Paid parental leave is not a reason to have a child

I first wrote this in response to a remark quoted in a newspaper, in which a federal politician suggested that women have children in order to collect a government payment. I have not been able to verify the wording, the date or the context of that quotation, so neither the quote nor the name appears here. The idea behind it is worth answering anyway, because it comes back every few years.

The claim, stripped of its heat, is that paid parental leave functions as a financial incentive to become pregnant. Set that against what having a child actually involves.

There is the pregnancy, and the medical appointments that go with it. There is the birth. There are the months of broken sleep that follow, which anyone who has lived through them will tell you cannot be costed. There is childcare, which is a household cost that continues for years. There is the interruption to a career, which in my observation does not end when the leave ends. And then there is the raising of the child, which is most of two decades of responsibility and comes with no end date that anyone honours.

Against all of that, a period of paid leave. Nobody makes that trade for money. Anyone who did would be the worst negotiator in the country.

What bothers me about the argument is not only that it is wrong. It is what it distracts from. Framing working mothers as the problem requires ignoring how much unpaid work keeps this country running: the caring, the cooking, the school pickups, the managing of ageing parents, the domestic administration that appears on nobody's payroll and is still done, disproportionately, by women. That work is not free. It is unpaid, which is not the same thing, and unpaid work is easy to leave out of an argument about cost.

Paid parental leave is not a windfall. It is a partial and temporary acknowledgement that having and raising a child is work with value, and that a country which needs the next generation might reasonably contribute something towards the cost of producing it.

There is a real debate to be had about the design of any such scheme: how long it should run, who is eligible, how it interacts with superannuation, whether it reaches casual and self employed workers, and whether it is structured so that fathers use it. I would welcome that debate.

It is a different conversation from the one that begins by treating mothers as opportunists, and we will not get to it while the first conversation keeps being had instead.