MATERNITY LEAVE - From the vanguard to the rearguard

Some of the arguments against paid maternity leave don’t belong to the twenty-first century and threaten to leave Australia lagging behind on social advancement, says Marian Sawer THE Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s options paper on paid maternity leave, A Time to Value, was launched last month. Judging from throw-away remarks such as that by employment minister Tony Abbott early in January, equal opportunity is now a lost cause in Australia. Certainly it appears to have few defenders and many opponents. We have heard nothing of the prime minister’s interdepartmental taskforce, supposedly ‘reviewing all the options’. What exactly is Pru Goward, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, suggesting? She is proposing to bring Australia into some conformity with the international standards for paid maternity leave, standards upheld by the International Labour Organisation, with its 175 member countries, by the European Union and by all of Australia’s trading partners with the exception of the United States. The proposed payment is hardly generous by European standards - income replacement for 14 weeks capped at the minimum weekly wage. It is costed at $213 million for the first year after offsets. The reason for international standards relates to a basic issue of equal opportunity - women can only participate in the workforce on an equal basis if there is recognition and protection of maternity. Fourteen weeks is now the internationally agreed minimum for maternity leave, and income replacement for this period of leave is no more controversial in other countries than paid sick leave. It is an industrial entitlement that acknowledges that women have babies. One difference is that in Australia employers pay for sick leave. The sex-segregation of work in Australia makes this an unfeasible basis for maternity leave - women of child-bearing age are concentrated in certain areas of the labour market and the cost would not be spread evenly. This does not mean that maternity leave is not an industrial entitlement comparable to sick leave, simply that it needs to be paid for out of general revenue to avoid penalising feminised industries or causing discrimination against female employees. It is certainly not the only employee entitlement paid out of general revenue - another is the full income replacement provided for members of the army reserve. The recent arguments against maternity leave include many familiar ones - equal opportunity is too expensive and will destroy the family and/or business. But some of the arguments for maternity leave have been almost as offensive - assuming that it is now all right to talk in terms of infant welfare or the advantages for ‘children and families’, but no longer permissible to talk about women. Opponents of paid maternity leave include those who suggest that having children is a lifestyle choice, somewhat akin to keeping a goldfish or smoking marijuana, certainly not something that should be subsidised by the taxpayer. They appear blithely unaware that all societies have a primary concern with their own reproduction and ensuring there will be someone to push the wheelchairs of the current generation. Children are a social benefit. A completely different argument is that put forward by the stalwarts of the Catholic ‘pro-family’ organisations. Their position is that paid maternity leave discriminates against women in the home. They argue it is discriminatory for women in the workforce to receive an entitlement not also available to women in the home - although oddly they do not extend this argument to paid sick leave or recreation leave. At present income support is skewed in the other direction, with non-means-tested benefits available for mothers who stay home, but not for those in the workforce. Different again is the economist argument that paid maternity leave will encourage highly productive workers to take time away from the workplace after childbirth, without compensating employers for the consequent loss in output and productivity caused by their replacement by less productive workers. Another economist argument is that paid maternity leave is all right as long as it is ‘voluntary’ - regardless of the equity effects of only giving paid maternity leave to those in relatively good jobs and leaving those in a weaker bargaining position without. Some, including senior government ministers such as Senator Nick Minchin, have described paid maternity leave as ‘middle-class welfare’. Again this is a label applied to anything that promotes equal opportunity for women. It has also been a term of abuse for community-based childcare. Those applying it would no doubt be most unhappy if their own leave entitlements were to be means-tested against their own and their wife’s income. Or to be capped at the minimum weekly wage. It is extraordinary that these arguments can still be heard in the twenty-first century. But perhaps not when one considers Australia’s record - for example, as one of the last countries in the world to abolish the marriage bar for women in public employment, some twenty years after comparable countries such as the United Kingdom and New Zealand. It is suggested that the introduction of paid maternity leave was more difficult here, because of the non-contributory social insurance system we shared with New Zealand. Paradoxically when the Australasian colonies were regarded as in the vanguard of social progress a major argument for non-contributory pensions was to avoid discriminating against women. Now New Zealand has introduced paid maternity leave, leaving Australia behind with Lesotho, Swaziland and the US. From the vanguard to the rearguard indeed. Marian Sawer is a professor of political science in the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU. This article originally appeared in the Canberra Time