Parents need as much help as they can get – but keeping women in work is about much more than that first 26 weeks
Paid parental leave is great. Eighteen weeks, 26 weeks, whatever. It's great if it means more parents can stay home for longer in the early months of a child's life. It's great to take away some of the financial worries of those early years.
And if it was really paid for by employers, in a similar way to annual leave, then it should certainly be offered at rate of a mother's normal wage. But that raises another whole pramful of problems – particularly the disincentive to employ women of child-bearing age.
And so the coalition has devised a hybrid scheme where bigger companies foot part of the bill for its more generous paid parental scheme for the indefinite future and the taxpayers make up the (sizeable) difference.
And that means it is still a government-funded measure, which demands some serious debate about the equity of differential payments, and also about whether it is the best way to achieve its stated aim – to keep women with children in the workforce (as my colleague Greg Jericho pointed out in a recent blogpost, there is evidence that it might not be) – as opposed to its initial political aim of rebooting the coalition leader's image with female voters.
Greg Jericho cites the Productivity Commission's finding that a paid parental leave scheme with "full replacement wages for highly educated, well-paid women would be very costly for taxpayers" and would pay the most to women who already had a "high level of attachment to the labour force" and also already had "a high level of private provision of paid parental leave". The PC's finding was that the PPL "would have few incremental labour supply benefits".
For parents it's a much longer, daily grind kind of a story.
Most women – most parents – who have been there know that in some ways those hazy, sleep-deprived, milky days of maternity leave are the easy bit. At least you get to concentrate on one thing at a time, even if it is a small thing that won't go to sleep.
The biggest headaches come when the 18 weeks, or 26 weeks, of maternity leave are over and you have to figure out what to do over the next 18 years.
Who does the pick-ups and the drop-offs and how do you fit that in with a working day? How many days of after-school care are too many? How do you get to the school concert/assembly/parent-teacher interview and meet your work commitments? Why do broken arms and other medical emergencies always happen at the same time as important work deadlines? Have you said anything to your children this week other than "Hurry up"? Can you juggle it all and not go insane?
It's these pressures that take their toll on working parents. And in my observation of parents around me, it is often these pressures that mean women stop or dramatically scale back their working lives later, despite bounding back to the office straight after maternity leave with their first.
These are pressures much more difficult to ease, certainly much more difficult for government policy to ease, than paid parental leave in the first four or six months.
But if the policy aim really is to improve national productivity by enabling women who want to stay in the workforce to do so – rather than just to make nice with female voters – then politicians and employers need to give it a shot.
First up should be childcare policy, with places still hard to get and prohibitively expensive in many parts of the country.
Labor rebates 50% of childcare costs to an annual cap of $7,500 and began the campaign announcing extra money for the providers of before and after-school care. Parents using before and after care are also eligible for the rebate.
The coalition has said it will hold a Productivity Commission inquiry into the whole structure of childcare provision, including whether benefits can be paid to families using nannies. It's asking the right questions but holding an inquiry after the election means we'll probably have to vote without knowing the answers.
Also important are attitudes towards part-time work – of mothers and fathers – as families figure out their own ways to manage the juggle.
Labor had go with a legislated right to request part-time work but according to Barbara Pocock, director of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, who co-ordinated a study of the issue, the proportion of workers who requested flexible working hours fell from 22% to 20% between 2009 and 2011 – so the original changes don't seem to have made all that much difference.
Paid parental leave helps start the great "Time of our Lives" juggling act – but if politicians really want parents to stay in the workplace they need to think not just about the generosity of the first 18 or 26 weeks, but the daily grind of the next 18 years.
