Is the PPL debate missing something?

I know it's not very PC of me as a feminist to question paid parental leave, but I do wonder about government provision of it. When a worker gets sick, who pays for sick leave? The employer.  When their mother dies, who pays compassionate leave? The employer. When their son goes into hospital, who pays family leave? The employer. So why is it a government responsibility to provide parental leave, not an employer responsibility? Is it not reasonable to expect employers to provide a minimum parental leave in the same way as they have to provide sick leave, annual leave, long service leave?

When parental leave is provided by the government, I think it moves from being a workplace right to a welfare payment. Which in itself is problematic - do we want family leave to be a worker's right or a welfare payment? And since when have welfare payments been either the equivalent of the minimum wage or an actual wage replacement?  Why is parental leave paid by the government not paid at the rate of other income support? I don't really have a problem with a welfare based parental payment either, but what we have is some weird combination of employment conditions and welfare provision. Does sickness allowance get paid at the minumum wage or wage replacement? No. Why not? If one is sick for months but has a job to return to, is it not a very similar position to be in?

Of course, everyone talks about paid parental leave being good for women. Which is sort of is, but it sort of isn't. It's only good for women because women continue to be the primary carers. And despite the occasional non gendered language such as I am stubbornly sticking to, that it is regularly referred to as maternal leave. Saying it benefits mothers is freely admitting that women are expected to continue to be the primary carers. And nothing about these policies is going to change that. Until we address the underlying social issues and assumptions that lead to women doing more than their fair share of the caring work, no amount of "parental leave" will change this situation. It just continues to admit that women care for babies despite clear evidence that babies can bond and be cared for by a whole range of people as long as their are available, loving and responsive to the baby's needs. Saying fathers can't do that is a mix of sentencing women to do the work, excusing men from it and underestimating men's capacities.

Why are family measures in budgets always "good for women"? If we didn't have the dreary expectation that it is women doing the work in families, family benefits would be good for, well, families ... Whilst the current reality sadly is that women do most of the work in families, I don't think it challenges that idea to continually focus on family business as women's business. Women can, should and do have many other aspects to their lives, and strangely enough, quite a lot of them don't involve families. Some women are too young to have them. Have not decided when or if to have them. Have been unable to have them. Chose not to have them. Have been there done that. Have them, but they are not the major source of issues in their lives. So really, when we talk about them being good for women, they are really only good for certain women at certain times of their lives in the current state of labour division. I'm not sure how good that really is.

Carrot or the stick? Or maybe just plain old fashioned assistance?

The budget papers suggest the govt is going to save $500 million dollars in child care benefits from it no jab/no pay policy. Well, now we know it's got nothing to do with increasing immunisation rates then.  If they thought the policy would actually increase immunisation rates, they would expect to still be paying the child care benefits. And in all honesty, they are probably right. Because how are you going to convince a bunch of people concerned about whether immunisation is all a big pharma/government conspiracy to immunise their children by trying to force them? Any sensible person would expect a knee jerk reaction of, "See it really is a conspiracy. They probably have microchips in the vaccines to keep track of everyone in the future".

Children who aren't vaccinated fall into those in families with socioeconomic problems such that they fall through the maternal and child health system and miss a lot a care as a result. Or those who come from countries where routine vaccinations just didn't happen. Or those who have deeply held, if misinformed, health/social/political concerns with vaccination. Are any of these going to be converted by the no jab/no pay policy? Probably not. The first two groups need intensive support to address the issues that have lead to them missing our on vaccinations and the third need to be provided with information in a non-aggressive manner and their concerns listened to respectfully and addressed appropriately. Of course, if you are going to consider religious objection to be a valid reason to not vaccinate, I don't quite see how other philosophical, non-scientific objection are any different.

But now we see that the government never really intended this to be a policy to address vaccination rates, but a way to save money on childcare benefits. Real action would provide further funding to access and support the families that need care. Carrots don't reach them through the complexities of their lives and sticks just put them further behind, whilst those holding "conscientious objections" tend to be well off enough to not be swayed by either.

Today seems like as good a day as any to withdraw our ambassador from the USA.

Today seems like as good a day as any to withdraw our ambassador from the USA. And China. Saudi Arabia. Singapore. Quite a few places really. While we are at it, maybe we should kick out all ambassadors to Australia from any countries that do follow international law and human rights treaties and save those countries the trouble of following Tony's new found ethical example.

Who needs sleep anyway? #penaltyrates

Oh those poor multinational companies paying penalty rates. I know running a small cafe can be a marginal business, but when we hear all this carry on about penalty rates, this is the only sort of business we hear about. No one mentions McDonalds, Starbucks, Shell or Coles. Or pubs, hotels and casinos. There are plenty of big players in the hospitality industry as well. Is it my cynicism that these are the drivers of the campaign against penalty rates, not small town cafes? Of course, it doesn't look so good to say a multi-billion dollar company has the shits with paying its lowly employees something in compensation for not having normal free time.

Shift work sucks. I have done it for many years in a variety of fields, and it is something to be tolerated not enjoyed. We pay more for evenings, nights and weekends, because these are the times people normally get together, relax, play sport and not the least, sleep. When do we have family dinners, birthday parties, BBQs, festivals, dance parties, weddings, sporting matches or just casual get togethers? It's very rarely at 2pm on Tuesday afternoon. When your friends or partner work normal hours, shift work is a sure fire way to minimise the amount of time you get to spend together. If you have kids, it's a sure fire way to reduce the amount of time you spend with them. It stuffs with your sleeping and eating patterns and has been shown to be detrimental to physical and emotional health.

If a night club objects to paying penalty rates, they could try opening on Tuesday at 2pm instead. I mean, it won't cost them as much. But then again, they might not get a lot of business. Some businesses just are suited to running out of normal business hours, and the price of running one is paying people to work out of normal business hours. It's not like these businesses went into it blind, it's been the case for 100 years.

These days, I'm a nurse. I hate working nights. I don't want to work nights, Tony, do you think the patients' families could just come in and look after them from 11pm so I could just go home to bed? Really, I don't think I am paid anywhere near enough to be desperately trying to go to sleep at 4pm in order to be awake all night then manage to get a few hours sleep in the morning before wandering around like a zombie until it all repeats again the next night. $67.70. That's it. A flat $67.70 night shift allowance for all that suffering. That's a 20% penalty rate. To work all bloody night.

But even if they were willing, neither Tony nor the patients' families could actually look after the patients safely, so I accept that much as I hate it, I will have to work nights. Someone needs to. And that is a basic fact of a lot of shift work. We aren't just talking about being able to get a coffee on a public holiday (and what is stopping these cafes from charging a public holiday surcharge if they are struggling so bloody much anyway?).  We are talking about nurses, doctors, carers, welfare workers, ambos, police, firepeople. And other unromantic jobs like cleaners, shelf packers and checkout operators. We all rely on someone doing this work. Strangely enough, only one of those jobs is renowned for its good income and even then, those doctors doing shift work aren't usually high in their pay spectrum. But it's ok to campaign to pay even less to these people already at the low end of income in Australia.

I've got this great idea. How much more productive could we be if all jobs were 24 hours? We could employ more people, get more things done ... look if all jobs were 24 hours, then we wouldn't have this strange prioritising of certain days over others or this expectation that we could actually sleep at night and we could just pay everyone the same rate for whenever. When Tony and the president of ACCI are awake at 3 am Saturday because they have to work, not because they choose to be out partying, then they can let us know what they think of penalty rates.

Did Tony really put that onion in the right place?

Honestly, it just shits me more every time I think about it. Refusing to provide basic services to remote Aboriginal communities. Did Tony not notice in the midst of the gustatory sensation of the onion that it's a little contradictory to announce a $200, 000, 000 subsidy to enable Tasmanian producers to export competitively with mainland producers whilst complaining that remote communities were unsustainable? You see, this isn't competition. It is supporting producers that would be otherwise unsustainable in the free market. Now, I'm not exactly a neoliberal economist, but I do think that neoliberal economists should accept that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. So until they stop diesel fuel subsidies to mining magnates (incidently, Gina earns my annual income in 3.3 minutes, http://www.howrichareyou.com.au/) and other myriad subsidies and tax breaks to people and industries generally doing a heck of a lot better and costing a heck of a lot more than remote Aboriginal communities, well, I think Tony should shove that onion up the other end of his digestive tract.

Hello kidney!

I love kidneys. I really came to love my kidneys the first time I worked in a dialysis unit. To be blunt, dialysis sucks. 3 days a week for 5 hours, you are connected up to a machine that is no where near as mobile as you own kidneys, ie, you are stuck in a chair whilst it does what your kidneys have nicely done for you for all the preceding years.  To add insult to injury, you should see the size of the needles they have to use to connect you up to the machine. And the surgery to create a fistula of an artery and vein to put said enormous needle in. And the scar tissue that builds up until you have a massive lump growing out of your arm from it. When you want to go away, you have to find another dialysis centre to attend because you can't go more than a day or 2 without your 5 hours of compulsory leisure time bonding with the dialysis machine.

Chronic kidney failure requiring dialysis in our indigenous population is something horrendous like 4 times the rate of the rest of us. And then, they are more likely to live far from the necessary services and be more concerned about accessing services that have often not been culturally appropriate. Whenever I get the chance, I tell people to look after their kidneys, because they do us amazing favours every moment of every day. Modern lifestyle illnesses such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension trash your kidneys.

 Chronic kidney failure massively reduces your quality of life. Dialysis increases your risk for nasty blood infections. And kidney failure will eventually kill you. It's particularly tragic that Aboriginal Australians suffer so much from it. Indigenous Australians suffer from massive social-economic problems that impact on their health as well as frequently having limited access to health care and facing culturally insensitive services. Low birth weight, malnutrition, challenging living conditions, high rates of infections, tobacco and alcohol use and the rapid change in diet and lifestyle resulting from dispossession and resultant modern lifestyle illnesses all increase their risk for kidney failure and it's just crap that as a society we like to blame individuals rather than looking at the social context in which this happens. Yet new diagnoses of 10 times the rate of other Australians, even higher in remote communities, are not exactly an individual problem. New diagnoses is those aged 34-55 are especially high. I'm sure you don't need me to point it out, but that's young. Really bloody young. These people are sentenced to life-with-machine and all our government wants to do is complain about the meagre support they provide to remote communities. Maybe real support could actually help cut back these horrific figures.

If we called them towns, would they be treated differently?

The WA government has said it will "close" up to 150 remote Aboriginal communities. Really? Just close them down like they were a shop going out of business?  Now, I get that Colin is premier of a bloody large state with a very dispersed population. I should hope he knew that before he took on the job. I'm sure it is difficult and expensive to provide services to all those remote people, but that doesn't mean you can just close down a few inconveniently remote communities. Anyone in rural Australia could name a few remote towns of small populations that are difficult and expensive to maintain. Over the last 10 years, Victoria has had to run pipelines to most of the north west of the state and provide treated water to umpteen small towns. Did they propose that Noradjuha had to be closed down and the 10 or so households move into Horsham or Nati? Of course not. Noradajuha still has water, mail delivery, garbage collection, a school bus run.

Aboriginal communities typically have schools, general stores, health centres, not to mention homes. Maybe a police station, footy ground, community hall. That sounds an awful lot like a town to me. But by calling them Aboriginal communities (which in and of itself there is nothing wrong with, and maybe the residents even prefer it), it conjures up in the mind of your average ignorant Australian of people living in dirt and humpies. And maybe some do and they like it. Good on them. But I suspect it is a strategy on behalf of the government to separate these homes of indigenous people from what most Australians call towns and try and avoid the appropriate outrage. Because really, our governments support a lot of expensive to maintain stuff. Most of it is for much richer people, organisations, communities and companies than some  isolated communities that already do in tough in myriad ways. Indigenous people do want to live in remote communities for social, family, cultural and health reasons amongst others. Suddenly making them homeless and trying to herd them into slightly larger, still very remote communities may look like it saves a small amount in services, but is going to cost a huge amount in trauma to these people and in managing the high risk of arising social and health problems. And like the NT intervention, when would governments ever risk doing these things to nice white people?