No return to the bad old '50s
The abolition of the operational subsidies for centre-based long day care announced in last week's budget is a direct and vicious attack, not just on working mothers, but on the majority of women.
Already, parents pay an average $140 per week per child for centre-based long day care. They recoup, on average, a $43 cash rebate. Removal of the subsidies will result in a fee increase of around $25 per week per child.
Since 1983, the number of children in care in Australia has increased by more than 500%. This growth is a direct result of the fact that 60% of women — more than ever before — are in the work force. Most women have no choice: it is virtually impossible for single parents (most of whom are women) to survive on social security payments, and most two-parent families require both incomes to pay the bills.
For many women, however, the difference between take-home pay and child-care costs is already so small that the question of whether to stay in the work force is posed. For many, the increase in child-care fees will tip the balance. As a result, more women will have even less economic security and independence.
The majority of users of centre-based long day care are low-income or single-parent families. The Coalition's funding cuts will force many into the cheaper options of family day care or informal child-care.
Family day care, which will be bursting at the seams following the cuts to centre-based care, is highly exploitative. The carers, almost all women, look after others' children in their own homes. They are relatively isolated and un-unionised, earn less than $6 an hour and receive no sick or holiday pay, annual leave, maternity leave or paid training time.
The other no-choice "option", informal care, is even worse. Most of this too is provided by women — grandmothers, neighbours at home during the day. While informal child-care can play a valuable role on an occasional basis, when substituted for long day care services, it is dangerous (unregulated for quality) and exploitative (unrecognised as real work). Indeed, it was the eradication of widespread "backyard child-care", with all its associated risks to the well-being of children, that strongly motivated the women's movement for community based child-care centres more than two decades ago.
The withdrawal of operational subsidies will force many long day care centres to close — despite their long waiting lists. To minimise the fee increases required, those centres that do keep operating will be under enormous pressure to cut costs by stretching the child/staff ratio, skimping on equipment and maintenance and convincing staff to give up wage increases and working conditions. Again, it is women who will suffer, if not as mothers, then as child-care workers.
Most women in Australia have children at some point in their lives, and women as a whole are still considered responsible for (and still carry out) most of the child-care. Genuine access to high quality, socially provided child-care is not, therefore, some abstract "women's right". It is a precondition to women being able to live full lives as equal members of society.
For the same reason, the Coalition's push to re-privatise responsibility for child-care is a precondition to its bigger project of cutting public spending and reducing the cost of labour by re-shackling women to Kinder, Küche, Kirche. If it succeeds, the return to the bad old '50s will be accompanied by all the isolation, poverty, depression, domestic violence and slave wages that generations of women campaigning for child-care provision fought so hard to escape.
We must not let the Coalition do this to women. We must stop this budget.
By Lisa Macdonald