A s referred to in last week’s editorial, a crisis of childcare is really a crisis of motherhood, of parents, of families and of children, therefore a crisis of society, a symptom that something is deeply wrong in our very midst.
That Perth and Australia have a crisis of childcare is because the society we have constructed does not actually deeply value any of these things for their real and intrinsic worth.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem revealed by the discovery that there are not enough childcare places in Perth for children aged 0-24 months.
And if childcare is a crisis, in any sense, of motherhood it is also necessarily a crisis of fatherhood because the two things cannot, and should not, ordinarily be separated as a normal state of affairs.
To question our society’s addiction and pressure to enter the system of childcare can be a dangerous thing.
It invites the dismissal that one who questions the status quo is some sort of dissident retrograde individual, insensitive to the needs of families and especially the needs of women.
Childcare, after all, has come to be a god of political correctness.
Childcare, after all, frees mothers – in the main – to work to support their family, to win economic empowerment for themselves, to become economically contributing members of society, thereby contributing to the common good.
Or so we have been consistently told over many years. And yet little of this is actually true.
One wonders why any infant aged from 0-24 months should be separated on a consistent and protracted basis from its parents and especially from its mother?
That this is considered a normal practice gives some idea of the deep nature and real scope of the problem.
The importance of the issue can also be glimpsed in the fact that increased funding for childcare places has been regularly embraced by some political parties in Australia in recent years as a strategy for winning votes.
In fact, if politics in Australia was ever to be conducted on any sane basis, political parties would be scrambling past each other to present voters with policies discouraging the economic pressures on families and mothers to sever family ties and participate in childcare.
The problem, in so far as that it affects women, and therefore mothers, is that over the course of half a century Australia has embraced an economic model which now depends on forcing both members of a couple to work on a full-time basis in order to own their own home.
Home ownership is the great dream of any society but especially the dream of married couples and those wishing to start their own families.
However what began as an attempt to win empowerment for women who were historically paid lower wages than their male counterparts has evolved into an economy which forces many women into the workforce against their own natural desires to be with their children in the early years of their lives.
Far from being a positive, socially empowering economic system, Australia has presided for decades over the development of an economy which is economically and financially anti-family in its effects and the pressures it brings to bear.
If it is anti family, the effects are negative for all members of the family.
What the childcare crisis reveals is actually that what was started in the 1960s stopped after it cleared the first hurdle of ensuring economic equality for women, but without finishing, so to speak, the race.
To ‘finish the race’ in economic terms would have meant constructing an economy which recognised and valued the deep worth of the feminine contribution of motherhood as a real economic factor and the deep and intrinsic importance of the family unit, which is the natural basis of any society.
This is why last week’s editorial in The Record proposed the formulation of a Primary Care Giver’s payment which, in effect, would begin to help short-circuit the tectonic economic pressures now routinely placed on families, but especially on mothers, by economic institutions such as banks and corporate bodies who care not one whit for whether a mother wants to work or to be with her children nor for the family as the most important social unit in the life of the nation.
A Primary Care Giver’s Payment would finish the race begun decades ago because the solution to the problem is to offer women the option that, so far, they have never been offered.
A Primary Care Giver Payment would not need to be the equivalent of a full-time wage but of a sufficient level to give Primary Care Givers, almost all of whom would be mothers, the option to decide which they would want to do.
Australia is a society that often talks the talk of rights for women but it is doubtful that it has ever walked the walk. Couples would be free to designate which – father or mother – is the designated primary care-giver, who would be the recipient of the payment to be indexed against cost of living indices.
The Primary Care Givers’ Payment would free families form the burden of absent parents and the institutionalisation of children in childcare centres.
In recent years Australian governments have provided paid parental leave which extends up to 18 weeks duration but this goes little towards solving the deeper underlying problem.
What is needed is a system that couples with children should regard themselves as entitled to for years and which should be paid by state and federal governments on the principle that they are acknowledging the primary social and economic importance of families and, in particular, mothers.
A Primary Care Givers’ Payment is also a moment of opportunity.
Although the present system is inhuman and unjust towards parents, families, children and mothers, it is not insoluble.
In time, it could prove to be an election-winning measure.