Â鶹´«Ã½

With preparations under way for International Women's Day, 1996, we are reminded of the demands of the women's movement over the decades. In the 1970s, women were demanding free, 24-hour child-care services for all. Two decades later, a large number of families in Australia do not have access to quality child-care. Over the years there has been much ado about government programs to improve child-care, but the results have been dubious. There is still no strategy to provide child-care universally. In fact, information is not even collected about how many places are needed. All we do know is that parents can currently expect to be on a waiting list for two years before obtaining child-care. Without adequate child-care services, women usually end up taking individual responsibility. This seriously undermines their right to engage in paid work. Exposing the high level of hidden unemployment among mothers at home, the Institute of Family Studies found in 1995 that 60% of full-time mothers would prefer to do some paid work. Recognising that the supply did not meet the demand for child-care, and in an attempt to win more of the "women's vote", the Labor Party used the 1993 federal election campaign to propose a child-care subsidy. If it wasn't clear then that this measure would benefit only a small number of wealthy women, statistics have just been released that prove it. The paper, Australia's Child Care Subsidies: A Distributional Analysis, reveals that 27% of the total child-care subsidy goes to families in the top four income brackets. Families in the top brackets "are more likely to receive the Childcare Cash Rebate as they have children in child-care more often and spend more on child-care than families on low incomes." In the federal election, it is increasingly clear that both major parties are seeking to privatise child-care in one way or another. The Coalition's big promise is to bolster the incomes of families which choose to have one parent stay at home to care for children. John Howard does not acknowledge that the "one parent" at home will probably be the woman, or that the majority of full-time mothers would actually prefer to work. Labor's record is little better. Over the past decade, government funding for child-care has increased three-fold. But a huge proportion of that increase has been in the form of either subsidies to businesses to set up work-based child-care (services they, not the public purse, should pay for), or subsidies to private, profit-making centres. Under Labor, the number of family day-care places, (in which individual women care for other people's children in their own home at rates of pay below the minimum wage), has also increased dramatically. The provision of public, community-based child-care services has been severely neglected. The number of community-based child-care places increased by a mere 18% between 1987 and 1994, compared with a 36% increase in all other types of care. In 1994, there were more places available in private centres than any other type of care. For so long as the sexual division of labour in this society dictates that women take primary responsibility for children in the isolation of the family home, cheap, convenient, high quality, public child-care services, available around the clock, are a precondition to women's participation as equals in all spheres of life. That demand, raised loudly and clearly in the 1970s, is no less relevant today. By Trish Corcoran