In a May 11 press release, childcare lobby group Community Child Care (NSW) stated that "by re-announcing old initiatives and talking up their additional out of school hours places, the prime minister and treasurer will attempt to hide the fact that child care will become more expensive and there will be fewer child care places for babies".
Women who have had to resign from full-time jobs, been forced to make do juggling part-time jobs with informal, inadequate child care, or decided to put off having children for now, have easily been able to see through the smoke and mirrors on childcare funding in PM John Howard government's much-touted "family friendly" budget.
These women know that the budget's one-off payment of $3000 is no substitute for paid maternity leave and affordable, accessible, quality child care.
They know that the release of 30,000 new out-of-school-hours care places, and 1700 new family day care places, is the result of long-term concerted campaigning by child-care activist groups. But they also know that these measures will not go very far in meeting the needs of an estimated 160,000 women who want to be in the paid work force, but are excluded because of lack of child care.
They know these child-care place "initiatives" will do nothing for women who give birth this year. Their babies will spend the first two years of their lives on childcare centre waiting lists, denied the benefits of quality early childhood care at a crucial stage in their development.
The ideological basis of this budget is consistent with the Coalition government's view that government funding for child care should prioritise subsidising profits for a burgeoning commercial child-care industry over meeting the needs of working women and their young children.
Since it axed operational funding to not-for-profit child care (provided by non-government organisations and local governments) in the 1996-97 budget there has been uncapped growth in services by commercial providers, generally in high-income areas, where "customers" can bear high fees. The commercial sector is also less likely to provide places for children who are under two years old as the profit margins are less for this age group.
It is estimated that the cost of child care has risen by at least 30% in the past two years, while the level of government subsidy to parents has barely risen above CPI increases.
Commercial childcare corporations listed on the stock exchange are recording record profits while accessible and affordable childcare slips further from the grasp of working women.
However, it is fair to say that Howard government's 2004-05 budget "family friendly". It is so to the extent that it seeks to entrenches the husband-"breadwinner", wife-"homemaker" family system.
Writing in the May 17 Sydney Morning Herald, University of Sydney political economist Elizabeth Hill observed: "In the overhaul of family assistance and tax in Tuesday's budget, Peter Costello has indulged in a little bit of social engineering, setting the government's preferred sexual division of paid labour at 80:20...
"The old Howard vision of the white picket fence with the stay-at-home wife, three children and a breadwinner husband may be fading, but the new Costello ideal of the 80:20 family is not much better.
"The tables that accompany the government's budget show that the biggest winners are dual income families with children in which the 'primary earner' (read male) contributes 80 per cent of the household income and his 'secondary earner' (read female) 'helpmate', the other 20 per cent...
"Costello knows mothers are also workers, but he's doing all he can to make sure they don't choose to work too much. Happy to let us out beyond the confines of the white picket fence a couple of days a week, he is clearly uninterested in promoting equality."
Margaret Gleeson
From Green Left Weekly, May 26, 2004.
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