Only connect
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tom Morton
Download the complete article PDF
Tom Morton's biography and other articles by this writer
My first thoughts on family politics for this essay came to me in the middle of a crowd of sweaty, half-naked men, some of them wearing frocks. I'm holding my four-year-old son above my head and dancing while he calls out, "Throw me up in the air, Daddy!" I guess there are a couple of hundred of us in the room, men and women, some in costumes with wolf masks or fairy wings, dancing to drum 'n' bass at 5 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. Outside, the shadows are lengthening across the bowling green; people are standing around talking and drinking, children chasing each other in between their legs. It's ideal family entertainment, a dance party for forty-somethings at a bowling club in Sydney's inner suburbs where you can take the kids. It just so happens that most of the crowd are queer, gay or lesbian, or have been in a former life; but straights are welcome, too, and everyone seems glad to see children here. It feels like a safe, laid-back sort of scene: family-friendly. When the drum 'n' bass gives way to Sister Sledge's disco anthem We are Family, the predictable cheers go up and the kids get down on the dance floor; it's a popular number at their day-care centre.
One part of me can't resist a nagging feeling that there's something all too inner-suburban and elitist about this particular family. It's all very well for us to be celebrating diversity, affirming an idea of family that's inclusive, open to all; and I can't deny there's a certain rather adolescent satisfaction in knowing how shocked the watchful perimeter guards of the nuclear family would be to find themselves in the middle of this colourful crowd. But really, we're just fringe dwellers, straight or gay.
It's not until later that it strikes me: in the modern, deregulated, flexible, free-choice economy of early-twenty-first-century Australia, it's the childless gay or lesbian couple who are the model family. Child-free, unencumbered by the need to pick kids up from school, care for them when they're sick, spend time with them on weekends or take time off in school holidays, gays and lesbians are the stuff employers' dreams are made of; and the Prime Minister's and Treasurer's, one might add.
Of course, that's the sort of thing only a heterosexual could say about gay and lesbian families. Plenty of lesbians and gays do have children; and even if they don't, many are caring for elderly parents, not to speak of maintaining a broad range of friendships and community responsibilities. And what about single people, gay or straight? Don't they have the same commitments and responsibilities, too? Why should the "work-life" balance be an issue for breeders only?
OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, A STEADY STREM OF BOOKS ABOUT THE FAMILY contemporary Australia has been appearing, with increasingly gloomy and often martial titles: Crowded Lives, The End of Equality, The Work/Life Collision, The War over Work. The common theme to all these books is a stark, relatively simple insight: the Howard government's unfolding vision of what the workplace should be is fatally blind to the reality of how families live and work in contemporary Australia. In fact, there's really no place for anyone with family responsibilities in the modern workplace.
Of course, it's a little too trite to lay all the blame for the condition of Australian families at the feet of the Prime Minister and Treasurer. They have simply continued and accelerated sweeping changes to Australian society that were engineered by earlier governments: the deregulation of the economy and the industrial relations system, and a paring-back of the role that government plays in enabling and shaping the choices people have in their lives.
Even for those of who've lived through it as adults, the sheer pace and scope of all this change is hard to comprehend. We now live in one of the most deregulated, casual and flexible economies in the developed world. However, the story of economic change in the past two decades is not all negative for gender equality, either in the home or in the workplace. Women's integration into the workforce in Australia has been aided and abetted by Australia's integration into the global economy. Women fill more than half the jobs that have been created since the early 1990s. It is women who have benefited most from the expansion of the service economy and the growth of part-time jobs that has accompanied it. There is pretty good evidence, from a range of statistical surveys, that the majority of women in part-time jobs are happy with the number of hours they're working and do not want to work more.
However, it's much less clear that women are happy with the conditions that accompany these flexible hours. About two-thirds of all part-time jobs are casual and about half of those casual jobs have no sick leave attached to them, no carer's leave when a child gets sick, no paid holidays to take when school is out. A simple change in the time a shift starts can turn the headlong morning rush to get the children to day care or school and oneself to work into an impossibility.
Exactly that scenario was the subject of an important legal precedent set by the NSW Industrial Relations Tribunal in what's become known as the Steggles Chicken case. Kym Wood, a telesales operator, received a letter out of the blue informing her that she was required to start work at 6.30am instead of 8am. The earlier start time made it impossible for her to take her children to before-school care, which opened at 7am.
Wood and her union took Steggles to the Industrial Relations Tribunal and won the tribunal ruled that she should be allowed to start work at 7.30am, a compromise that suited both her and her employer. But many more similar cases are now beginning to surface, and under the proposed national industrial relations scheme, employees are unlikely to enjoy the sort of legal recourse or protection that Wood sought and gained in NSW.
For the best part of a decade, we've become accustomed to hearing that we are lucky enough to be citizens of a kind of globalising Arcadia, a land of milk, honey and low interest rates, sustained by our economic "wonder Down Under".
In fact, the lived experience of many Australians during the past decade has been a very different one. For lower– and middle-income families, the reality looks more like this: longer working hours, more insecurity and financial stress, increasingly unreliable public services. As the author of The War over Work (Melbourne University Publishing, 2003), Don Edgar, puts it, it's a daily battle "for possession of our bodies and minds: work versus family, boss versus baby, presence at work versus time spent at home, men versus women, young versus old".
One of the great political achievements of the Howard government and its supporters has been to render this battle largely invisible. Despite the prime minister's description of work and family issues as a "barbecue stopper", he has been extraordinarily successful in preventing these subterranean conflicts from bursting up through the pristine pavers of Oztopia and spoiling the lamb satays, much less entering what passes for mainstream public policy debate in Australia. This achievement is all the more remarkable – given the weight of evidence that has been piling up in recent years – evidence that suggests that the "work-life balance" is no longer a preoccupation of the already privileged middle-classes, but is becoming the central political issue for ordinary Australians.
AUSTRALIA HAS NO SHORTAGE OF SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, commentators and policy wonks who think and write about these issues. But generally, they've been unable to weave together what's happening – the fragmentation of the labour market, the complex and shifting ways in which the labour of caring is divided between men and women, the shrinking of the public sphere and the privatisation of hope as a social resource – into a coherent story.
A welcome exception to this general rule is Children of the Lucky Country? (Pan Macmillan Australia, 2005) co-authored by Australian of the Year and professor of child health Fiona Stanley, professor of psychology Margot Prior and director of the National Institute of Labour Studies Sue Richardson.
For a society that professes to care so deeply about children, and which obsesses about child protection, it ought to come as a profound shock to us that the incidence of many physical diseases and psychological problems among children and young people in Australia is not declining but is actually rising – and rising "alarmingly", as the authors contend. The great virtue of what Stanley, Prior and Richardson have done is to join the dots between a set of symptoms – for example, premature births and low birth weights – and a social context.
We hardly need to be told one more time that the health of poor people tends to be worse than that of those who are well-off. So, it may come as no surprise to learn that the poorer the parents, the more likely they will be to have a baby with low birth weight. Similarly, the news that being born into a single-parent family increases a baby's chance of low birth weight may produce no more than a knowing nod. We might begin to experience a mild perplexity at the news that there has been a steady increase in the proportion of underweight babies since the 1970s in the United Kingdom and that a similar trend is appearing here. After all, don't we have a world-class health system and an economy running like a smoothly oiled machine? What are all those mothers doing wrong? The research also tells us, after all, that if only they'd get a bit richer and, well, middle-class, their low-birth-weight babies would have a much better chance of thriving in later life.
The point at which we might really start to ask some questions, however, is when this already chastening set of facts is seen in connection with the larger changes that have taken place in the economy, in the workplace and in gender relations over the past two decades. Again, the broad outlines are almost as familiar as Peter Costello's smirk and John Howard's worried frown. We know all too well by now that men have been working less while women have been working more. Men's participation in work has fallen from 78 to 72 per cent, while women's has risen from 44 to 56 per cent. Those bald statistics conceal a more complex picture: as Anne Summers points out in The End of Equality (Random House, 2003), the proportion of women in full-time work has not increased since the 1970s. The increase in women's participation in the workforce has been entirely driven by the rapid expansion in part-time work, much of it casual and low-paid. Contrary to one popular myth, women have not been stealing the jobs from under men's feet. The percentage of men in full-time work has fallen even further and faster than the overall participation rate, and the reason is simple: a whole sector of the economy, made up of low-skilled, blue-collar, full-time jobs, has simply vanished. One in five men with no post-school education is out of the workforce, regardless of age.
Let's add one more ingredient to this dreary stew. One in six children in Australia lives in a household in which neither parent is working. Now stir. Skim the scummy stuff off the top – I'll let you work out what that is – and what lies beneath ought to be pretty clear. We have a whole cohort of Australian men who are out of work and have little prospect of getting back into anything except part-time jobs. That doesn't make them very attractive as husbands. If that sounds harsh, read the wealth of research that shows that working-class men without jobs are much less likely to marry or form permanent relationships than their employed middle-class counterparts, and much less likely to have marriages and relationships that last. They are doomed to more or less permanent exclusion from what the sociologist Goran Therborn has called "the normative aspiration of the European working classes": becoming the primary breadwinner of a nuclear family.
Roll over to the other side of the bed and you have a significant group of women who can't expect to find husbands with jobs and who must make the choice to have children with a jobless man – a choice that is almost certain to mean a life on or below the poverty line – or to have children on their own, which amounts to pretty well the same financially, or to have none at all.
Strangely enough, the pundits who mutter darkly in the opinion pages of our daily newspapers about Australia's putative population crisis do not seem overly concerned about this group of women. This is hardly surprising: it is the declining fertility rate of the middle class that has them tossing in their beds at night, not the prospect that women in public housing estates and teenage girls might suddenly go on a baby strike.
What is surprising is how little public discussion there is of what ought to be self-evident, and what Stanley, Prior and Richardson delineate so clearly and sharply: that allowing a section of the population to become simply superfluous, excess to needs, is a sure-fire recipe for what is happening daily in maternity wards around the country: the birth of a growing number of children who are starting life behind the eight-ball not only socially and economically, but physically as well.
Let's try to call a spade a spade here. This is a scandal. It is not only a scandal, it is disgusting, in the truest and deepest sense of the word. It ought to fill us with a profound moral nausea that this is happening in one of the richest countries in the world, and in a country, moreover, which in the past has at least paid lip-service to notions of fairness, decency and equality of opportunity.