Last year I paid income tax.
I’m not going to tell you exactly how much tax I paid. Suffice to say it was less than James Packer or Gina Rinehart but more than most university students or Paul Hogan.
My taxes paid for a lot of things that I use – things that me and mine directly benefit from. Smooth roads to drive on, cheaper prescriptions for the pill, subsidised university degrees, trams to take me to and from work, affordable physiotherapy for my partner’s slipped disc, and three seasons of the ABC television series Rake.
My taxes also paid for a whole lot of things that didn’t benefit me personally but contributed to the overall peace and prosperity of the country I live in. Welfare payments to lower income earners who are raising a family, machinery to properly arm our defence forces, pensions for older citizens who are no longer able to earn a living, investment in crisis services for those without a roof over their heads and education for every single Australian child.
The benefits of these payments to me as an individual are perhaps less obvious, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It is in all our interests that we live in an Australia where those who are doing it tough are supported and that investments are made to keep people in education, training and work to ensure our ongoing economic success.
This week Coalition backbenchers have been agitating about paid parental leave and arguing that the payment should be made available to stay at home mums as well. It’s important to note here that this isn’t about Labor’s existing scheme versus Tony Abbott’s, this is about whether the Government should be in the business of paid parental leave at all and if they are – who should get it.
Nationals Senator Ron Boswell has been leading the charge and indicating that in his view, fairness requires paid parental leave payments be extended to stay at home parents too. With respect, this argument is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because it conceptualises paid parental leave in entirely the wrong way.
Paid parental leave should not be viewed as ‘compensation’ for parenting. The Government doesn’t award the payment as some sort of incentive for parents to stay at home with their babies for longer and avoid re-entering the workforce. In fact, the policy purpose of paid parental leave is quite the opposite.
Paid parental leave is about helping employees and employers and through them fuelling Australia’s economic prosperity. Paid parental leave schemes recognise that when a parent leaves the workforce to have a child – and let’s face it, that parent is usually the mother – that break from work will be financially disruptive to the family and have a negative impact on the national economy.
The mother loses immediate earnings because she is unable to work for a period of time. She will often struggle to re-enter the workforce after a break because she has lost momentum in her career progression, the industry she worked in has probably advanced around her, she may have missed vital training and will be less experienced than her male counterparts.
This is only compounded by the fact that returning to work part-time or with flexible hours still isn’t possible in many organisations and child care is both difficult to find and expensive. The result? A gap between men and women’s earnings emerges, companies become nervous about hiring women in their child-bearing years and Australia loses the benefits of skilled and highly trained women employees who stay out of the workforce for longer.
Paid parental leave is about making a mother’s transition in and out off work during her child bearing years easier. Why? Because of the economic benefits that has for the country. Paid parental leave is not a welfare payment, it is an investment in getting that woman back to work faster and facilitating her contribution to the economy.
I do not say any of this to denigrate stay at home parents in the slightest. My mother stayed at home to look after my sister and I until I was six or seven-years-old and the benefits of her presence is unquantifiable. But she was able to stay home because our household could afford for her to do so. And had she been unable to afford to do so, the Government would have stepped in with a range of welfare payments like Family Tax Benefit A and B, to support her financially.
There have been payments in many forms in this country and over many years, designed to support Australians with young children. Baby bonuses, school kids bonuses, child care rebates, family tax benefits. These are welfare payments that recognise the role Government has to play in ensuring parents are financially able to care for, look after and educate their children.
But paid parental leave is not a welfare payment; it is an economic play pure and simple.
It’s about keeping women whose education and training our taxes have already paid for, in the workforce and contributing to our country’s continued economic success. It is about minimising the disruption to a woman’s career that child bearing has and supporting working women to be masters of their own financial destinies.
And that’s not unfair. It’s just good economics.
Do you think Paid Parental Leave should be available to stay-at-home mums?
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Top Comments
...and in breaking news...
It turns out, according to Hockey's biography, Abbott apparently invented this scheme without telling anyone except Rupert Murdoch.
Business does not want to pay more tax to fund it.
A large chunk of the Coalition don't support it at all.
The Nationals' support is lukewarm at best. In fact, they want so many changes, it's hard to call it "support".
The Productivity Commission would prefer a focus on childcare, rather than PPL as they see no tangible productivity benefit in it.
Leading businesswomen would prefer a focus on childcare, rather than PPL, as childcare arrangements and costs are what really stop new mothers returning to work.
Social welfare groups would prefer a focus on childcare subsidy, rather than PPL, as they don't believe the rich should get more welfare than the poor.
The new industry tax, sorry, "levy", that was supposed to fund it, falls short by over $5B and the shortfall will be made up by cutting existing entitlements for other taxpayers.
The Greens no longer plan to vote for it (they should never have even considered it given that it's mostly welfare for the rich) because they aren't happy with the funding model detail.
So, on one side we have Tony Abbott and one mamamia blogger, and on the other side.... Australia.
The plan should be dumped immediately. Since the new industry tax is apparently not an issue, it should still be implemented and the $4.5B revenue diverted to more important things - not welfare for the wealthy.
No, I don't think stay-at-home parents should get PPL because PPL should not be a government entitlement. If it is to be a workplace entitlement, like long-service leave, holiday pay or sick leave, it should be paid by industry as those benefits are.
If it is to be paid by the government then it should be treated like all other welfare benefits and paid on a needs basis, where higher-income earners get less benefit, not more.
And despite what you argue, it is an income-support payment for someone out of work. It is a welfare entitlement and the very idea that wealthy families should be paid tens of thousands of dollars in welfare while low-income families get next-to-nothing from the same benefit is offensive.
Two-income families get two sets of tax breaks on their family income. One-income families do not. One income families pay more tax per dollar of family income than two-income families do. So your argument that you paid the tax so you earned the benefit is wrong.
I note, however, that like others on your side of the argument you do indeed denigrate stay-at-home mums as a drain on the economy. Like others, you declare the very act of motherhood as economically valueless in order to justify your own access to excessive levels of welfare those other mums shouldn't, according to you, be entitled to.
Nice.