The Magic Wand of Logic Strikes Again

Below is my blog post for tomorrow's Sunday Mail, cross posted with love.

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As I write this, the Productivity Commission is submitting its final report to the Federal Government into the feasability of an Australian Paid Parental Leave scheme.

Amid fears that the Great Global Financial Crisis (tell me, how long do you suppose it will be before GFC makes its way into the Oxford?) will prevent such a scheme being implemented in the immediate future, Rudd is being cagey about whether or not we can expect to see mention of it in the May budget.

I believe Rudd when he claims he remains committed to the idea of paid parental leave (after all, it’s not only the socially responsible thing to do but it carries a degree of political expediency) I’m annoyed by the umming and ahing about affordability given that the Government has just splashed around $42 billion in their economic stimulus package – a third of which is expressly designed to be spent on material trifles and more stuff that we just don’t need.

Meanwhile, Australia continues to be one of only two OECD countries without a system of paid maternal or parental leave. Proponents of such a scheme like myself face an uphill battle against the whinging of miserly citizens who just love repeating lines like “if you want to have a baby, pay for it yourself” and “I raised my kids without any financial handouts and I managed it!” and then, my particular favourite, “it’s just typical of this generation – always wanting things without having to work for them, expecting everyone to support them!”

Join me as I systematically destroy these arguments with a wave of my magic wand of logic!

1. If you want to have a baby, pay for it yourself.

Ah yes. This old chestnut. In an ideal world, people would plan for children. In my ideal world, they’d require licenses and thorough background checks – but that’s a fantasy that will have to sadly remain on the shelf with other impossible visions of reality, like a world without obnoxious motor racing events, elective cosmetic surgery or Bert Newton’s scary-clown-on-acid face that he likes to pull out occasionally.

But I digress.

Children would be carefully prepared for, saved for, cherished, loved, provided with excellent and free education, treated equally no matter their gender, appearance, race or abilities. And every week, parents would have just enough to make sure their wee little precious ate a hot meal every night and slept in fresh sheets.

Such a reality does not exist my friends. Babies aren’t ordered from the stork. Mostly, they arrive unexpectedly. And incidentally, there’s a vocal minority of people out there who just love to remind that if they DO arrive unexpectedly, you have no business getting rid of them.

We live in a global village. We pay taxes. We band together to help victims of terrible tragedies. Yet we have a remarkably callous attitude towards helping to raise the future members of our society. We’ll throw around lofty, arrogant criticisms of other people’s parenting skills and the ragtag antics of some rude, nasty little children, but we absolve ourselves of responsibility to raise a society rather than a family because if they’re not your kids they’re not your problem.

Paid parental leave won’t see the tax man personally knocking on your door to take $500 from your piggy bank to give to Jane Fertile, mother of 12, who lives across the street in her three story golden roofed house that’s been built on the backs of hard working Australians who have to fund her ‘lifestyle’ choices.

What it will do is make having and raising children easier for ALL people who choose to do so in our society – and the last time I checked, the majority of adults were still eventually going through the rigmarole of biological imperatives.

Magic Wand of Logic: 1
H8ers: 0

2. I raised my kids without any financial handouts and I managed it!

Interpretation: My life was bloody difficult at times and I had to get through it, so if any of you young strumpets think you’re about to get an easy ride of it you’ve got another think coming! Of course, our economic climate was less risky then and it wasn’t as necessary for both parents to be working because back then you could buy a house for a handful of magic beans (whereas now I’m pretty sure the bank carves out a chunk of your own soul just for the down payment), so it was easier for the mother to stay at home while the father did his manly duties and paid for everything unless you were a single mother in which case you both struggled AND were vilified by the community, that is if you didn’t have your baby forced into adoption, and besides it wasn’t the done thing for mothers to work so the system itself was far more accommodating of them staying at home and also The Female Eunuch hadn’t been written yet so they just sort of accepted their lot in life unlike now where women understand they have opportunities and rights and that there is life outside of children and we can have careers and that if we lived in a society which placed as much emphasis on fathering as it does on mothering then we might actually progress forward a little bit and also that just because something used to be one way and now it isn’t doesn’t necessarily make that a bad thing, I mean it used to be considered completely acceptable to make black people sit on the back of the bus and Aboriginal people weren’t even legally recognized as people until 1968 which is just astonishing but people just thought it was normal and now things have changed which is a perfect example of how society is supposed to progress because we are intelligent human beings and wanting things to remain the same all the time is the sign not only of an uninquiring mind but a stagnating species, but none of that matters because if I had to bloody well raise my kids by myself in an entirely different social world to this newfangled modern one, then you bloody well can too.

Seriously. The world is different now. Society progresses. It’s supposed to. Take that. Accept it. Build a bridge and get over it.

Magic Wand of Logic: 2
H8ers: 0

3. It’s just typical of this generation – always wanting things without having to work for them, expecting everyone to support them!

Yes. We do expect people to support us. Because we expect to support other people. But it’s not true that we don’t want to work for things. While we’re quietly entering the work force and paying our taxes and contributing to society in the manner of responsible young citizens, we’re also not complaining about having to fund the pensions of senior citizens, the disabled, the homeless, the accidentally unemployed. We don’t mind our taxes going towards hospitals and roads (well, I mind mine going towards roads because they never seem to do anything to accommodate bicycles, which are a perfectly valid form of transportation and are in fact superior to cars in every single way and anyone who rides a bicycle is the bestest and deserves to be addressed as Your Excellency and given more treats than those who opt for polluting four wheelers who all frankly deserve to wait in long traffic queues while yet more road works take place and they are resolutely refusing to catch the bus) and schools – because these things form part of the foundation of our society.

Which is ironic, because children basically ARE the formation of our society. Raising them properly should be the number one priority on every thinking citizen’s agenda. Supporting the raising of them is paramount. I don’t plan on having kids any time soon, so batting for paid parental leave is hardly sitting around and waiting for a handout to add to my collection of other Things I Have Made People Give Me Without Working For Them. But I value the idea of children being given the best opportunities that they can be. And I believe that allowing parents to share taxpayer funded leave at home with their child before returning to work to continue contributing to the country’s economy and workforce is absolutely vital.

H8ers, wanting paid parental leave for the nation’s working parents doesn’t make me selfish and grabby. It’s being AGAINST it that marks those things in a person.

Magic Wand of Logic: 3
H8ers: 0


I fully expect the Productivity Commission to back up their findings last year regarding paid parental leave, and recommend a respectable system for Australia to adopt.

But I will be sadly disappointed if Kevin Rudd waylays the system for the immediate future because the GFC is rearing its ugly head – a situation, might I point out, that was not created by the youth but by those very same people who so escape criticism when the greedy stick is enjoying its daily round of pointing accusations.