Thank you Pericles.

The oft-repeated refrain from those supporting taxpayer funded paid parental/maternal leave is that Australia is one of two OECD nations that do not support a scheme. The squirming and inconvenient truth is, currently, Australia has the SECOND HIGHEST cash handouts (as a proportion of GDP) to people with children among OECD nations (after Luxembourg).

Those who argue against the notion that children are a private good and insist they are social goods are, incongruously, supporters of private welfare, in the form of taxpayer-funded cash handouts, for parents. If children really are social goods, then why should it attract private cash handouts for parents? Parents should be able to access social services aimed at making them better parents or access better health and education for their children. I have no argument that sort of social wealth is of long term benefit to me and society. But no. These people seem to instead assert upholding the private wealth of (middle-class) parents is "deserved" and this best achieved through income redistribution and it is morally acceptable to penalise the childless to achieve this.

The childfree are no way responsible for the *arguable* financial adversity said to be experienced by the child-burdened, yet the entitlement-poisoned anti-childless lobbyists see no moral shame in exacting financial adversity upon the childfree because, in their twisted logic, punishing the childfree fiscally will address an invented or imagined inequity.

Pericles, it it more than naked pork-barrelling. Taxpayer funded maternity leave is social engineering. To their rare credit, at least the neo-cons and the New Right overtly support cash handouts to families as it supports their ideological position and they make no pretence in hiding their glee at the prospect of penalising childless gays and the deliberately barren jezebels who dare to have sex for recreation and not procreation. But the lefty-feminists dress it up as a wymyn's issue. Leon Bertrand notes " If feminism is really about gender equality, it shouldn’t treat women who have children as a special class that is automatically entitled to income from others, regardless of need."

Anyone who wants to be familiar with the strong arguments against paid maternity leave need only read this article:

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7535

In short, paid maternity leave is sexist, regressive, inefficient and fundamentally unjust.

Well I will also be unpopular - and stone the crows, but I am actually in agreement with Houllebecq on something. Martin_C and Pericles also make some good points.

Frankly I don't think we can afford paid maternity leave (PML) in the current climate.

Firstly, unless it is a universal government scheme it will increase pressure on small business and if it is a taxpayer funded scheme it will mean reductions in other infrastructure to support it. I don't think PML is more important than improving the health system or the public transport system or innovative alternative energy initiatives just to name three.

It also ignores women/men/families who choose to stay at home and raise their children who are not currently in the system ie.the 'paid' workforce.

And it is a policy that is borne of, and perpetuatues the economic myth of consumption and expansionism - in other words the push to get everyone in the workforce contributing to the economy while the issues of raising children are conveniently ignored.

While maternity leave enables working women to stay at home with their babies for a short time, what about those who do not want to use institutionalised child care? Is the value of a woman/man who wishes to raise their children at home any less from an economic or social perspective than those who return to the workforce?

One of the failures of feminism was to devalue the role of parenting and while trying to be equal to men in the workforce, we forgot about the importance of family. As a society we have become indoctrinated with the idea of 'career' as being of value and conversely the role of caregiver as less valuable. Sacrifice has become a dirty word.

The emphasis is on 'working families' while ignoring other choices such as child raising, single by choice or childless by choice. Why are child care workers paid at one of the lowest rates in the country? Because the true cost of child care would make it impossible and we have to ask does middle class welfare come at a cost?

Phanto-: I want a Ferrari and it is my right to expect taxpayers to provide it for me.

A future generation of children is going to provide society with a heap more benefits than a ferrari. In fact tomorrows children are our only future. They will be the future consumers to provide the lovely profits and the future workers to help make those profits and carry society forward.
Maybe women should just give up and stop having children. Because of the attitude of people like yourself and others I have read on this site who think they can survive without a society around them.

As for funding, stop putting other countries and their children before the welfare of our own children and spend some of those foreign aid billions at home here. The people in those countries hate us anyway. Look after your own first. I'm always suspicious of do gooders who are out helping everyone else while their own children suffer. Charity begins at home.

Pelican- One of the failures of feminism was to devalue the role of parenting, while maternity leave enables working women to stay at home with their babies for a short time, what about those who do not wish to use institutionalised daycare.

Spot on Pelican, what I said to Phanto about overseas foreign aid being redirected to our own mothers and babies here I said not so much in defence of paid maternity leave as in defence of motherhood and fatherhood (parenthood) in general and I don't see why it couldn't be paid as a wage to whichever parent elects to stay home for a few years to care for an infant. Why do we give money to some societies to the north of us who make no secret of their hatred of us. Why are their families more important than the welfare of our own.

"...while their own children suffer."

Too right Pelican. A report released in October 2008 by the Australian Law Reform Commission showed that the number of children requiring protection from their OWN parents has trebled in the last decade.
http://www.bigpond.com/news/national/content/20081003/2381395.asp

I would much rather my tax money is spent addressing this matter than being redirected to yuppie-breeders because they want their baby and eat out too.

The bottom line is that despite all of the endless hand-wringing and angst about the state of the nation's children, assistance isn't being directed toward kids at the greatest risk. It's a charade designed by and for yupppie-breeders who aren't thrilled with the consequences of their own choices, who either feel guilty that they don't spend enough time with their children or are irate at the financial impact that children have on them after having lived as DINKS. Who, after decades of funding welfare for the poor, no matter how parsimonious, are now demanding theirs.

In less than a generation family size has fallen by about one child, but the number of rooms required in a typical family home has increased. A typical house was 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, a combined living/dining room. Most families had one car and, if they had 2, the second was a generation old. There was no cable internet, weekly trips to cafes,air-con. Status requires both parents to work so that the family has 2 4WDs, an air-conditioned four bedroom house, with 2 or 3 bathrooms, study and family room that occupies the entire block of land together with the lastest mod-cons. The trend in the latest whizz-bang and fashionable gadgetry sees the "must-have" household items superseded on an almost exponential level.

Most people these days keep themselves dissatisfied with their income by always comparing themselves with people who have more and never with people who have less who they rarely see up close. The yupppie-breeders seem to expect to have a zero-sum impact after they have whelped; they want to continue living like the DINKs next door and they expect the childless and working poor to pay for it.