Paid maternity leave is not a capricious feminist whim

A sociology lecturer once gave me a valuable piece of advice: “If you want a government to act on an issue, make sure you tell them how much it is going to cost them if they don’t.” Understanding that this suggestion was probably truer today than at any other time in history, I recently set out to find some information on the cost of not providing paid maternity leave to the working women of Australia. Surprisingly – or not, I have found no information of the kind.

It has to be interesting that one of the most contentious social policy issues in contemporary Australia has been fought on economic grounds only when justifying the absence of a unified, committed, national policy on paid maternity leave. Perhaps the answer is blinding obvious given that the cost of paid maternity leave is the cost to be borne by governments and business with no short-term economic justification to either. Which is where the argument could stop. But that is only so if one accepts that the society one lives in has one common goal only – economic performance measured by the simplistic and somewhat outdated concept of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

There are several reasons, social and cultural, that could explain the fact that the on-and-off paid maternity leave campaigning is often seen as a cause of an ‘annoying lobbying group’, as Anne Summers aptly put it, even if the group in question happens to represent about half the population of Australia. Indeed, as a person of European background, I have often found it puzzling that an issue most Europeans consider close to a basic human right would somehow be seen as ‘women’s problem’ in a country as prosperous and, supposedly, as progressive as Australia.

There is, of course, an economic argument behind Australia’s general reluctance to introduce paid maternity leave. It is a country where roughly 75 per cent of businesses are in the small business sector. Making them come to the party is near impossible without serious government commitment to footing the majority of the paid maternity leave bill.

Being a country of migrants, it is also a place well aware of the benefits of “parallel importing”, so to speak. In simple economic terms, human beings whose education and preparation for productive economic activity has been paid for by other nations and the benefits of imported, ‘ready to deploy’ knowledge reaped by Australia, ultimately makes for a more rational economic choice.

If this sounds like a cynical oversimplification, think again. The government that sees itself primarily as a manager of the economy will prioritise policies that can be sold as sound economic choices. In the case of Australia, migration is a sound economic choice. Paid maternity leave is not.

But is paid maternity leave something that should be considered just in the context of sound economic choices? In other words, do governments (and the Australian government in particular) have the mandate that extends beyond economic and into social well-being and returns? The answer to that question is also obvious. But social well-being and returns are an ideological category. And so their understanding and definition influence the paid maternity leave debate in rather ideological ways.

One of the key arguments that has been presented to the Australian public over the years to explain the lack of commitment to the paid maternity leave is that working and non-working mothers should receive equal support from the society they live in. This argument presents an interesting problem for policy makers. At the heart of it lies the question of weather paid maternity leave should be placed in the context of workers’ rights, or in the context of women’s rights. In either case, they steer the debate towards a ‘special interest group’, removing it from its proper and real context.

The question of paid maternity leave is a family issue, it is a social issue, and an issue affecting Australia from both micro and macro-economic point of view. What this is not (though it is often portrayed as such), is an echo of the feminist "revolution", which somehow makes the problem of having children simply the question of women’s choices, and, hence, their own problem.

A national Newspoll survey on paid maternity leave shows 78 per cent of men and 75 per cent of women in Australia are in favour of its introduction. Their reasons for supporting it are varied, but revolve around three key themes – newborn babies require women to stay at home for at least a year, financial pressures often make this impossible, and governments, business and workers should share the burden of child-rearing in the first year of a baby’s life. Australia, alongside the US, is the only OECD country that (officially) doesn’t believe so, even if the social consensus on the issue clearly exists.

As Australia keeps facing its now almost perpetual skills-shortage crisis and a declining birth-rate, it is interesting to see that no government has been willing to encourage Australian women to participate in solving both issues through a better support and incentive system. If anything, numerous policy analysts have argued existing policies have done exactly the opposite – encouraged women out of the workforce and into full-time motherhood. Faced with a choice of economic hardship, diminished career prospects and the lack of support during pregnancy and the first year of childbirth, women have opted out in significant numbers.

For many young couples, the choice between home-ownership in the least affordable housing market in the world, and having a baby in one of the most unsupportive environments for working mothers is a tough choice. Entrepreneurialism, a national buzzword used to suggest to aspiring and young mothers to just get on with it and find a solution has simply not provided us with a satisfactory answer. Our declining birth rate is but one of the proofs. Paid maternity leave might not be the only ingredient required to reverse the trend, but it is certainly one of the key elements currently missing from the Australian social policy puzzle that could attempt to do so. The cost of not doing so could be quite high.