Freedom Socialist Bulletin • Number 36 • Summer/Autumn 2007 "Free?! This is utopian. Impossible!" say many feminists who believe strongly in women's right to childcare. Not only is this solution to an ever-growing problem for working people possible and realistic, it's urgent. For most parents, childcare is beyond reach. In the past decade of the Howard Government's privatisation regime, affordable community-based centres have largely disappeared. In their place have grown corporate childcare chains. One of these, ABC Learning, has become the world's leading stockmarket-listed childcare business. The conglomerate runs more than 800 centres in Australia, compared to the hundred run by its nearest rival, Kids' Campus. In four years, ABC Learning's float on the stock exchange shot up from $25 million to $1.2 billion. Stephen Long, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's economic correspondent, once aptly branded this Big Mac of childcare as a "playground of profit," with more than 50% of its returns coming from government subsidies. So this is Australia's childcare system. In 2004, the national average weekly cost for 50 hours of care was $208. In New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, the average was closer to $230 per week. The federal government provides a 30% tax rebate on childcare costs as well as the Child Care Benefit, a free relief system which is insultingly inadequate. In NSW, one-child households earning $65,000 spent 15% of their disposable income on childcare — after government subsidies. For those with two children, this rose to 25%! Besides the cost, childcare hours and regulations are so restrictive that parents —†mainly mothers — are totally stressed by the end of the day: managing a household and a job are hard enough, but getting kids to childcare and racing back to work without incurring an after-hours penalty is really tough. For sole parents and shift workers, the juggling of time, responsibilities and money is even harder. Most working women earn less than $600 a week, and nearly 75% of families pay less than $100 per week on childcare. "Informal" childcare, provided by family members and friends, is the only alternative for the majority of working parents. In 2004, grandparents accounted for 25% of all childcare for kids under five years old. Their childminding constitutes much of the $74.5 billion worth of unpaid work they perform each year. When reality is unrealistic. Profit-motivated childcare, which shuts out most parents because of its cost and lack of places, is the cruel reality. But it's justifiable only to a minority, like ABC Learning's CEO, Eddy Groves, who is worth $272 million, and Liberal Senator Bronwyn Bishop, who heads a federal parliamentary committee which in December revealed its idea of a "solution" to the childcare crisis. The Howard Government is faced with a dilemma. The global economy is in a tailspin. The shortage of skilled labour is threatening profits, and corporate cartels are counting on women's reproduction, along with draconian industrial legislation, to fix this. In Australia, the lack of a national paid maternity leave scheme, the attacks on women's limited access to abortion services and the gutting of childcare have been strategies to force women back home to breed and raise the desperately needed labour. But it also needs women in the workforce. According to an Access Economics estimate, more women in employment could add 2.8 % - 4.4 % to the national income. But Howard's last 10 years in power have made it near impossible for women to work and have children. In December 2006, a survey of the Universities of Queensland and New South Wales revealed that across Australia, four out of 10 women on 12 months' unpaid maternity leave return to work within nine months. About 25% go back within six months, and 10% when their babies are three months old. Unpaid maternity leave is a luxury that working women simply can't afford! Only a sharp eye could find this report in the press, but in that same month, the Bishop parliamentary team's recommendations were splashed all over the news. Most critical were its proposals to remove the fringe benefits tax (borne by employers) from employer-provided childcare, make work-related childcare tax deductible, extend government payments for in-home care, such as nannies, and create a special visa for the introduction of a national au pair system. What is practical and necessary for the profit system is hell for working people. The Bishop committee's plan is a poorly disguised boost for business at the expense of wage earners and the most poor. Remember the Goods and Services Tax (GST)? Any working or unemployed person only has to look at a sales docket or bill to see how the burden for the economic crisis has been dumped onto them. In the case of childcare, taxpayers will pay the escalating bills —†the proportionately highest payers being the lowest paid, mainly women. Fifty percent, or more, will end up in the accounts of Eddy Groves and his shareholders. This is perfectly reasonable to Groves and the power dressers who can afford childcare —†and nannies. But it's unrealistic for everyone else, including the 162,000+ working mothers stuck at home without childcare, whose numbers will surely soar. The real fix. Here are counter-recommendations that are practical, possible and badly needed:
Ending corporate welfare would make all this possible. Here's an encouraging statistic: one Collins Class Submarine ($1.1 billion) would pay for 250,000 childcare places, 33,700 public hospital beds or 173,000 government school places. It's time that subsidies to business — in the form of government contracts, tax breaks, privatisation and bailouts — stop. The only thing preventing us from turning the tables is the defeatist idea that we can't. The reality is that, once working people pool together our needs and our power, we can! Debbie Brennan |
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