Does the Coalition support families? After the PPL debacle, who can say?
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Version 0 of 1. Joe Hockey is a man trying to make sense from nonsense. For all the Coalition’s talk of family values, the federal government doesn’t appear to have the faintest idea of what a functioning childcare, parental leave and family support regime would look like. That’s probably why Hockey’s interview with Laurie Oakes on the Sunday before the budget was such an extraordinary stuff-up. Why else would he feel compelled to agree with Oakes that claiming parental leave payments from an employer and the government simultaneously was “basically fraud” and then later deny it? Of course the system is in disarray: nobody in the Coalition seems to agree on what paid parental leave is supposed to do. Tony Abbott said in 2013 that parental leave entitlements should be provided so that reproduction is incentivised for high-earning “women of calibre”. Now Hockey says claimants who earn over $90,000 are fraudsters. Does the government fund childcare and PPL to boost female workforce participation, to support healthy children and families, or to promote gender equality? Related: Calm down dears: we may have been rorting but at least we're not rorters! | Kristina Keneally This fundamental confusion, and a complete refusal to articulate or address it in public, is why the government has such an impressive collection of policy failures and embarrassments to its name. Abbott is a human microcosm of this phenomenon, and if he weren’t prime minister the government’s position might be very different. He has a pre-existing ideological commitment to “traditional” family values, involving a heterosexual nuclear family unit in which married couples divide their responsibilities along rigid public sphere-private sphere, earning-caring, work-home lines. His PPL scheme was an attempt to encourage this arrangement. It failed, because it exposed a contradiction between Abbott’s family values and his commitment to economic rationalism. It wouldn’t have lifted women’s workforce participation, and therefore did not represent good “value for money” in terms of public expenditure. Since this is generally the bottom line in policymaking, the choice was between keeping the scheme and trashing the government’s reputation as “good economic managers”. This seems to be the fate of family policy: built on deeply suspect foundations or not tailored to meet any specific goal or benchmark, we get increasingly ridiculous ad hoc measures to plug the gaps. Take the increasing cost and short supply of childcare. Formal childcare replaces an unpaid caring workforce, mostly mothers, with a paid one – childcare workers. Doing so enables mothers to rejoin the paid workforce. The Productivity Commission’s childcare report found that there are up to 165,000 parents (mostly mothers) who do not work, or work less than they would like, because they cannot access adequate childcare. Despite the soaring cost, childcare workers receive low wages, and the Fair Work Commission will hear a case later this year demanding pay increases of up to 70%. If these wage increases are won, the sector will become commercially unviable without subsidies. But there is speculation that these subsidies tend to be captured by providers, which also functions to increase the cost to parents. The picture that emerges is of a fundamentally unsustainable industry, propped up by a government that is caught in another bind and unable to articulate the rationale for its current course of action. Deregulating childcare is one method of decreasing centre operating costs, and at face value it seems to be in line with the federal government’s economic philosophy. It’s true that the National Quality Framework requirements, mandatory staff qualifications and increased staff-to-child ratios have made childcare more expensive. It’s also true that increasing professionalisation is part of the justification given by the union, United Voice, when they demand higher pay for workers. So strip the regulations away, pay staff almost nothing and Bob’s your uncle: higher female workforce participation, lower government expenditure on subsidies. Related: Employers and unions unite to try to force changes to paid parental leave plan This is an impossible prospect for “family values” reasons. There’s simply no way for the government to endorse underpaid, unqualified childcare workers while professing to value the special parent-child bond, or remaining rhetorically committed to a child-centric conception of care. Yet alternatives, like a Finnish-style system of publicly-funded daycare controlled by local government would require, like Abbott’s PPL scheme, an abandonment of the principles of economic rationalism and the supposed primacy of individual choice. Instead of acknowledging this and making a tough decision, the government has released a band-aid reform package and announced a pilot program that would see unqualified nannies eligible for subsidies. This policy will be vociferously opposed by childcare centres that don’t want to compete with bargain basement alternatives, and childcare workers who must hold qualifications. Perth-based think tank the Indonesia Institute provided a submission to the Productivity Commission advocating low-paid carers from Indonesia and the Philippines, to be paid as little as $200 per week. This seems unlikely to get the go-ahead, but in our current atmosphere who can blame them for trying? Hockey’s real mistake was allowing Oakes to draw out his own attitudes towards “family values”, which turn out to be quite different to Abbott’s. Focusing on the word “fraud” distracts from the substance of Hockey’s broader point, which is that he believes government-funded family entitlements are an unearned gift at taxpayers’ expense rather than a way to support the natural family structure in which Abbott believes so strongly. The Coalition’s policies will remain an incoherent compromise between these two commitments as long as they continue to ignore how irreconcilable they really are, and Australian families will suffer as a result. |