A column for the NZCPD, May 13:
Paid
Parental Leave - time to take a step back
The
NZ Herald recently ran a poll asking whether National was
right to use its veto to override Labour MP Sue Moroney's
private member's bill to extend Paid Parental Leave (PPL) from
14 weeks to 6 months. After 16,000 votes were submitted, sixty
percent of respondents had answered yes.
Frustratingly, this doesn't tell us whether people were
against the extension in the context of the current economic
climate, against an extension full-stop, or against the entire
scheme. I fall in the last category.
More
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Against the entire scheme seems a logical position to me.
The problem with NZ - and its crashingly low productivity - really means we need to move urgently on
- annual leave: most countries with which we compete have only 1 week, not 4!
- public holidays: ditto, rather than mondayizing we should be sundayizing!
- 6 day working weeks --- especially in the public sector. Even in France & Germany, schools typically run 6 days.
- length of working day
- and of course minimum wage and wage rates.
Paid parental leave is just one of the many productivty-destroying regulations in NZ that needs to be abolished forthwith.
Lets take a slightly ironical look at several women here:
The beneficiary from school days gets a basic benefit 20-40% below the woman on the DPB, so she has a financial incentive to have babies, get on the DPB and open up more expenditure for various things like accommodation independent of her parents.. from this point of finance and a home she is free to have "fun" with whoever she wishes.. including some under the table stuff from her boyfriends.
Woman B is a hardworking mother in a low income job.. she has another baby but is back at work within three months and is paid her $26,000 *plus* WFF of say $12,000 plus whatever her partner brings in. For her being low income is something of a myth.
Woman C is your middleclass person with an average job, married to a man with a good income and she wants to be a homemaker in the approved fashion of breastfeeding to age two, toileting the kids when *they* are ready and being there for her kids. Even she can pick up thousands from WFF.
Woman D has a good job, is career minded and she's back at work in 3 months because she's career minded, needs to support her husband through a rough patch in his business.. and of course she has to pay the taxes to help support the other three women.
The Govt doesn't pay for those three women's lifestyle.. Woman D and her similar mates do.
The thing is, these women aren't wrong or evil or anything like that.. they are simply following paths made available to them when we were one of the most affluent societies on Earth. But that is no longer the case and it is taking us an awful long time to appreciate it.
JC
Right. And the only way to fix this problem, the only way to remove these incentives is to stop the benefits. Nothing else will do it.
Dole, DPB, WFF, ACC, EQC, Old-persons-dole and all the rest - plus the benefits (really middle-class welfare) of health & education "spending".
Stopping all that and then these problems just go away.
Post a Comment