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Too little time

By Emma Simone - posted Wednesday, 30 August 2006


In June 2003, Prime Minister John Howard announced a House of Representatives inquiry into changes to the Family Law Act. The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs (FCAC) produced a report, Every Picture Tells a Story - Report on the Inquiry into Child Custody Arrangements in the Event of Family Separation. One of the principal aims of the inquiry, Mr Howard said, would be to determine whether there “should be a presumption that children will spend equal time with each parent”. The issue of custody after marital separation has created intense interest within the Australian community.

Custody patterns in Australia have changed markedly over time, due to a combination of lobbying and legislative changes. Marilyn Lake from La Trobe University points out that during the 1920s and 1930s women had to fight for custody of their own children on two fronts. Not only were husbands automatically granted custody of their children in divorce proceedings, but working-class women faced the prospect of losing their children due to “new claims by the state to the guardianship of those deemed ‘neglected’”.

The story of custody after marriage breakdown in Australia has changed dramatically since then. In recent decades it has overwhelmingly been women who have been granted majority custody. The FCAC report cites Family Court of Australia figures demonstrating that in 2000-01, only 2.5 per cent of custody arrangements involved equal residency between parents. From this perspective, the Prime Minister’s push for equal-time custody represents a potentially massive legal and cultural shift.

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The FCAC report and the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs’ Report on the Exposure Draft of the Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Bill 2005 have ultimately informed the creation of The Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Bill 2005.

Contrary to the Prime Minister’s initial push, the Bill does not include a rebuttable presumption of shared parenting time, rather a presumption of shared parental responsibility. This means both parents equally share responsibility for any major decisions that will affect their child. The presumption is revoked if a parent is deemed by the court to be unfit.

Nonetheless, an Attorney General’s Department media release stresses, “where both parents share responsibility, consideration will also be given to the children spending equal or at least substantial time with both parents”. Clearly, regardless of the FCAC rejection of the rebuttable presumption of equal parenting time, the government is strongly encouraging the courts to consider such an arrangement as the starting point in cases where both parents are requesting sole custody.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) gave evidence to the FCAC Committee on the changing roles of men and women within marriage, and the consequent need to look at ways of rethinking post-separation custody arrangements. This notion of change is echoed in Every Picture Tells a Story, which asserts that 96 per cent of Australian fathers support the notion that mothers and fathers should “share the responsibility for bringing up children equally”.

However, as the report also highlights, “these attitudes are not reflected in the work that men and women do in the home”. From studies dealing with the actual time-diary evidence (pdf 8KB) of mothers’ and fathers’ contact with their children, Lyn Craig, from the University of New South Wales argues that although Australian surveys indicate both men and women “express strongly egalitarian attitudes towards parenting”, her research reflects that these attitudes are not carried out in practice. As she states, “because a social practice is generally regarded as desirable, it doesn’t mean it’s actually happening. Often changes in social attitudes run ahead of actual behaviour”.

The significance of the issue of child care is highlighted in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) 2005 Discussion Paper, Striking the Balance, which attempts to explain the difference in rates of custody for mothers and fathers.

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The HREOC stresses that “shared parenting after separation depends on whether shared parenting is in place prior to relationship breakdown”. Statistics (pdf 159KB) collected by the National Association of Community Legal Centres reflect that “fathers are highly involved in day-to-day care of the children in only 5 to 10 per cent of families, and share the physical care equally in only 1 to 2 per cent of families”.

The marked discrepancy between what fathers are saying and actually doing requires some explanation. Studies have highlighted one area in particular affecting men’s participation in child care - both pre- and post-separation: their place within the workforce. A policy research paper for the Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) reveals what most of us already knew: “men find that it is difficult to fit family around the demands of work. Most men agreed they did not find enough time for their families”.

The HREOC survey of 1,000 Australian men found “more than half believed that the major barriers to being involved as fathers were related to their participation in paid work, in particular work load or work commitments”. The HREOC paper also reported an underlying belief within Australian society that corporate culture, “views workplace arrangements to care for children as irrelevant for men”. The FACS paper highlights that most men who wish to engage in shared parenting are faced with the same choice that women have long had to make, that is, between children and career.

The fact that mothers generally bear greater (unpaid) responsibility for the day-to-day care of their children means that their access to a variety of workplace opportunities is necessarily restricted There are only so many hours in a day.

Australian Democrats Senator Natasha Stott Despoja has argued that a combination of inadequate childcare places, the lack of a national scheme of paid maternity leave, few workplace supports for working parents, and women’s over-representation in “insecure, casual positions” has meant that the workforce participation rate of women in Australia with two or more children is the second lowest in the OECD.

The Government has placed no limit on child care costs, so some parents pay between $90 and $110 per day just so they can go to work. Men with families, too, are also often “locked-in” to traditional gender roles, particularly that of family breadwinner, because their earning capacity is generally greater than women’s, even within the same industry and job description.

It often makes more economic sense for the woman to stop working or reduce working hours to become the primary carer of their children. As a consequence, both the woman and children of the partnership become economically dependent on the male. This economic reliance may very well account for the fact that fathers “of young children are likely to be working a greater number of hours than all men”.

In a paper presented to the Fabian Society, Sara Charlesworth from RMIT University’s Centre for Applied Social Research, suggested one possible solution to the problem of work-family balance was the “strengthening” of part-time work, which has overwhelmingly been the realm of women.

As a FACS policy paper observed, men rarely work part-time. The FACS paper emphasises the very real disadvantages currently tied to part-time work: few social benefits such as holiday or sick pay, “low prospects for advancement and promotion”, “worse staff-management relations”, among others. Sara Charlesworth argues that access to part-time work needs to be created at all levels, including senior and executive levels, and part-time workers need the same benefits and job protection as full-time workers.

For such a move to be ultimately effective the traditionally gendered nature of such work needs to change, and “how to include men” becomes an important issue.

A 2003 survey by Relationships Australia found, “Eighty-nine per cent of Australians agreed that relationships suffer because of work-life conflict”. In particular, the lack of time that married couples can spend together was seen as the biggest negative influence on relationships.

Striking the Balance emphasises that women who are in the paid workforce and also bear the greater responsibility for unpaid work within the home, feel “anger, tiredness and strain” to such an extent that for some it becomes “grounds for divorce”.

A survey of 779 dual-income marriages found that “women who perceive their division of household labour as unfair are more likely to divorce than those who perceive their share of housework to be fair”.

Men are also feeling the strain of the work-life balance. The pressure to be the breadwinner and work long hours is not only potentially detrimental to their health and general well-being, but leads to “insufficient breaks from workplace stress and insufficient time to devote to family and intimate relationships”. This is reflected in a 1999 survey of 1,000 Australian men, 68 per cent of whom believed they “did not spend enough time with their children”.

The recent industrial relations changes will clearly exacerbate existing feelings of discontent within relationships. There is a very real possibility that marital dissatisfaction and pressure will increase, and divorce figures rise as a result of changes in the Government’s workplace policies. Senator Stott Despoja stresses that the changes in legislation will mean “many parents, especially those on lower incomes, will lose precious family time … including time for holidays together and time off to see the school play or sports day”.

Referring to a study by 17 academics of the Government’s IR changes, Professor Russell Lansbury claims the changes will “damage the fabric of Australian society by encouraging poorly paid jobs with irregular hours, little security and a worsening work-family balance”. And, the group stresses, “evidence shows that individualised employment arrangements result in lower work and family benefits. The proposed changes can only exacerbate these problems”.

This is a stance reflected by the OECD finding that there is only a “’low penetration’ of family-friendly work practices in Australia”.

One might reasonably wonder if the right hand of the Howard Government knows what the left hand is doing in the two areas of family law and industrial relations policy.

In 1999, John Howard gave a speech detailing his government’s national families’ strategy. Stressing the importance of the family unit he said “a stable functioning family still represents the best that any community has devised and certainly the least expensive”.

Earlier in the same speech Howard argued, “[e]veryone knows from their social welfare system experience in dealing with marriage breakdown … that financial pressures are one of the principal reasons why relationships come apart”. Howard’s own words make one wonder how he can emphasise the importance of the family and then justify his industrial relations reforms.

As Charlesworth stresses, true gender equality means men and women have the same opportunities to “participate fully in nurturing and paid work”. This is why the changes to family law and industrial relations are intrinsically inter-related: work and family life cannot be considered separately.

The changes on both fronts represent a short-sighted view of the reality of lived experience. If the Government wants to push for men to have joint custody of their children after divorce, it will have to introduce industrial reforms that make this possible prior to marriage breakdown. Such measures would no doubt lead to a reduction of divorce rates in the first place, through decreased family pressure and marital dissatisfaction.

If the government wants greater female participation in the workforce, it has to create reforms that re-design the very notion of part-time work, to no longer be work that under-utilises women’s skills and carries few if any benefits or prospects of advancement. The option of part-time work needs to be made sufficiently attractive that men do not feel they are throwing away their careers if they decide to devote more time to their families.

Families need the option of shared responsibility and equal parenting time before relationships break down, to ever hope to equitably have it after.

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About the Author

Emma Simone is a postgraduate student working in the areas of literature and philosophy.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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