Thursday began with reports of wayward lions and never-ending lines of parents wanting to put their kid into childcare. The latter story isn’t quite as eye-catching but more far-reaching for the nation.
”Childcare operators say they are struggling to fill vacancies,” an ABC report warned. ”The government says its new subsidies will allow 37,000 parents to work full-time. But the sector says there are not enough workers to support that.”
So it’s a fairly familiar saga. Parents can’t get places and are threatened with fee rises. Childcare operators, unable to find or keep staff, want wage subsidies. The fresh aspect is the hope that the Albanese government’s industrial relations changes will drive up the low wages and help fill the 7000 vacancies in the sector.
In wider terms, it’s also a saga driven by the avoidance of the patently obvious. But then Australians have a seemingly limitless capacity to look at the world with fingers over their eyes, screening out the inconvenient bits. We are not alone in that trait, but we are darn good at it. Somebody should do something about a problem, but that somebody isn’t me.
Overcrowded cities? Well, you move to one of those regional towns crying out for people. Rising sea levels? We need to enact a ”managed retreat” from the coast, but I can’t give up my property quite yet. A heating planet? Let’s stop those exports of toxic coal, iron ore and gas, as long as those delivery vans keep rolling up our driveways and those boxes of goodies plonked on our doorstep. Social housing? Of course, but it’s not in character with our neighbourhood. Wind generators and solar farms? Definitely, somewhere out past the rabbit wire where Barnaby’s people live.
And more childcare workers so parents can make a quicker return to the workforce? Well, you take the low pay and the limited joys of cleaning up and ”teaching” professional people’s kids before those kids head off to big school. Or you (taxpayer) top up the wages, to ensure the dog-chasing-its-tail effect of: have child, take up to 26 weeks’ leave, go part-time, then get Noah or Amelia into the local childcare centre where a 23-year-old female (and it’s mostly going to be a female) is happily minding richer people’s kids, until she decides to have kids of her own, and starts paying taxes to cover the next generation: the next generation of women minding other women’s kids, that is.
This is not an attack on anybody’s desire or need to keep up their career and it’s definitely not an attack on working mothers, who perform incredible juggling acts. Higher wages are crucial to elevating the status of an occupation. Look at the medical profession, where the unwillingness of its students to commit to the long hours and low financial rewards of general practice continues to undermine Medicare.
No, this is a cry of frustration at politicians (and academics, professional associations and advocates of many stripes) who continue peddle the fantasy that we can simultaneously elevate child-minding to a well-paid, fulfilling profession while continuing to imply that full-time parenthood, motherhood specifically, even for a few years, is a second-rate occupation or even a waste of skills. Many journalists are part of that fantasy too.
”More Australian parents could soon be forced to stay at home and not go to work as childcare centres face staff shortages,” that ABC report warned. Yes, forced to look after their own kids. Few in the media (one honourable exception being Virginia Tapscott) seem willing to challenge that mindset.
Childhood: the new frontier of economic rationalism (with some help from Twiggy)
Mark Sawyer is a journalist with extensive experience in print and digital media in Sydney, Melbourne and rural Australia.