Full-time mums not bludgers

SOCIAL policy writers are not generally celebrated for their sense of humour.

So when I opened Sydney's The Daily Telegraph last week to be confronted by the headline "Treasury to get tough on bludging soccer mums", I wondered from what parallel comic universe this masterpiece of irony had sprung. Having spent the past eight weeks toing and froing from hospital with my 14-year-old, I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

The headline accompanied a report on Treasury secretary Ken Henry's latest foray into political commentary, also known as leaking from his own department, in a recent speech to the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. Among other ideas, the speech questioned whether middle-class parents should receive family tax benefits while their children are at school, and whether mothers wouldn't be better off and more productive in the paid workforce. Henry bolstered his arguments with a mysterious document that sounds like a lift-out from the Sunday tabloids called the "wellbeing index".

Unfortunately there is a simplistic notion, aimed at single mothers and introduced by the previous government, fed by the commentariat and now supported by the Rudd government. This notion is that your children may need you when they are infants but as soon as children are aged about six, mothers should get into the productive workforce and outsource their child's care.

Paying government benefits to families when the mother stays home discourages this because -- as is known by most part-time working mothers, that is, the majority of working mothers -- being in the paid workforce isn't worth the extra money unless it is a lot of extra money.

The interaction between paying income tax and losing benefits means that for women who work in low-paid jobs for a few hours, paid work isn't worth doing. Henry's solution? Stop paying benefits.

Get those bludgers out to work. That is the explicit and insulting misconception about full-time mums who receive so-called middle-class welfare, and it comes thick and fast from full-time working mothers who resent other mothers who don't "pay their way". Simultaneously, these mothers in full-time paid work may bemoan the lack of mothers at the tuck shop volunteering to pack their children's lunches.

Henry admits that a quantitative value cannot be put on this kind of volunteer work. But what is odd is that amid all the clamour about taxpayers forking out for middle-class welfare, mothers in the full-time paid workforce who need childcare do not think of themselves as recipients of middle-class welfare, despite the availability of subsidies for parents who outsource childcare. Nor do they seem to think that those subsidies may put an unfair tax burden on the middle-class family where the mother stays at home or works very limited hours. That is a situation that is going to become even more lopsided.

Some new research on the forward estimates 2011-12 for Nationals senator Ron Boswell by Richard Egan, national policy officer for FamilyVoice Australia, shows that if one looks at subsidies directed solely to formal childcare, as opposed to subsidies available to parents who do their own childcare, the taxpayer will be paying nearly double for outsourcing childcare.

This research looks at two periods of childcare. In the first post-birth period it counts the parental leave component as an incentive to outsource childcare. So averaging net paid parental leave per family at $7342 compared with the baby bonus of $5000 per family means nearly 1 1/2 times as much will be spent on families with working mothers to facilitate their return to the workforce, than on families with stay-at-home mums. That is assuming that the baby bonus stays. Many government advisers are ideologically committed to abolishing it.

What about when children are a bit older? What if one adds up all the subsidies paid for childcare, including costs such as the childcare benefit, the childcare tax rebate, childcare services support, the jobs, education and training childcare fee assistance, and universal access, accreditation and quality assurance? Then subsidies for childcare average $6041 compared with $3112 for family tax benefitB, the only benefit directed solely at parental care. That means nearly twice as much will be spent on families using non-parental, mainly institutional care than on families with stay-at-home mums or dads.

That is also based on the assumption that the present family tax benefit B is still in place. This picture will become even more lopsided when children go to school if, as Henry suggests, all family tax benefits areabolished.

Australia already has one of the most individualist tax systems in the world and it penalises the middle-class family. Families on a limited income have to shoulder a grossly unfair share of the tax burden. Family tax benefits were not envisaged as welfare. They replaced income-tax deductions as compensation for bearing the burden of multiple dependants. Henry's solution will leave most families with no compensation for taxation at all, at a time when children are most expensive. It will effectively mean large families where the mother cannot work will subsidise smaller, richer families where both parents work. It will force mothers who have no preference for full-time work into that situation. It may also have the effect of lowering the birthrate.

All the research of the past 10 years on women's preferences has shown that women do not want to do paid work until they think their children are ready. They resent being coerced into the full-time workforce and treated as economic units.

The decision to work is not solely an economic decision, and sometimes paid work just isn't worth it. Such as when you come home and your 14-year-old isn't there. I wonder how Henry's wellbeing index rates that one?