Maternity leave: it's about time

The above examples of public policy discrimination elucidate why it has been so hard to get a publicly funded payment that is clearly targeted to an employed mother.

Our policy makers still assume that mothering and paid work are not related concepts, and maybe should stay that way. Men have created the workplace in the image of worker who, at best, has no responsibility for domestic chores that interfere with workplace demands. At worst, the intrusion of other roles is to be ignored or punished unless, maybe, connected to sport or defence needs.

Despite the massive shifts of women into paid work, this viewpoint prevails, albeit not so openly. Similarly, the mothering role is still clearly female, and male parenting is assumed to be primarily as provider and not to interfere with careers. Therefore public policy that recognises the intersection of paid work and other roles is to be avoided and piously justified, by figures like Tony Abbott, who claim that to do otherwise would be to discriminate against those "real" mothers who "chose" to commit full time to nurture.

Yet a report issued recently week by the SPRC on LSAC data on children failed to find any statistical differences between the development of babies and four-year-olds on the basis of mothers' employment status. So why is there such a fuss about a payment specifically aimed to those in paid work?

I realise that I have painted this picture in somewhat caricatured style but it is the only explanation for the difficulties in recognising that parental leave should be an entitlement like sick leave and long service leave.

Parental leave needs to be partly publicly funded to ensure that employers of women (at this stage) of child bearing age are not seriously disadvantaged in a gender segregated workforce.

This current proposal is a modest one, with most of its costs coming from other payments, and only offers an average of $3,300 extra per recipient.

There is no real justification for continued public failure to recognise how parenting and paid work mix, so Government needs to affirm the legitimacy of both.

The Productivity Commission's starting point proposals allow for a serious cultural change to "normalise" the connections between paid work and parenting. Perhaps then we may be able to feminise our workplaces and masculinise caring for children, and others.