ENDEAVOUR FORUM NEWSLETTER No. 120, NOVEMBER 2005

 

 

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NO WORK, NO FAMILY, NO BALANCE

PART OF THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE HERALD SUN, 6 JULY 2005

BABETTE FRANCIS

Discussion on "balancing work and family" is fuelled by elite feminists who have discovered they are not supermen 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 & Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in June. 

There are few men leading this debate - judging by  Ross Brundett's Herald Sun column "He says, She says", the average Aussie bloke after a day's work just wants to settle on the couch with a beer, the remote control and the form guide. Any "imbalance" in Brundett's life is created by his wife demanding that he paint the house, mow the lawn or give her more money for shopping. 

Employers'  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. 

Overlooked in feminist preoccupations  is that large sectors of the community have neither work nor families.  Dr. Bob Birrell's (Monash University) study: "Men and Women Apart: The Decline of Partnering in Australia"  showed a growing underclass - about 30% - of single men are not in full-time work and lack the economic resources to support a family. 

For this  underclass esoteric concepts of "balancing work and family" are daydreams. Peter Mickelburough in "Labor hunts for a heart" (Herald Sun, 26/4/05) reports that 150,000 Victorian children live in families where no one has a job.  

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates 24% of Australian women will not have children. One reason for this "infertility" is feminist focus on careers ahead of babies.

Women postpone childbearing till their mid-thirties when there is a sharp decline in fertility and  many will have no families to "balance" against their careers, cf Virginia Haussegger's cri de coeur  "The sins of our feminist mothers" (The Age, 23/7/02),  and Danielle Crittenden's "What our mothers didn't tell us", Simon & Schuster, 1999. 

One group who Pru Goward could help are 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. HREOC'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 "share domestic responsibilities and the care of children and elderly family members" .  Feminist laws are likely to depress the Spanish birth rate - already one of the lowest in the world - even further. However, as the Muslim component of the population grows, with a demand for sharia law and polygamy (as has been mooted in Perth and Canada)  with  each husband allowed to have as many as four wives, all kinds of intriguing ways of balancing work and family will be possible. 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 the men without jobs, the 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......

 

 

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