It’s been declared a ‘political budget’, the kind a government delivers in order to win back some popularity, usually in the lead up to an election.
And there are plenty of vote-winning measures available in the Coalition’s 2015 Federal Budget. Small business owners offered an extremely generous $20,000 tax break must certainly be pleased.
But in every federal budget there has to be a group of losers, those that fall short on the ‘fairness’ equation and have certain things taken away.
This year, that group is new mothers. A seriously surprising contender for the wooden spoon. Once considered ‘women of calibre’, you really have to wonder how new mothers have become public enemy number one.
After all, you could at least pretend to go after the super rich at budget time. Or you could look at excessive superannuation tax-breaks. Or you could deliver a serious measure to fairly tax large technology companies — instead of the quasi effort Treasurer Joe Jockey discussed over the weekend.
Instead new working mothers have been depicted as greedy, double-dippers taking twice their share of paid parental leave.
According to the 2015 Budget papers, the free ride is over — just like Tony Abbott’s once extremely generous paid parental leave scheme. The $3.5 billion childcare package on offer won’t pay for itself, and who else to help pay for it but those new mothers, living it large on their double doses of paid maternity leave?
The new rules to government PPL outlined this week, would see new parents receiving paid leave from their employer that’s equal or more than the full $11,500 on offer from the government, lose the government payment altogether. It’s estimated that 80,000 new parents currently receive allowances from both their employer and the government every year. The significant majority of those taking such leave are women.
I have to admit, demonising new mothers certainly came as a surprise. Even for this government, which hasn’t exactly been at the forefront of innovative policies to support women.
This time last year, Hockey was attempting to sell (and failing miserably) his ‘lifters and leaners’ budget. The one that predominantly targeted the young and the jobless, and yet still managed to support a $5.5 billion PPL scheme.
Twelve months later, many of those same mothers that then deserved the six months at full-pay treatment, now no longer even deserve 18 weeks at the minimum wage.
You can only assume the Abbott government has tried everything it could to please this segment of women — and yet still many such women could not be pleased.
And so now it’s given up. You can’t please them when you throw billions at a generous paid parental leave scheme, so why bother attempting to please them at all?
Either that, or the Abbott government assumes taking parental leave on the one hand and offering more childcare incentives on the other, will be enough to finally convince the women.
But that doesn’t explain the language the Abbott government has touted to describe those that have been taking what they don’t deserve.
Terms like ‘double dipper’ don’t simply roll off the tongue. They are intentional, carefully-scripted descriptions designed to demonise a segment of the population in order to make the payments they lose more palatable to the general public.
New mothers are the ‘leaners’ of the 2015 Budget.
New mothers are the enemy of fairness, standing in the way of everyone else who’s just trying to ‘give it a go’.
We can only assume the Abbott Government has given up on this segment of women.