Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australian families are being damaged because we put too much emphasis on ourselves as individuals and not enough on our families. Never before has materialism and self-interest been cultivated to the extent it is now. This is the result of a market driven approach adopted by both major parties.

Family First supports free enterprise, not unfettered free markets. In our market driven world we are constantly told that we are individuals and that we have choices. Marketing or advertising panders to our interests in ourselves; it encourages us to spend to satisfy ourselves. Of course, to compensate for that spending we have to work longer hours. Statistics show that full-time workers are working longer hours. It is becoming more common for people to work more than 50 hours a week. Two-income families are becoming the norm.

Market economics tells us that we are individuals making rational decisions in our own interests. But rather than being a theory that tries to explain how economies work, this theory has, to some extent, been used as a philosophy of how we should act. This philosophy forgets that we are who we are because of our relationships and our interactions with other people. We are children, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers and grandparents. We are all members of families and we owe much of who we are to how we were brought up in families. Those of us fortunate enough to have children also owe much to our kids, who teach us about life. As members of families and communities, we should not make decisions in a vacuum, as if our decisions do not impact on others.

We have seen the struggle between individualism and the family in the debate over industrial relations laws. Under the antifamily Work Choices legislation, workers on agreements or contracts are no longer guaranteed public holidays, meal breaks and overtime. Families believe in a fair go and they need to feel financially safe and secure. We all know that many workers are not in a strong bargaining position with their employers, and the government’s Work Choices legislation makes them even more vulnerable, which is why Family First voted against Work Choices.

The latest example is the Australian workplace agreement that the Commonwealth Bank wants its staff to sign. The government has defended the agreement on the basis that it gives families more flexibility. But the Commonwealth Bank has not mentioned families. All it has talked about is the convenience of customers. However, that message still seems to slip past the guards of the major parties. As Professor Neil Gilbert from the University of California has observed:

… the quality of family life suffers when mothers with young children go to work: hence, policies that create incentives to shift informal labour invested in child care and domestic production to the realm of paid employment are not ‘family friendly’ in any genuine sense.

Nevertheless, it seems we are determined to ignore this reality. According to the Sunday Age the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services is about to present its report on work and family. It seems it is going to recommend tax deductibility for child-care payments, exemptions from fringe benefits tax for child-care payments and a national au pair program, likely to involve young foreign visitors.

While these policies might strike a chord with the well-to-do, they are likely to be less relevant to ordinary parents living in the outer suburban areas and regions. These proposals demonstrate Professor Gilbert’s observation that many policies promoted in the name of the family are market friendly rather than family friendly.

Family First has said it before: we work to live; we do not live to work. We have to pull things back into balance. The government has the important job of getting the policy right to support that balance, but each one of us has the important task of re-examining our priorities. That applies to politicians too. However, given the government’s workplace relations policies and now, it seems, the recommendations of this House of Representatives committee, I am not sure we are doing much of a job.

Children, of course, would be the prime victims of a society built on individualism. A world of individuals is a ruthless place. No-one would have to like us or give us the time of day. So we would have to work even harder to be more self-reliant and to ensure our security. That is a world we are moving towards.

Families are the basic building blocks of a community, but they are also the basic training grounds in which each and every one of us learns how to live together. Families are the first place we learn about rights and responsibilities. Families are where we learn right from wrong, sharing, sacrificing for others and how to get on with each other. That is why Family First believes that family policy should be child focused and not employer focused or adult focused.

Family First’s view is that we should not be mandating particular child-care options for families. Rather than just offering to subsidise places at institutional child-care centres, why not allow parents to choose alternative child-care arrangements and receive the same subsidy? Parents may prefer to leave their children with a family member or a friend. Why won’t the government provide the same subsidy for parents to do that?

The report of the House of Representatives committee has not yet been released. When it is, the questions we shall need to ask include: who do the recommendations put first? Are the  recommendations child driven so that the interests of children are paramount or are they instead focused on getting the most productivity from parents? Do the recommendations aid family life and time together or do they aim to increase workforce participation rates? Are the committee’s recommendations child driven rather than driven by the needs of parents?

Policies that purport to be family policies need to be family driven, not market driven. Family First awaits the release of the recommendations of the committee on balancing work and family and will be looking to see if these are truly family-friendly recommendations or just market-friendly ones that are concerned with work or family, not truly work and family.