Australia moves closer to paid family leave

The U.S. has just moved closer to solo spot on an ignominious list: The U.S. and Australia alone among industrialized nations fail to offer paid parental leave, and last week an Australian government panel held hearings on implementing paid leave. It’s unclear when Australia would get the leave, but the recently elected Labor government has supported paid leave.

Under one plan being floated, mothers would get six months paid leave and fathers four weeks. I don’t like the gender bias of that, but that’s quibbling. It’s a vast improvement over the current Australian scheme, which grants families a payment of $5,000 on the birth of a child. Because of this credit, some sources already put the U.S. as alone in failing to give paid parental leave. That’s incorrect, because the baby credit is very different from paid leave, and it’s important to understand why.

A child credit was a major plank—the most expensive plank—in the Republican Party’s Contract with America back in the ‘90s. Whereas paid leave from one’s job empowers women, enabling them to stay in the paid labor market, child credits, like Australia’s or the Contract with America’s, are payments to families and in no way alter the barriers to mothers’ employment. In fact, they can encourage women to stay out of the paid labor market, further reinforcing gender role specialization within families and therefore the imbalance in power between women who specialize in unpaid caring labor and men who specialize in paid labor.

Another way to look at it is that paid parental leave reduces the economic penalty for child rearing, whereas child credits are rewards for breeding (and since they go as much to fathers who don’t engage in caregiving as to mothers, or fathers, who do, they reward a merely biological function). People who choose not to breed—and who might do so for admirable reasons, such as not contributing to the overpopulation of the world—might rightly resent such bias. Paid leave reduces a tilt in the playing field, while child credits increase the tilt toward traditional families and inequality within them.