Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The shadow minister has by this debate illustrated federal Labor’s unreadiness and inadequacy to govern. This is basically a picking apart of government policies, with no solutions. It is not a debate of the issues at the heart of the matter for mainstream mums and does not acknowledge that long day care is not for every mum. Every mother is different and will make different choices based on her life. Let me point out early that there are not two mothers in this debate—the working mums and the non-working mums—and that the debate is about the best way of raising children, because it is not. It is about every woman who works until she is 30 before having her first child, then returns to her job full time until she has her second child and then returns to work part time until she has her third child and stops work all together. It is about every woman’s life experiences and dealing for every woman in all circumstances in which she may find herself parenting.

A woman’s work and life choices are very different from those of the postwar feminist era the shadow minister is trying to replicate. That type of feminism has no appeal to the vast majority of young women, who are viewed as exceptionally ungrateful by the feminists of that era. Today, they enter the workforce at 20, unaware of chauvinistic limits, and they do not think about children until they have acquired an array of valuable skills that make them highly sought after as employees. When children arrive—and the average age in Australia today for the mother of a firstborn child is 30 and rising—for a multitude of reasons women continue to work. We often regret it later in life and we wish we had spent more time at home, but at the time it seems like forever and we think we have forever—it is for only a year here and a few years there. Time passes.

This issue, contrary to what the shadow minister is saying, is not about the right to work and the state taking care of children in high-quality care a la long day care centres; it is about an inevitable social trend where more and more mothers are working, for whatever reason. Despite the shadow minister’s bleating that we should send in the bureaucrats and spend more dollars finding statistics that we already know, the employment rate of Australian women is higher than in earlier decades.

In 1985, 45 per cent of mothers with dependent children were employed, compared with 60 per cent in 2003. Relative to comparable countries, Australian women currently have a low level of workforce involvement. In 2000, of Australian women with two or more children, 43 per cent were in the workforce, compared with 81 per cent in Sweden, 64 per cent in the United States and 62 per cent in the United Kingdom. Ireland, Italy and Spain have similarly low rates of women’s participation, with two or more children, at 40.8 per cent, 42.4 per cent and 43.3 per cent respectively.

I believe that, with our employment rate for females, Australia is on the way to the US, UK and Swedish levels. This means that we have a job to do in government to make work and mothering easier. For the mums who are not working we provide 24 hours of respite each week, but we need to do better for the mums who are working, especially those on low wages. The medium weekly family income in the electorate of Lindsay is about $58,000 a year. In the shadow minister’s electorate of Sydney it is nearly $80,000 a year. So those from inner city, high-income areas, where Labor councils have consistently failed to provide planning for child-care centres and free up issues and regulations for other types of child care, are now bleating at the federal government to do more.

We have doubled the spending on child care for the next four years. When Labor was in office we saw child-care costs rise by 19 per cent in real terms.

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