as supermarket shopping though, its just a general category of “purchasing activities”. And interestingly women living alone or in group houses spend a couple of more hours per week on this than men in the same situation.
I really hate supermarket shopping when its busy (when I was able to I used to do it at 10pm at night when its really empty) and really wish we had home delivery here. But for most of our food purchasing we go to the markets weekly and its more a family outing than a chore.
Many of these categories can be either a chore or have a recreational component merely depending on people’s individual circumstances which they allude to in the report (eg walking the dog – chore if you hate doing it, recreation for others who really enjoy it). Even some of the “looking after children” time could be classified as leisure time for parents who aren’t able to spend as much time with their children as they would like to.
“I’ve been a feminist all my adult life so I know perfectly well what the arguments are, and the conclusion I came to over twenty years ago was that the nuclear family as we know it and true gender equality in daily life are mutually exclusive.”
And that’s about the nub of it. Not only are people working longer hours, but parenting standards seem to have risen as well. As has been pointed Auskick takes over from playing kick to kick on the streets and parents have to start behaving like servants to their kids. As for the fairy cakes issue – I have a friend who deals with this sort of stuff by saying, ‘I’m not that sort of Mum. Deal with it’.
This reminds of a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago on a hot summer night over a couple of glasses of wine. We were talking about motherhood and she said, ‘Sometimes I wonder if I would have been happier without my kids. And I’ve come to the conclusion as much as I love them, I would have been’ I think this a thought that runs through many womens’ minds, but it’s a shocking thing to say in public.
I know many people about whom I think this would be true. I don’t know if many people have a clear idea what they are getting themselves into by having children.
There is a cultural belief that having children is a duty that brings its own rewards. It should no longer be viewed as a duty. We are over-populated and to have children now should be viewed more as a privilege. As for the rewards it depends very much on how you manage to cope with the downside.
Parenting is a role that is pretty much non-negotiable in most of its facets.
You have to go with it completely – and let everything else come second. Unless you’re one of those rare people who can do everything all at once and don’t need time and space for solitary recuperation.
Deborah,
As Chris points out @323 that it is all shopping and not just the groceries. A quick Google search shows only about a third of that time will be for the weekly groceries.
I’m not saying it doesn’t, but such things covered by allocations separate from the “minding child” option. Such as “physical and emotional care of children” and “teaching/helping/reprimanding children”.
I heard a bloke on radio the other day. I forget what his spiel was about, just the example he used.
He said the women had a choice of three – a successful marriage, kids, a career. He said they could choose any two out of the three, all three was impossible.
Exceptions were allowed, but that, he contended, was the general rule.
One wonderful benefit of the GFC is that good help is so much easier to find.
Helen,
If you’ve agreed on a particular standard then it shouldn’t harsh the mellow by pointing out that something was done substandard. If you haven’t agreed on a standard then perhaps you should try communication rather than resentment.
If you cannot agree on a standard then why does it bother you so much that you are responsible for doing things that are for your own satisfaction?
I’d probably just get up and clean them myself.
If your argument is that there is a subset of men that match the stereotype and still expect women to be in charge of running the household I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m arguing that from a national perspective that it’s not generally the case and that national policy, such as parental leave, should be based on the national perspective not cultural stereotypes.
Re: leisure hours contained within shopping. I’m with Debord on this one:
Look, as much as childless person can in the abstract, I like children. I can see the attraction of babies and I’m in awe of the effort my friends who are parents put into parenting. I can see that combining chores (like shopping) with childcare can turn a banal, tedious activity into valuable parent-child contact hours snatched from the office. I’m glad, Chris, that your kids enjoy the trip to the markets.
I can’t see though that in a discussion about parental leave that those activities inseparable from modern industrial life (like supermarket shopping) the rest of us childless people see as a chore should be turned fundamentally into something it is not, just through the addition of children. Neither does the enjoyment of a necessary household activity make it a non-chore: I don’t mind doing the dishes, but I wouldn’t dirty up plates just so I could wash them.
This issue is a bit tired. About a generation passed its use-by date. The elephant in the room here is that women work substantially fewer hours than men outside the home, so women picking up the slack inside the home is no big deal. Besides, as noted above, most two income families have a maid of some sort.
Greenslime
Jezza! Greenslime spill in aisle no 3! Jezza to aisle no. 3…
Yes, it’s so pitifully obvious you wonder why he bothers.
Brian @ 328:
Historically women have chosen the marriage and the kids whilst the father has by default chosen the marriage and career. They might biologically be the father, but so many have missed out on so much of their children’s lives. I think many more father’s are aware of the trade offs these days.
Liam @ 331 – I agree with what you say. Although on the flip side I think for many people there are aspects of their work day which they really enjoy, some would even do it for free. I have enough programmer friends who will take holiday leave to well, program on things very similar to what they get paid to do anyway. Maybe they’re just the lucky ones
Undoubtedly in general women do most of the housework and I think there is a fairly common belief that either they work harder than their partners (when including paid work) or that they don’t get the recognition they deserve. The former doesn’t appear to be really true according to the statistics, but then we get into a debate around their validity and detail around primary/secondary tasks. I don’t think I really understand the latter well. Lack of recognition from family I understand may be common, though there’s not much the government can do about that. What form external recognition is desired is not so clear to me.
Greenslime? Damn great tsunami of it.
wbb @ 326, on the radio once I heard about a survey of British women, wherein 20% of women were found to not want kids at all, 20% actively wanted them and really didn’t want to do anything else, which left 60% mixed up in the middle.
My wife because of specific circumstances taught a lot of kids of “good Catholic mums” in a government preschool where the kids then went on to Catholic primary schools. Apparently most were good Catholics and very good mums, seeing this role as something of a vocation.
I’d tend to think that having kids is best left to those who are really keen and committed, so I think I’m agreeing with your sentiments. Also agree that people often don’t have any realistic idea of what they are getting into.
“Historically women have chosen the marriage and the kids whilst the father has by default chosen the marriage and career.”
While I’d agree that men who work long hours don’t get to spend as much time with theier kids, this statement is just so chock-full of male privilege, I don’t think you could physically fit any more in there. Men, by default, get all three, because their wife does the emotional housework and the actual, physical housework, leaving their husband free to focus on career, enjoy playtime with the kids, and not have to think about ironing shirts to take away with them or what time the kids need to be at school tomorrow for orchestra practice, etc etc etc etc etc.
Rebekka,
I think you’re trivialising the significant difference in the relationship a primary carer has with their kids and the relationship a breadwinner has with their kids. By similar logic you could point at the jobs a woman has before and after she is focused on the kids as a career and claim that women get all three as well.
Huge assumptions there Rebekka about how households work. Is it that easy to separate ‘work’ time with children and ‘play’ time with children? Where’s that big, black line drawn? Could it be that all the extra time mothers spend with kids doing all the work, actually hugely benefits their relationship with their kids through bonding?
One of the arguments feminists strongly used in the’70s was that the nuclear family was also a negative for many men because it meant they spent so little time with their kids.
I think the important word in Brian’s comment is ‘default’. By that, I take it he means that the way our society is organised family/work choices will work out in this stereotypical way, unless actively worked against. I see nothing objectionable in stating that. I don’t think there’s enough hours in the day for someone to focus on work, relationhips and family to an equal degree. Something always have to give. The problem is, is that it’s usually women who end up having to focus less on work.
is that it’s usually women who end up having to focus less on work.
Who end up having to focus less on paid work, the sort of work that gets recognised and rewarded by our societies, and instead they end of doing unpaid work that is not recognised, and indeed is trivialised by our societies.
Yes, I agree with that. What I’m arguing against is Rebekka’s statement that men get ‘all three’.
This is getting a bit muddled. Fine, I think it was Chris who used the word “default”. I wouldn’t have intentionally.
I quoted what I heard on the radio, without committing to it myself, but I’m inclined to think that having all three is beyond many or even most who belong to the professions, with the possible exception of those who like dentists can make lots of gooley while limiting access to their services.
I think Rebekka @ 339 was a bit naughty in quoting one sentence of three in Chris’s paragraph @ 336:
Please note the first word “historically”. As a statement of what was rather than what is or should be it represents the experience of many, I think. I’m not willing to make generalisations about what is, or indeed what should be. In my own experience we once did a staff survey of the professional staff over a six month period. Muggins me as the boss came out at 82 hours per week, thus setting a shocking example. The lowest score was 45 hours pw, in a public service situation where the requirement was 36.25. No-one got any overtime.
I settled back to about 60 hpw for the long haul, definitely privileged work over family and marriage, and in my own estimation came up short on all three.
The admin staff, however, worked the required hours to the minute unless they were paid overtime and generally had more satisfying and balanced lives IMO.
I’m glad you said that Brian (your last sentence). The valorisation of long working hours at any cost is one of the less loveable features of our social setup.
I heard the same bloke on the radio and like everyone else, who he was escapes me, but I agree with Rebekka that he was a fairly privileged individual. It is annoying to people like R and I who like to think about these things, to hear this stuff tossed off as Holy Writ, or an Immutable Natural Law. What he actually means is “women can usually only have one of these three while working life continues to be constituted pretty much as it is and there is no change.” See the difference? Now, why would he ignore such an important qualification? To be fair, for one, you can’t always address every qualification without being too verbose. But on the other hand, qui bono? Hmmm. I think he and his kind bono, very much.
Oops, yes. I quoted you, not Chris. My muddle.
Sorry, two of the three, I should have said, not one.
Rebekkah @ 339
Wow. Men may get the standard society’s expectation of what a father should get out of fatherhood, but he certainly traditionally doesn’t get all 3. Perhaps its because I work from home that I see much more clearly what fathers commonly miss out on. I see what I miss out on.
Fine makes a very good point about bonding. As much as people like to talk about “quality time”, really good bonding often requires just wads of time, not just small chunks of time during the week when you get home from work and weekends. To paraphrase a friend of mine about her father who worked fulltime while her mother was the stay at home mum: “he’s always wanting to spending time with me now that
he’s not working so much – well he should have made time when I was living at home!”.
Having to stay at home when your baby or child is sick can be really tiring and disruptive to your work and leisure time. But comforting and bonding with your sick child by holding her in your arms while she sleeps is something you have to experience to know what you will miss out on if you’re at work all day.
The privilege doesn’t all sit with one side.
Deborah @ 342 – no argument from me that men have a much lower bar to get over when it comes to fulfilling what society’s expectations of what fatherhood is compared to what motherhood is.
Helen @ 345, yes I do see the difference. Thanks. We have options but changing social norms is hard work. I haven’t had my head right into this issue, given the space left by my well-known obsession with matters re climate, but I’ve been aware that NZ have had work/life balance on the political agenda. This may have been mentioned up-thread. I haven’t read it all.
I’ll just throw in here that 10 years ago I read an interesting book by Zygmunt Bauman entitled Work, consumerism and the new poor.
“Work” and “poor” are of course, socially constructed concepts with ideological content. I recall him saying that at the beginning of the industrial revolution in Britain work was made into an intrinsic virtue and more was better. The virtues of work were preached from the pulpit. The concept that you might work to provide basic needs only had to be destroyed.
At the same time we had to have the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, who were excluded and punished.
Chapter one is the relevant chapter here, but here’s Chapter four.
Deborah,
I’m still trying to work out what kind of recognition workers get that stay at home parents don’t get but should be entitled to.
Can you provide an example of how society trivialises parenthood?
I’m tempted to enter into this conversation as (as far as I can tell) the only lesbian about in a relationship where I am the breadwinner and my partner the ‘housewife’, but a) not sure I can be arsed and b) not sure it’s really that instructive anyway.
but I do know a quote from Ursula Le Guin’s Tehanu when I read it, being a major admirer of her work.
nice choice Deborah, particularly as Le Guin returned to the Earthsea cycle to in part redress the fact that in the first three books there was little in the way of female characters expressing their views (even though I would argue all the books are fundamentally feminist in their philosophy).
I’ll be right around with my virtual vacuum cleaner, myriad, to do that spot of housecleaning I promised to whoever could identify it.
Thank you Myriad, now I know what to look for at the library.
The Earthsea books are wonderful Mindy, enjoy.
Deborah, let me introduce you to our large dog, her 20kg mayhem of a puppy and my house bunny…..
Can I get a virtual pillow-fluffing or something for picking the author?
No
What Casey said. It’s all or nothing around here.
[whispering]
Though I was impressed by the way you picked her style, FDB.
[/whispering]
That’s an important part of the puzzle. It’s the only good thing about Ronald Reagan – he didn’t set a bad example by working too many hours.
People like Rudd or Obama, for example, should be conscious of trying to break down the expectation that job commitment comes b4 all else.
Bosses should chide their workers when they stay past time – telling them they should run off home to their family. Instead there are subtle signals put out that 37.5HH is indicative only. That a real worker should expect to put in more than that. (Certainly goes like that where I work anyway.)
“People like Rudd or Obama, for example, should be conscious of trying to break down the expectation that job commitment comes b4 all else.”
Dunno know about that in their case. There are some jobs which need to come first.
Yes but Rudd is known for his long hours. I’m not a fan of Ratty, and I don’t like a lot of the things he did in his ten years, but you can’t say that the country fell apart because he didn’t work as long hours as Rudd does.
But then again Mindy, he didn’t do a hell of a lot either. Rudd etal are now doing the o/t, cleaning up the mess.
Fine @ 362 – there was a documentary a while back that mentioned that all the PMs we’ve had have worked really long hours (even Howard) – its the kind of job that really does need it. But in terms of his expectations of the public servants that work directly and indirectly for him its public knowledge that he expects them to work pretty insane hours as well, and thats where he is setting a really bad example as a boss. In opposition he would have been telling private sector bosses to just hire more people if they needed more work done.
One would hope that at that level people would have learned the art of delegation.
I dunno about that either. I have a family member who’s a senior public servant in Canberra. He reckons it’s a beat up. He says that the hours for the senior ones have become slightly longer but that in his experience, it hasn’t increased at all for junior ones. He thinks the problem is that Rudd demands much more rigorously thought through advice than some are used to offering and that’s causing some resentment. Others are enjoying the challenge. Anyway, that’s one person’s opinion.
One elephant in the room which tends to get missed here is the lengthening human life span. We’ve just seen the increase in the pensionable age due to that. At the same time, family sizes are continuing pretty small. Some of people want more than two kids but not that many. So the idea that a woman should have to choose between “a career” and “motherhood” is just a furphy these days, given that a woman has so much life before and after childbearing, even if she has someone to support her financially it’s a bit much to expect somwone to make a career out of one or two sprogs. So really the “working mum” is ending up as “most people” and the idea of a dichotomy is fairly meaningless.
On the “ideal employee”, I’ve written elsewhere about the fact that as more men take on an increased role in parenting, it will be harder for employers to discriminate against this or that potential employee on the basis of their perceived status as carer. This will be win-win for men as well. I see this happening in my workplace where there are a lot of Gen-X dads.
Fine @ 365 – I think it depends on which department you’re in. I know people (very junior) who have been hinted at pretty hard not to work so hard because they’re making others look bad but then other people in other departments (not juniors but not very senior) who do work very long hours. The pay and conditions are pretty good though, especially the retirement plans.
Fine #365:
Which, if true, would be consistent with Rudd’s unwillingness to suffer fools and poorly prepared Cabinet submissions gladly in his role as head of the Office of Cabinet in the Queensland government in 1989-95.
It probably is true, but I have also heard that he demands briefings to be ready when he gets up, which is apparently at 5am most mornings. Which is asking a lot of people who then have to put in a normal day at the office (up to 6.30-7pm for most senior managers if not later).
Mindy @ 369 – And whilst 5am or 6am may be fine for him, its not the kind of hours that fit in well with a family friendly workplace. Not everyone can afford a nanny and if you’re out of the house between 6am and 7pm just when do you get to see your kids while they’re awake? I’ve no problems with people working those long hours if they want to, just don’t expect others to do it on a regular basis.
My thinking exactly Chris.
There’s truth to both sides of the stories about Rudd et al.’s demands on the PS.
Yes they have (HALLELUJAH!) largely restored evidence-based policy advice and decision making for the most part. The overall quality of ministers is much higher too (but don’t get me started on garrett – I reckon he’s bald like a buouy to mark the place he waits for rescue because he’s drowning, not waving).
However there are, particularly from the PM’s office, regular and ridiculous demands for fairly complicated information yesterday; or for information that anyone with half a noodle would realise can’t be assembled without a decent amount of time (some things just take time), and asking for it quickly just means poorer answers.
My fear with the latter in terms of my own Dept. is we become a victims of our own success – we put in herculean efforts to meet sometimes quite unrealistic requests, pull it off at a great deal of cost, but of course then contribute to the fiction that this is acceptable.
at least the evidence-based bit is back tho’.
“but don’t get me started on garrett – I reckon he’s bald like a buouy to mark the place he waits for rescue because he’s drowning, not waving).”
Best insult evah. Applause.