Herald-Sun 07-07-05
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MOST
of the talk about balancing work and family is fuelled by elite feminists who
have discovered they are not superwomen and cannot "have it all". Having
failed to get their partners to share housework and childcare, they now
demand government and employers enable them to "balance" work and
family. Latest
suggestions for balancing acts come from Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru
Goward whose paper, Striking the Balance: women, men, work and family, was
launched by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission last month. But
what's often missing from the debate is recognition that an employer's
responsibility is to make profits for shareholders. Most
employers cannot afford to provide rooms and babysitters so their employees
can breastfeed babies a la Natasha Stott Despoja in Parliament House. Also
overlooked in feminist preoccupations is that large sectors of the community
have neither work nor families. Dr
Bob Birrell's study, Men and Women Apart: The decline of partnering in
Australia, showed a growing underclass -- about 30 per cent -- of single men
were not in full-time work and lacked the economic resources to support a
family. For
this underclass, esoteric concepts of "balancing work and family"
are daydreams. The
Herald Sun recently reported that 150,000 Victorian children lived in
families where no one had a job. And
the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates 24 per cent of women will not
have children. One reason for this "infertility" is feminist focus
on careers ahead of babies. Women
postpone child-bearing till their mid-30s when there is a sharp decline in
fertility and many will have no families to "balance" against their
careers. But
there is one group Pru Goward could help -- the 100,000 women who each year
feel they have to resort to abortion because of financial or social
disincentives to starting or adding to families. For
some, the babies they abort may be the only family they will ever have. THE
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's failure to help is curious in
view of its commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which
mandates protection for children before as well as after birth. In a
recent survey by A Current Affair on what women want, the top two wants were
love and motherhood. Predictably,
the survey was rubbished by feminist Eva Cox. Feminists constantly confuse
equality with identity of function. Perhaps Eva and Pru would be happier in
Spain which has a new law requiring men to "share domestic
responsibilities and the care of children and elderly family members". These
feminist laws are likely to depress the Spanish birth rate, already one of
the lowest in the world, even further. One
doubts however whether such "balancing" will be palatable to
feminists. Pru
Goward could accept the suggestion of the Herald Sun reader that she butt out
of his home life, or she could help men without jobs, women without children
and the babies without life. Alas,
she will probably prefer to promote the new Barcelona washing machine -- a
response to the Spanish "equality" law -- which uses fingerprint
technology to prevent the same person using it twice in a row. babette@endeavourforum.org.au |