Tag: hoyden about town

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Reading the policies: the Coalition’s parental leave consultation document

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

My attitude to the vast bulk of elections, including the 2010 Federal election, is “I don’t like any of this, please get me out of here”. I usually intend to make an informed decision based on policies and then have trouble even following the news coverage. So, in the spirit of public acts helping enforce private commitments, I’m going to review a few policies for Hoyden.

a screenshot of the title page of the Coalition's consultation document titled Direct Action on Paid Parental LeaveFirst up, Direct Action on Paid Parental Leave, the Coalition’s consultation document: a final policy is yet to come.

This has been fairly well publicised, but the basics are that it provides paid parental leave for 26 weeks following the birth or adoption of a child. The leave will be subject to a work test, and be paid ranging from the minimum full-time wage, for any person paid at or below this rate, to a maximum of matching a $150 000 per annum salary (that is, a carer will receive somewhere from $14 000 to $75 000 gross while on leave depending on their previous earnings). The current Baby Bonus will be paid to carers who don’t meet the work test, or to anyone who chooses it over the Paid Parental Leave scheme. It will be funded by an additional corporate tax on a small set of seemingly unidentified companies.

The big news about this policy yesterday (Coalition accused of leaving dads out of parental leave plan, pressured on costings, Dads cut out of full-pay parental leave scheme) was that male primary carers would be paid their female partner’s (presumed) lower wage if they took the leave. This was quite incoherent, and evidently is going to be a change in the final policy, because in this document, fathers weren’t going to be eligible for more than 2 weeks of leave at all. The document itself is a little internally inconsistent, beginning with a nod to primary carers in general:

The Coalition’s Paid Parental Leave scheme will provide primary carers (in the vast majority of families, mothers) with 26 weeks paid parental leave…

But later, the “carers (let’s face it, probably mothers)” phrasing is dropped, in favour of:

… fathers will be able to use two weeks of the 26 weeks of Paid Parental Leave that will be available, either simultaneously with the mother’s leave or separately.

A family can lose one of its two incomes for a period of time as the mother gives up or reduces paid employment to care for the child.

The Coalition is committed to protecting and improving the well-being of families, particularly that of the mother and child, by ensuring a mother can afford to stay at home during the early stages of her child’s development… In recognising this, the Coalition’s Paid Parental Leave scheme will assist mothers to take the recommended minimum of six months leave.

I’m genuinely unclear from this about whether they originally intended provision for fathers or any other primary carers to actually take the leave.

They have quite a few nods to postpartum recovery and especially the need for mother-child contact to establish breastfeeding:

The proposed Paid Parental Leave scheme will enhance child and maternal well-being by providing financial support to mothers while they are outside the paid workforce recovering from childbirth, establishing breastfeeding and bonding with their newborns… Six months is also the minimum period of exclusive breastfeeding recommended by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and the World Health Organisation.

But it’s a long way from separating the idea of paid parental leave into maternity leave for recovery and establishing breastfeeding and primary carer leave for, possibly, a different carer.

Purely in terms of entertainment, we have some Labor’s-big-debt snark:

The Coalition would prefer to fund our Paid Parental Leave scheme from a Budget surplus, but this is not possible due to the large debt and deficits run up by the Rudd Labor Government.

And is this some WorkChoices nostalgia I see before me?

The [Howard Government] also supported women’s choice by… introducing more flexible workplace conditions which provided parents, particularly mothers, with the choice of working part time or flexible hours.

Observations:

  • This is a generous scheme, as the document points out, both in comparison to Labor’s scheme, which has a maximum payment of under $10 000 gross and which does not provide any option to share even 2 weeks of the leave with another carer, and in comparison to most other schemes worldwide, which mostly are either shorter or pay less.
  • It’s especially generous to carers already earning a higher income, although this is fairly typical of worldwide schemes: either you get a payment linked to the minimum wage, or you get a payment linked to your recent income.
  • The implementation of the policy in the context of any family that’s not built around a female-male couple who are both legal parents of the child is not at all clear from this document. It’s especially unclear how the payment works if the baby care is shared by more than one household.
  • I do not know why it is emphasised that a carer who passes the work test could still choose to receive the Baby Bonus. The current Baby Bonus is valued at just over $5000 tax free, and is no longer paid as a lump sum, but is also paid over 26 weeks.The only case I can come up with where that’s going to be better than the Coalition’s scheme involves higher order multiples (since the scheme will not pay multiple times for a multiple birth).
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The lamb roast roundup: Mums and censorship

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Feminist criticism of the “It’s Time to Tell Mum” anti-filtering campaign has shown up on several blogs:

ZDNet Australia writer Josh Taylor picked up the story and contacted myself and Geordie Guy, vice-chair of EFA’s board, for comment in his article EFA apologises for ‘sexist’ anti-filter site.

[Geordie] Guy told ZDNet Australia the responses he received to his blog forced him to delete the entry.

“A couple of the comments that came in response to that were really abusive and I didn’t want to start or continue a fight, which is why the article was removed,” he said.

“We sincerely regret that the campaign offended some people,” Guy said, explaining that his personal musings on the blog were superseded by the apology from the EFA board. He said it was inevitable that the different approach to the censorship debate — and getting a comedian involved — would offend a few people.

“Needless to say, we didn’t set out to upset anyone and we don’t think mums are stupid — we think some mums are being treated as such by the government, who is playing on their fears without giving them the full story,” he said.

The EFA though have explicitly disclaimed any apparent apology in their own blog:

So contrary to reports elsewhere, like [Taylor’s piece], we aren’t apologising for the campaign – we’re happy with the way it turned out. Of course, we’d rather nobody was offended, and sincerely regret it. But offending nobody is only possible without any risk-taking, and a risk-free campaign is unlikely to break any new ground.

I’ve also transcribed the the Akmal Saleh video that’s part of the “It’s Time to Tell Mum” campaign.

Continue reading “The lamb roast roundup: Mums and censorship”

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So simple, even your mother will be opposed

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

My four month old has explained a lot of things to me. To date it’s been things like “it’s been four months and you still can’t tell the difference between tired and hungry? HERE LET ME SHOW YOU.”

But I confess that I was surprised last night by his cogent explanation of reasons to oppose the Federal government’s proposed Internet filtering scheme, thanks to Electronic Frontiers Australia’s It’s Time to Tell Mum campaign, which enabled him to simply explain things like even mums want an internet connection that’s faster, cheaper and more secure, if mums begin to rely on the filter to keep their children safe, rather than monitoring their children’s internet use themselves, children will actually be less safe than before the filter was in place.

And I have to thank him, and Electronic Frontiers Australia, because that was a lot clearer than the confused mother-logic authored by some mummy bloggers I know around these parts.

Seriously, is there some kind of bingo card for “getting mothers involved” yet? Here some squares to get you started, thanks to “It’s Time to Tell Mum”: mothers are late technology adopters, mothers are uninterested in technology and toys for their own sake, mothers are solely responsible for the moral welfare of children, (which is lucky because) mothers are pretty much only interested in the moral welfare of children, (which is also lucky because) fathers and co-parents might as well not exist. Any more?

See also discussion in the previous Open Thread.

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Many roads, one surname

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

In yesterday’s SMH Catherine Deveny asked Why do (don’t go there) most children(don’t go there) still end up with (don’t go there, don’t go there, don’t go there!) their father’s surname?

She’s fairly clearly talking about a certain, already small and reportedly shrinking, milieu, that of heterosexual couples forming a nuclear family where the male and female partners have different surnames. She’s particularly talking about legally married couples, because in that case there is a socially visible ‘choice’ available to the female partner to use her birth surname or adopt her husband’s surname, or, I think even more rarely, some combination thereof. (Deveny has discussed women’s own decision here and it made it to Hoyden in 2007.)

Of course, we’re already in problematic territory here, in our last surname discussion WildlyParenthetical had a great comment in which she wrote:

[A structural analysis of surname choice as a feminist decision] assumes to know, in advance, the entire significance of a choice. In fact, it says that the entire (feminist) significance is given by its capitulation or resistance to a particular dimension of patriarchy…

… it can erase the heteronormativity of the issue to begin with… it can erase a colonialist, imperialist and racist history… it can erase the moments in which one has been disowned, or a survivor of violence, the moments where the very nuclear family structure enforced by surnames has been the cause of great damage…

Here I am under the microscope though. I had a son last month, my own first child and the first child of my long term heterosexual relationship. Moreover, his father and I are legally married. I’m white and of largely British Isles descent: this surname tradition is my cultural heritage. And I use my birth surname both socially and professionally, as does he: of course, my choice to do so is marked, and his isn’t.

My son? His surname is the same as mine, rather than his father’s.

While I was pregnant, we worked over this problem a lot, because I was very struck by the comment of zuzu’s that tigtog brought to our attention: You may feel you have great reasons for choosing the option which just happens to be what the patriarchy has greased the rails for you to do rather than taking the harder path of going against tradition. But having good reasons doesn’t mean that you’re not adding your own grease to those rails… Deveny observes much the same, that there are many many many reasons, but very much one likely outcome.

I come with a great big helping of privilege, and I’ve greased plenty of rails already and figured that the punishment I’d take for thinking about adding a teeny smidge of friction here was small, but it still took a great deal of energy to reach this decision. It took a great deal more for me than for my husband of course. I considered a lot of options: the children using the surname of the same-sex parent, inventing a new family name entirely, and so on.

I’ve ended up liking using my surname because it’s a distorted mirror of the usual decision. There’s very few objections to it that don’t also apply to the most common decision. Input from others vastly tended to focus more on what he and his family would lose than what mine would gain. Neither of us has brothers: sisters are so unreliable when it comes transmitting surnames! Several people took it out to cousins: I have more male cousins with my surname than he has with his. Trouble he might have dealing with travel or school documentation were raised more often than trouble I might have.

I am not kidding myself that this was Big Activism for me, it was low risk to my safety, my relationships, my right to parent my son. And I’m much more pleased to share a surname with him than my husband is sorry not to. (Of course, if he becomes very sorry, he can always change his name…) In some ways though, that makes me extra glad with the decision to do the, or at least an, unusual thing.

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University colleges: nurturing a rape culture

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Warning: this post has graphic quotes from and links to mainstream media accounts of rape culture and imagery, and sexual violence.

One of the profoundly disturbing aspects of rape culture discussions—and this won’t surprise readers here—is the way that they reveal the confident assumption that there are rapists, who are evil and other and unresponsive to any form of social control, and then there are the rest of us, who can be exposed to any number of conflicting messages about rape—sexy rape, not-rape rape, that-type-of-girl rape, he’s-such-a-good-fellow rape—and emerge with our anti-rape moral compass intact.

There is no single place in my own experiences that taught me that this is wrong more thoroughly and dramatically than university residential college.

Continue reading “University colleges: nurturing a rape culture”