About time indeed... We should not have to be in that embarrassing position of having either to beg for a favour from our employer or to present them with blackmail: agree to shorter hours or I quit. Requesting shorter working hours (within an acceptable limit and against reduced pay) should be a right for all employees.
The article mentions 'employees with children under 6'. In my experience however, as a mother of 2, it's only after my children had started school that I felt the need to reduce my working hours. While they were in day care they were happy and so was I. Now that they're both at school (they're 11 and 7) I find it increasingly difficult to meet their demands for my time as well as the demands of my employer. By continuing to work full time, all 3 sides lose out.

You don’t realise how important work life balance is until you are faced with the results of imbalance.

I heard that when computers were spread though out the Department of Social Security the people in the computer department were away from home so much that almost all were divorced during the rollout.

I worked beside the bloke who was the last head of the Department of Social Security computer department before the department was outsourced. The department had been whittled down from 200+ to 13 people over 2 years. 6 weeks after they left the DSS there were angina incidents recorded by 11 of them.

These blokes had no sickness pay, no workers compensation rights and faced long periods of limited work as they slowly recuperated. This meant that they were trying to recover from sickness with the added stresses of no income. And if I remember correctly yes the ex-wife with custody of the children had her alimony payments cut as a consequence.

Then of course there is the obvious “elephant in the room” of women who are not having children because they can’t see how they can get the child to crèche then get to work in a timely manner.

Hugh MacKay wrote in The Age on March 11th
“the available figures suggest that 20 per cent of employees work 50 or more hours a week and 30 per cent regularly work on weekends. Two million Australians lose at least six hours of "family time" through Sunday work, and those hours are generally not fully compensated for by time off during the week. So it's not surprising that 37 per cent of full-time workers say they would like to reduce their working hours.

“At the other end of the spectrum, though, the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us there are 1.8 million Australians who either have no work or not enough to satisfy their needs. So this story is partly about the unequal distribution of work” http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/work-balance-is-a-matter-of-choice-too/2007/03/10/1173478720635.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1