Well, Tony Abbott’s Great Big New Distraction worked for a short while, until it got bumped off the front pages by healthcare. Paid maternity leave was hot topic for a couple of news cycles and women everywhere, from Prue Goward to Mia Freedman, were proclaiming it as a huge win for feminism.

I can quite see why Tony Abbott would be delighted at the idea of more women staying home to look after babies, but it baffles me that so many women are marching in lockstep with him.

Paid maternity leave is not a step forward for women, it’s a step backwards. And its most dangerous problem is that it is presented as the solution to the complex problems of balancing working, raising children and ensuring that women are not disadvantaged in their career or financial circumstances after they have a baby.

Paid maternity leave doesn’t address any of these issues in any meaningful or effective way.

It’s a short-term fix for well-paid married women who have a full time job, want to have a baby and want to stay home for six months to look after it; but it doesn’t address any of the issues that affect everyone outside that small group.

What about women who want babies but don’t want to stay home with them for a full six months? What about the couples who want to share the time they spend looking after their babies? Or the fathers who want to stay home with their children? How does paid maternity leave affect the 28 year old woman who doesn’t want to have children and also doesn’t want to look like a riskier proposition than her male counterparts when she’s applying for a job? What about the women who want to be freelance workers, entrepreneurs and sole traders? What about the women who want to stay home with their babies for years rather than just four-to-six months? What about families who want to have 3 or 4 babies, relatively close together?

Paid maternity leave narrows the choices for all these women; it funnels them away from other options and back into the traditional role of stay-at-home wife and mother.

Maternity leave, whether paid or not, doesn’t cause huge problems for large corporations, they usually have some spare capacity and are able to provide training or temporary positions to cover long absences by key staff.

Small businesses, which count for about 50% of employment in the private sector, find this much more difficult, which means that half of all private sector employers find women of childbearing age riskier to employ than men. Making maternity leave more attractive to women only makes this problem worse.

If Rudd has millions and Abbott has Barnaby-style billions to spend on ensuring that women are more able to stay in the workplace after they have children, why not spend them on things that genuinely give all parents more options? Why not spend the money on something that will benefit the entire family, not just the women? Why not consider the wider economy and women’s place in it? Whatever it is that professional married middle class women need, it is not more welfare.

I’m certainly not advocating that we remove all leave entitlements now available to women when they have children, but we need to equalise the risk of hiring men and women, particularly for small business and open up the options available to all parents after their children are born.

The only way to level the playing field is to make the parenting leave options equally attractive and available to men and women alike.

Offer tax breaks to businesses that provide flexible working hours, in-house child care, job sharing and working from home options.

Make the language and options for parents of small children completely non-gender specific, so that fathers who want to participate in caring for their children can do so.

Provide assistance to small businesses to cover the costs of temporarily replacing staff on parental leave, so that they are not reluctant to hire potential mothers.

Bring back income splitting, so that women (who are still paid less than men) are less likely to be forced out of the workplace when a household has to choose which income they should drop.

Offer assistance to cottage industries and start up businesses, provide advertising space and networking opportunities for parents starting up businesses that could potentially employ other parents, encourage them to share working hours or childcare resources.

Having a baby doesn’t change your life and career for only 16 or 26 weeks, it’s changed forever. A woman’s ability to remain part of the workforce is not a short term problem, and parents would be far more able to continue their career with long-term support in the areas of child care and basic logistics than they will with a short-term welfare handout.

What about something as simple as national school bus routes, which I believe are common in the US? A safe secure means of getting children to and from school so their parents can get to work on time and not have to leave early enough to fight their way through the school traffic would make a huge difference to people who struggle to manage the school run everyday.

Affordable, good quality child care is probably more important than any other factor in most parents’ ability to return to work. It’s an issue for at least the first 12 years of a child’s life, not just the first six months.

Having your children start school doesn’t solve the problem, in some ways it can actually make things worse. Parents who work full time need to manage before school care, after school care and school holidays. No-one wants an 11 year old coming home to an empty house every day, and for families with several children, spaced a few years apart, this can be an issue for nearly 20 years.

I make no judgements at all of the women who put their babies into full time childcare, but most parents don’t want to do it. The ideal solution, were it possible, would be to share the care of children between the parents, the extended family and where necessary, some help from good quality, professional childcare. Practical solutions to make these things possible would be far more effective at keeping women in the workforce and assisting ‘working families’ than a few months of paid leave.

Paid maternity leave is a political quick-fix. It works well in sound bites because you can explain it in three words and all those middle class workers in marginal seats see the dollars signs clicking over when they head off to the ballot box. It does not, however, address the complexities of all the choices that should be, and aren’t, equally available to all women and men.

It’s chauvinism of the worst kind, because it’s telling women to get back into the home and look after the babies while the men to go off to the office and earn some money; and it’s being dressed up as something we all should aspire to.

Pah! I wonder if Rudd and Abbott are going to offer us all a free iron with every new baby as well.

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I was also asked to provide a quick comparison between the government and the opposition’s maternity leave offerings. It’s a little difficult to do because the coalition has not yet provided any specifics about their plan, but the table below covers the bare bones of it:

As with any government scheme, the devil is in the details, things like eligibility criteria, how the payments and leave can be accessed.

For example, can the entitlements be split between parents? What happens if at the end of six months the parent decides not to return to work? How is the coalition going to calculate ‘current salary’? What happens to entitlements and eligibility for second or third child? Is the government scheme going to compensate employers for the extra administrative tasks involved in being the paymasters for the scheme?

I could go on and on. And on.

But I won’t. I think you probably get my point by now.

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