Tag: paid parental leave

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The 62nd Down Under Feminists Carnival

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

In blue on a white background, the DUFC logo: in a square with rounded corners, there is the female/feminine symbol; with the Southern Cross inside, above which it says 'Down Under' and below 'Feminists Carnival'.

Welcome! This post is the 62nd monthly Down Under Feminists Carnival. This edition of the carnival gathers together June 2013 feminist posts from writers living in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to all the writers and submitters for making this carnival outstanding, amazing, sad, outraging and uplifting.

Highlighted new(er) Down Under voices

I’ve highlightede posts that come from people who began been blogging at their current home in June 2012 or later, such posts are marked with (new blog) after the link. I know this is a very imperfect guide to new writers, since some may have simply started new blogs or switched URLs, or be well-known as writers in other media, but hopefully this may be a quick guide to feeds you may not be following yet.

Also, this carnival observes the rule that each writer may feature at most twice. Apologies to the fine submissions that were dropped under this system.

Feminist theory

Cristy is kicking off a feminist book club, from historical feminism and first wave onwards.

Joanna Horton reviews Joan Smith’s Misogynies, twenty four years on.

Party politics and government

In late June, Julia Gillard was deposed as Australian Prime Minister. Feminist commentary on Gillard’s media portrayals, treatment in Parliament, and defeat in a leadership ballot included:

Orlando got in before the spill with the questions the governing Labor party ought to be asking itself (not about the leadership).

Julie found that potential women candidates for office can’t commit due to time constraints.

Orlando salutes Emily Wilding Davison and other radical activists for women’s right to vote.

Ethnicity, racism, colonisation

Utopiana discusses lateral violence in the wake of her critique of Indigenous beauty pageants. (new blog)

Kim Mcbreen recaps a talk she gave about understandings of gender and sexuality in Māori traditions.

LudditeJourno chronicles news stories about pressure on indigenous people to assimilate.

Barbara Shaw recounts more than five years on income management in the Northern Territory.

The Koori Woman blogs on hope after the apology and anger after the Intervention for Reconciliation Week 2013.

Celeste Liddle reflects on international gatherings for indigenous people.

Misogyny, sexism, harassment, assault

Hayleigh wants to go outside her house without being objectified (new blog).

AJ Fitzwater promises to ally herself with people who speak out or who can’t speak out about bad behaviour in the speculative fiction community or the SFWA.

Amy Gray argues that the treatment of Adrian Earnest Bayley, who murdered Jill Meagher, shows that the Australian legal system does not deal with rapists well.

tigtog explains that it is the very indifference of creeps to desire that makes them creepy.

newswithnipples takes the mainstream media to task for widespread fail of the highest order.

bluebec does not want to excuse the abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church on the grounds that they also do good works.

LudditeJourno reviews the many lessons about rape that the Steubenville rapes show aren’t being learned.

Scuba Nurse points out that a rape, abuse or victimisation narrative resulting in the eventual victory of the survivor isn’t miraculously unproblematic.

Bodies

Hayleigh is tired of being chased around Facebook by weight-loss ads (new blog).

Eliza Cussen lists five mistakes she’s constantly correcting about abortion, including the myth that it’s legal throughout Australia (new blog).

Genevieve writes about healing after post-abortion trauma (pro-choice perspective).

Fat Heffalump debunks fat-shaming as a pro-public health act.

Workplace, employment and education

Anjum Rahman writes about the right to work, in the context of people with disabilities, and ethnic minorities (new blog).

blue milk writes about the Australian Coalition’s parental leave scheme and adds a followup in response to critique.

Rachael Ward asks why so many of the testing materials in the General Achievement Test in Victoria related to men’s achievements.

Arts, music, crafts and media

Holly Kench writes that stories with diversity don’t need to be about being different; they may be about belonging with difference (new blog).

The results of the Triple J Hottest 100, 20 Year Edition music poll aired in early June, and as with the all-time edition in 2009, women musicians were very badly represented. Commentary:

Chally is reviewing LGBT young adult books, check out her reviews of Is He Or Isn’t He?, Beauty Queen and more.

Transcendancing recaps Karen Pickering’s talk on the secret feminism of the Country Women’s Association (CWA).

Jo Qualmann analyses the disappearing women of Doctor Who in light of the season finale.

AlisonM observes how very different Facebook ads are, depending on your selected gender.

canbebitter analsyes Cee Lo Green’s Fuck You, concluding that Fuck You is misogynist. Later in the month canbebitter presents an alternative queer reading of Fuck You.

Scarlett Harris reviews Paper Giants 2: Magazine Wars in light of current developments in magazine wars.

bluebec criticises recent coverage of polyamory in the press.

QoT is unimpressed by “feminist” clickbait.

New blogs

Blogs started in or after June 2012 featured in this carnival were:

Next carnival

The 63rd carnival will follow at can be bitter in early August. Keep an eye on Down Under Feminists Carnival HQ for submission instructions.

Volunteers are needed to host carnivals from October onwards. Volunteer via the contact form.

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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).