Too little time

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.