Page 4113 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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Of course, my main concern in bringing this matter to the Assembly today is for the families of the ACT and that childcare policies and reforms benefit working families and working parents in the ACT. Many women, in particular those in their 20s, 30s and 40s, have been sold a certain picture of how their life should look. Sometimes this was by other women, sometimes by the media, sometimes by society and culture at large, and sometimes even by their own mothers. Women have been told that they should be able to have a successful career, have beautiful children, keep their handsome husband happy, host dinner parties, volunteer at the school canteen, make a casserole for the soup kitchen, do soccer and ballet runs on a Saturday morning—and go to the gym!
We tell women that they must have it all and be fully involved in community and family life in order to be considered worthwhile contributors to our society and to our community. That is asking for the impossible. We tell women that if they do not have it all, and they are not fully involved in the community and their family, they are doing our community a disservice. For many women this is an absolutely ridiculous expectation. Firstly, it requires substantial finances. Secondly, that is an awful lot of activity to fit into one week. It is unreasonable to expect women to have it all and be fully involved in family and community life without doing something about balancing work and family life to make this easier to manage.
Virginia Haussegger, in her 2005 book Wonder Woman, notes:
In May 2004, an OECD study found Australians to have “some of the least family-friendly policies for working mothers in the developed world”. In terms of “the generosity of family support”, Australia ranked way down towards the bottom of the OECD scorecard, next to Mexico and Turkey, but even those countries scored higher on the issue of paid maternity leave. These findings are a disgraceful admission and should be a source of red-faced embarrassment to our government and business bodies.
Many men have been sold an equally unattainable picture of how their life should look and the sorts of things they should be able to juggle with ease: to be a good dad, you need to participate in sport with your children, go to school interviews, volunteer for community organisations and take a fair share of home duties. I am sure other members in this place could add to the list. This kind of pressure is frightening for both men and women. The pressure affects us in different ways. Our relationships, our families, our working lives, our productivity and our sense of self can all suffer. There can be major effects on our mental health, and indeed the general health of the community.
The 21st century demands a great deal from families. Currently, as far as I can see, up until now the federal government has not made it any easier to meet those demands. One can easily understand that the impetus for much of the commonwealth government’s work, and indeed the inquiry into balancing work and family, is to find ways to increase female work force participation. In fact, the commonwealth government wants everybody back at work if at all possible—those with family responsibilities, those with disabilities, women who have been widowed. Even though we have a very low national unemployment rate, female work force participation in particular has become targeted and very important.
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