Vikki Campion: ‘Modern mums need properly-funded childcare’
Stay-at-home mums are often sacrificing their own career to raise another — but it is not an option everybody has or wants. So modern mums need properly-funded childcare, Vikki Campion writes.
Opinion
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In Victorian times, many women trying to work turned to laudanum, an opiate advertised as “the poor child’s nurse” to control their children.
Now, we have iPads and Paw Patrol on demand.
Universal access to early learning is seen by the “don’t breed them if you can’t feed them” mob as a taxpayer-fleecing scam for lazy mothers who can’t be bothered raising their own children and funding it criticised by fiscal conservatives as middle class welfare, their least-favourite kind.
But our economy relies on every adult who can work to work.
In a world where the taxpayer will make more out of a woman who works than you will lose subsidising early learning there has to be a wider logic in this.
First — you accept someone not being paid to teach young children — if we said to the men who vote against this “your missus is at home with the kids – you have to pay her $240 a day”, he may change his mind.
The government just voted to pay $18bn to fund universities this year, another $2m to send 180 students overseas on exchange, and $8.3bn in subsidies to help young children into their first foray in education away from their families.
In the first five years, the human does the most growing and learning ever in their lives. It is critical for children to have resources as those neural pathways form — surely that is more important than sending some habitual student in a mid-life crisis off to get another degree they will never pay back?
The parent of any school-aged kid is getting subsidised education, so what we are really arguing about is the age it kicks in.
Toddlers who benefit from early education can’t protest in the street, or wine and dine MPs or vote. There’s no national union of students for the under-fours.
Labor’s latest $6.2bn childcare funding package — adopted from former leader Bill Shorten’s model — is not lavish, especially considering resulting GDP growth of $4bn, and paid by parents through their taxes.
It shortens the pay gap and will slash pension costs because mothers can retire on their own super.
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Labor women this week offered greater relevance to parliament, with the alternate dominate theme motherhood statements on a recycling bill that everyone agreed upon – and an unsuccessful motion by South Australia’s nuttiest ALP mung bean Mark Butler to stop North Queensland getting the technology that Japan already has, clean coal.
We must stop disincentivising the women who want to work. The argument should focus on early education and, if required, savings from other heavily-subsidised lives Australian adults lead.
Educators have certificates, diplomas and degrees specialising in teaching, yet they are reduced to “childcare workers” in both Coalition and Labor press releases — equivalent to calling a psychologist a “counsellor” or a senior minister, a “government clerk”.
Early educators not only provide insight into development milestones — such as speech, co-ordination and learning — but can help correct impediments before they become lifelong burdens.
When early childhood educators have their own babies, they often can’t afford to return to work because their own pay does not cover the cost.
Mums in regional areas often either miss out on paid work, such as seasonal fruit picking, because they can’t get a spot or take their children to work with them. Mums everywhere say no to an extra day of work because the subsidy cuts off and you are working for no take-home pay.
Stay-at-home mums are investing in all-important emotional capital, they’re sacrificing their own career to raise another — but it is not an option everybody has or wants.
Given the vital nature of early childhood education, if it comes to a choice between giving useless degrees to mature-age kidults, the money should go to the young.