Maternity leave mish-mash

So when consideration came to providing paid maternity leave, this completely fallacious justification of unfair subsidy was used to pay the Baby Bonus to all mothers whether they worked or not. The simple fact is that the Baby Bonus was extremely bad public policy. (It certainly didn’t increase fertility rates as Costello likes to claim - the recent blip upwards was the consequential result of delayed first births.)

My complaint against the Productivity Commission is that it ought to provide frank and fearless advice rather than playing political games. It should have recommended the abolition of the Baby Bonus. Single income families survived for years quite well without it.

Although it acknowledges that there are problems with the tax system which are being examined by Treasury, it should have recommended that parental leave benefits should not be taxable until these problems are fixed. In any case, it is doubtful whether the size of a payment of this nature should be affected by the date during the tax year at which a woman gives birth. We don’t need log jams in maternity wards! And the qualifying hours per week for the parental leave component should be raised from 10 to 20, to reduce the kind of absurdity I have outlined above. I haven’t discussed the impact of the proposal to compel employers to pay superannuation contributions on parental leave. It is of little merit, and I’m assuming it will be the first of the recommendations to be dropped.

The only real issue is whether the Rudd Government will have the political bottle (or is it ticker?) to unwind the disastrous mess the Howard government created with the personal tax and family tax benefit systems, in the face of high decibel screeching from the traditional housewife lobby, various Christian evangelical family groups, talk-back radio shock jocks, and the usual right-wing ranters in think-tanks and the press. Wayne Swan says he wants to have a go. We shall see.