Bouquet: The Federal Treasurer has made a commitment to paid parental leave. $544 per week ( the minimum wage) for 18 weeks for primary caregivers whose income is lower than $150,000.
It’s about time. But there’s the rub:
Brickbat:
The scheme must be introduced in a measured and responsible way, particularly taking into account the global recession, so the scheme won’t begin until January 2011.
The cost is estimated to be about $450 million per year.
There were a couple of plausible start dates the Federal government could have chosen, and plenty of other possibilities. The ‘sensible’ start dates would have been 1 January 2010, or 1 July 2010 (the start of the government’s financial year. But the government has chosen to delay PPL by between 6and 12 months. Using say 5% as a discount rate (official cash rate of 3%, plus the usual 60 basis points margin, plus doubling that to allow for governments all over the world looking to borrow money at present, giving me 4.2%, and rounding it up to 5% just to be very cautious, which represents my former auditor’s soul making itself felt), I estimate that based on the time value of money, and using a standard present value calculation, the delay will save the federal government between $11 million and $22 million.
I can’t see any good reason for the delay. If saving $22 million is so very important, couldn’t it be done elsewhere in the federal budget?
Save the Children has just rated Australia as one of the best places in the world to be a mother. It’s number 3, behind Sweden and Norway, and ahead of Iceland (4), Denmark (5), New Zealand (6), and well ahead of the United States (27). The place where it needs to be better is in paid parental leave.
And while I’m handing out the brickbats, it seems that the sole parents pension will not be increased in the coming budget. That’s another measure that will impact much more heavily on women than men. And it will impact very heavily on the children of sole parents. Save the Children ranks Australia number one in the world in terms of the status of women, but a woeful 27 for its treatment of children (PDF – 3.7MB). Surely ensuring that sole parents are adequately supported would improve this ranking.
Between the delay in paid parental leave, and the predicted failure to increase the sole parents pension, it looks as though this government doesn’t really want to support mothers at all. Or maybe it just sees them as their most expendable group of supporters.
