Feminists for shame! Why we should all support paid parental leave

OPINION: Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This is why you should support paid parental leave, even if you don’t like Tony Abbott.

TALK about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The debate over Tony Abbott’s proposed paid parental leave scheme has taken on a decisively nasty, divisive and highly retrograde tone.

Rather than a debate about what is affordable in the current budget environment, it has turned into an attack on the very idea of paid parental leave — a concept which all Australians should inherently support.

As both a woman, and an economist, it has been particularly distressing to watch as an unholy alliance has formed to tear down Abbott’s proposal to pay working women (or men if they are the primary care giver) a full replacement wage for six months to care for their newborns.

High profile feminists — who just can’t seem to get over their hatred at the father of the proposed scheme and focus on the merits itself — have teamed up with unreformed dinosaurs within the Coalition and political opportunists in the Labor Party to undermine what should be a key social policy debate in Australia.

Labor’s position is particularly galling, it being the party that only recently secured the very hard fought reform of Australia’s first ever national paid parental leave scheme in 2011 (ending an embarrassing situation where we were the only developed country without one.

Today it’s almost as if we’re back where we started, asking: why are we paying women to stay at home at all??

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So let me clarify: we pay parental leave to (mostly) women because otherwise they would bear an unfair financial penalty for their possession of a uterus. The penalty is clear: Women earn less than men, have less saved in super and are vastly under-represented in the upper echelons of decision making in this country, in business and politics.

If we don’t pay for the valuable contribution that mothers make, we undervalue it. Prices send signals. If we don’t pay women for this vital work, we undervalue them and the contribution they make. It is unfair to make women as individuals bear the financial penalty for performing an act that without which there would literally be no economy.

Every Australian owes a debt of gratitude to the woman who bore then and the care giver that looked after them in their early years.

For too long this has been women. Hopefully it will change and more men will take up the role of primary caregiver. This will happen naturally as more women become financial breadwinners — as they already are in one in four households.

Many reasons ... to support paid parental leave no matter what side of politics you’re on. Picture: Thinkstock

Paid parental leave recognises that raising children is a valuable type of work, whether performed by a man or a women, and deserves recognition.

The Productivity Commission was crystal clear in its 2009 review of Labor’s proposed scheme. Such a scheme would: “Provide a strong signal that taking time out of the paid workforce to care for a child is viewed by the wider community as part of the usual course of life and work for parents, rather than a nuisance. A scheme that intends to signal this should be structured like other leave arrangements, such as those for recreation, illness and long service leave, rather than being structured as a social welfare measure.”

A welfare entitlement? No. A workplace entitlement? Yes.

Of course, a great way to force women back to work is to pay them nothing, hobbling them financially so they can’t afford to stay at home. But decades of research show this isn’t a good outcome for maternal or child health.

The Commission found six months of leave was in line with international evidence on the best length for breast feeding. Abbott’s scheme would fill this gap.

Given budgetary constraints, the Commission ended up backing Labor’s proposal to pay parents 18 weeks at the minimum wage.

But clearly this is still considered insufficient by employers who have largely opted to retain their own top up schemes — paid at a woman’s wage.

The true merit of Abbott’s more generous scheme is that it would replace this patchwork of overlapping schemes.

Still pushing for the scheme ... PM Tony Abbott in Question Time in the House of Representatives. Picture: Kym Smith

Parental leave would be taken off the books of individual businesses, thereby removing the incentive any line manager may have to discriminate against hiring a woman. Only big business would pay the 1.5 per cent company tax levy to partially fund the scheme, while the rest of the cost would be largely covered by rolling in the existing national leave scheme and state based schemes for public servants.

Employers who employ a lot of senior women could even find they pay less under the scheme, while employers with a poor track record employing women could indeed end up paying more.

I’m happy with that.

It is often said that women can be their own worst enemies and the paid parental leave issue has proved particularly so, unleashing a type of class warfare among high and low income women.

Forget for a moment that these high income women who would benefit under the scheme are exactly the sort of role models we should be celebrating. These are the women who are climbing the greasy pole and amassing the power to actually change workplaces to improve conditions for all women.

In some ways, I hope the cost of this scheme blows out — as that would be a sign that more women are climbing up the income scale and revolutionising our workplaces.

So by all means, let’s debate whether a beefed up parental leave scheme is affordable given the current budget situation. And yes, let’s talk about what else needs to be done to help families balance work and family responsibilities, like improving childcare.

But let’s not, in the process, trash the very idea of paid parental leave. To do so would be to roll back the clock on one of the most important social reform of the past decade.

Originally published as Feminists for shame! Why we should all support paid parental leave