Young families will be happy to be the focus of the latest bidding war to break out between Kevin Rudd's government and Tony Abbott's opposition. The government is bringing in its paid parental leave scheme next January, offering the primary carer of a new baby up to 18 weeks on the federal minimum wage, subject to a fairly generous means test on normal earnings. Now Abbot is thinking about offering a further eight weeks, to bring paid leave up to six months.
In addition, he is thinking about mandating similar pay and conditions such as superannuation for nannies, who currently work in a laissez-faire environment. It may be that this apparent outbreak of Scandinavian welfarism - running somewhat counter to Coalition tradition on self-help and Work Choices - is designed partly to counteract a perceived image problem with women. Sometimes Abbott cannot help himself making remarks that suggest he is one of those old-fashioned men who think a woman's place is in the home. Witness his slip this week about women at the ironing board.
Abbott now favours funding from tax revenue rather than a levy on employers, an earlier idea. It is still called ''parental'' rather than ''maternity'' leave, and will be available to the ''primary carer'', whoever that might be. However, the six-month period is linked to the understanding in the minds of Abbott and his early-childhood spokeswoman, Sharman Stone, that six months of breast-feeding is beneficial for the development of the child - suggesting less neutrality about who is the better carer.
The scale of the benefit and the cost are yet to be worked out. The government's scheme, setting the payment currently at $544 a week,
is estimated to cost $260 million a year. A rough calculation increases that annual cost to $375 million if an additional eight weeks' entitlement is added. This is still below the $450 million cost of a scheme recommended by the Productivity Commission. So we are not talking about a wild, unrealistic bidding war, unless Abbott dramatically ups the payment.
Either way, parental leave is long overdue in Australia and should not be deferred any longer, after the delay in its introduction due to the global financial crisis. Australia is one of only two countries in the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development not to have such a scheme (the other being the United States). While that does not seem to have stopped American and Australian women having more babies than their European counterparts, it has been a definite drag on female work participation that our ageing population can ill afford.
