Paid Maternity Leave Plan No Golden Fleece
This article appeared in the West Australian, 19 March 2007.
Another International Women's Day has gone by, another chance for Government critics to whine about our lack of maternity leave. The newspapers were full of it, complaining yet again that Australia is the only OECD country other than the US without paid maternity leave.
But hang on a moment. Since 1993 employed women in Australia have had a legal right to take a year's unpaid maternity leave. And they do get paid. In 2004, the Government introduced the maternity payment which by next year will reach $5000 per child. Yet this maternity payment hardly rates a mention in the endless public bitching about paid maternity leave. It's the weirdest thing.
The emperor is fully clothed. But it's the pundits - the media, the feminist academics - who are determined to try to prove the emperor is naked. There's good reason the Government choose to reject Pru Goward's maternity leave proposal and introduce a maternity payment.So good, in fact, that Mark Latham stole the policy and introduced it as his own in the lead-up to the 2004 election.
The problem was less than half of all women having babies would have benefited. Democrat costings for a Stott Despoja Bill based on the proposal showed mothers would be eligible for the paid leave for just over 100,000 of the annual 250,000 births. Women must work for one employer for a full year in order to qualify and that means most women would miss out.
The Australian Institute of Family Study's longitudinal study of Australian children is showing over a quarter of women giving birth have spent the previous year at home looking after other children and only half of working women have had the same employer for 12 months.So all the bitching is about a deal which wouldn't help most mums.
What the Government did instead was introduce a maternity payment which goes to every woman giving birth.This will cost the Government over a billion this year, more than twice that required for the Goward proposal. By next year the payment will be $5000 per child, a thousand short of Goward payments but in a similar ball park.
So why doesn't the current set-up meet the approval of the pundits?Well, no one actually spells that out. Last week HREOC released its It's Time report, once again demanding a paid maternity leave scheme, dismissing the billion dollars the Government is currently spending as failing "to meet all the aims of a national paid maternity scheme".
But what are these lofty aims? According to Anne Summers, the current policy doesn't "cut the mustard as paid maternity leave" because it is not "predicted on ongoing attachment to the labour force" and the payments are "not tied to a woman's previous earnings".The assumption seems to be that we have to do what Europe does, namely link the amount women receive to prior earnings.Yet most of the European countries which have generous paid maternity leave schemes use social insurance where everyone in the workforce pays a levy for this type of service. And only those who pay receive. Social insurance schemes have their own problems, including employment disincentives and barriers to part-time employment which are leading some countries to move away from this approach.The system is totally different from Australia's current tax and welfare set-up.
With Sweden having decided to move beyond earnings-based paid maternity leave to add a new child-care allowance for parents caring for their own children, Australia's policy of supporting all mums is looking cutting-edge rather than behind the times.And paid leave doesn't necessarily help women retain their links to the workplace.In some industries this applies but the AIFS child-care survey shows very little difference overall in return rates of women with paid or unpaid leave.
Sure more needs to be done to remove barriers to workplace re-entry, including flexible hours and more supportive tax and family payment policies. But for the children's sake, it's also critical to provide more support for extended parental care for infants during the vital first two years. Getting the balance pretty right between providing care for infants and supporting women at work isn't easy, but a paid maternity leave scheme is no golden fleece.