Vikki Campion: Paying mum to stay at home better than cheaper childcare

If taxpayers can afford $675 a week for a childcare centre to raise our kids, we can afford $500 a week for new mums to stay home with their babies now, writes Vikki Campion.

Sometimes an epiphany comes like a brick to the head. Unwelcome and painful as your previous resolute opinion burns down around you like the fantasy you once called home: We are asking women to birth babies that the taxpayer pays a corporation to raise.

On these pages past, I begged for cheaper childcare, believing even as mothers, women had to compete with men, blaming a lack of child care for not returning to work fast enough, believing young children had to be socialised.

I packed up my family for 18-hour return drives to Canberra 20 weeks a year, so I could rejoin the workforce and socialise my children.

After paying for childcare, I’d be left with just enough for a tank of fuel. I took on additional jobs from home when my children slept, and the more I earned, the more I spent on child care.

When I stopped, the bile of financial vulnerability rose with the bills.

‘For the best outcome for a child, they should be nurtured by the mother until the age of three, but that comes at a cost.’

Under the Albanese government’s $17bn childcare policy, pinned as the jewel to return the PM to the Lodge, we will be paying childcare centres $135 per child per day, with the narrative that mothers can take home more of what they earn.

This week, I spoke to Erica Komisar, a child psychologist who doesn’t write opinions but facts, and the truth is childcare damages children under three. She lists peer-reviewed papers for me to read and the bricks come hard and fast.

Smack. Kids in childcare have worse mental health, now and as adults.

Smack. Socialisation is a myth.

Until eight months, babies think they’re an extension of the mother. After that, it’s an adventure but only in sight of the mother.

Their brain wiring is not set to independence to be removed from their mother without detrimental pressure on their ability to cope with stress.

Smack. Biting in babies is the fight response. ADHD is the flight response.

Labor’s cheaper childcare policy I previously thought would benefit children and their mother’s financial futures, does neither. Picture: iStock

Instead of recognising these as symptoms of a stressful environment, society says drug it out of them as they get older, give them stimulants, a prognosis for what is not their problem, but ours.

Labor’s cheaper childcare policy I previously thought would benefit children and their mother’s financial futures, does neither.

We simultaneously slam women for having kids they can’t afford while making it harder to afford them at all.

If our childcare policy works so well, why must we import people from countries that don’t have childcare to combat our low birth rate?

We shame mothers for not contributing to the economy rather than celebrate their sacrifice of staying at home with babies. Domestic care work is unvalued.

As they struggle with the demands of bosses and small children, we tell mothers how empowered they are to return to work, even as they compete with counterparts unrestrained by sick children or centre opening hours or the reality of motherhood.

We don’t recognise the psychological nurturing between mother and child, and save money, If we gave mums $500 a week to raise their own children

That’s how we end up with a society happy for taxpayers to pay $135 a day to hand an infant the size of a loaf of bread to a government-regulated institution but won’t consider even $100 a day to help mothers stay home with children, a move which would save the taxpayer about $175 a week, comparatively.

We don’t recognise the psychological nurturing between mother and child for the first 1000 days, unnoticed at the time and undeniable in their adult lives.

If we gave mums $500 a week to raise their own children instead of giving childcare companies $675 a week per child, we would be immediately saving money, and our fertility rate would go up.

The conversation is the same between mums at the playground, the kindergarten, and the swimming lesson.

Do you want to go again? Yes, but we can’t afford to take another year off.

We’ve made housing prices so high through a quagmire of arbitrary planning laws and soaring immigration to take the place of the babies Australians do not have because they cannot afford their housing.

To have future pensions and hospitals, Australia desperately needs more children.

Each school is a hive of future taxpayers whose future taxes we have already spent, with a current net debt of more than $13,000 for every man, woman and child.

The facts have been presented to me that for the best outcome for a child, they should be nurtured by the mother until the age of three, but that comes at a cost.

To respect this economic sacrifice, you must create an environment where a woman can nurture their own child for the first three years of life, which includes keeping a place for her in the workplace when she returns.

The only way Australia can fix its fertility is by correcting the financial bear traps placed on our path.

If taxpayers can afford $675 a week for a childcare centre to raise our kids, and the uncosted Medicare and NDIS toll for issues later in their life, we can afford $500 a week for new mums to stay home with their babies now.

ROYAL TOURISTS SERVED UP A CONFECTED COCKTAIL OF GREEN DREAM

Don’t listen to what they say. Look at what they do.

As the King praised Labor’s disastrous energy policy, he was put in a 12-car convoy to take the PM’s favourite private jet to an island supposedly going under a rising sea.

If the Prime Minister, the Governor-General and the High Commissioner were truly concerned the Pacific was swallowing tiny islands from global warming caused by carbon emissions, why did they choose the highest emitting option, the biggest private plane in Australia’s personal VIP fleet, to get the King and Queen there?

In a constitutional monarchy, the King and Queen will never do anything contrary to the Prime Minister’s recommendation.

Official channels for itinerary planning are via the recommendation of the PM to the Governor-General and the High Commissioner.

King Charles III gestures before boarding a plane at Sydney Airport in Sydney on Saturday after a six-day royal visit to Sydney and Canberra. Picture: Bianca De Marchi/Pool/AFP

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, High Commissioner Stephen Smith and Governor-General Sam Mostyn planned an itinerary that kept the monarchs in the chauffeured embrace of certified kings and queens of climate change histrionics, such as Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.

Here’s a bike path, an apartment, a wind tunnel. Here’s your sterile, cement version of Australia.

Funnel the monarchs to Rolex handshakes with wind and solar grifters in taxpayer-funded airconditioning and spin a dream of “green” power. Imagine how different the discourse would have been had the King and Queen been whisked from the blighted urban heat sink to walk mountain tops of breathtaking Gondwana forests set to be bulldozed for swimming pools of concrete and monoliths taller than Sydney Tower?

Here’s land being stolen by ‘Energy Co.’ to give to private companies to build 500 kilovolt transmission lines. Here’s our soaring power bills.

King Charles and Queen Camilla came in Friday night and left on Wednesday, unrestrained by commercial flight times, with ample ability to take the VIP to the regions, had they been allowed, to see themselves how covering country with Chinese glass panels had degraded neighbouring prime pasture to camel melons, cat heads, Bathurst burrs and Patterson’s curse.

See how easily the dream is swallowed and regurgitated when it is plated up on the royal itinerary.

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