The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.

What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media plays in mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence of a correlation with heavy use is not. Haidt offers up studies supporting the causal interpretation but acknowledges that nothing is straightforward where human behaviour is concerned. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

The post Virtual anxiety appeared first on Inside Story.

Khrushchev’s eyes slid across the appliance, deadpan. “We have such things,” he replied.

Nixon tried again: “This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev bristled, perhaps at the assumptions about gendered work. “Your capitalistic attitude to women does not exist under communism,” he said.

Apparently missing why his praise of a dishwasher might have drawn such a reaction, Nixon barrelled on: “I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do, is make life more easy for our housewives.” The “American system” gave consumers “new inventions and new techniques” so rapidly, he said, that this very kitchen — currently so up to date — would itself be obsolete in twenty years.

“In Russia,” said Khrushchev, “all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing… In America, if you don’t have a dollar you have a right to choose… sleeping… on the pavement. Yet you say we are the slave to communism.”

It was the mention of this exchange in Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s new book, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that prompted me to watch Nixon and Khrushchev talking past each other. It is good viewing, if only for the unintentional cringecore. Squirm as Nixon digs himself deeper; behold two different views of the world butting up against one another. It’s obvious that the US president didn’t understand Khrushchev, but did he also feel that he was being laughed at, outsmarted or outwitted by one to whom he felt a natural superiority?

I happened to watch the video in Laos, just one of the countries Nixon ordered to be bombed in the name of crushing communism, but one particularly devastated by that crusade. I wondered if humiliations like this kitchen debate partly motivated his inhuman insistence on bombing this country “back to the Stone Age” (in the words used during the Indochinese war by General Curtis LeMay) a decade later.

Sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, I could see traces of the poverty, grief and physical devastation left by the war. Amid all this, it seemed indecent to be ruminating on the difficulties of the life I lead at home in Australia. My life, and presumably Hester’s and Srnicek’s, is the kind common across what they call the “rich world”: chronic overwork, real or imagined precarity, a constant feeling of being harried, kids I adore but can’t be with enough, and endless domestic chores at the end of a long week.

This crisis of work in and out of the home has been building for some time, but, as writer Angela Garbes says, “Over the course of the pandemic, many people came to understand — for the first time, deeply, or with renewed agency — that American life is not working for families.” It is easy to dismiss these as “First World problems.” But they are real all the same.

After Work fuses visions for a post-work world with calls to recognise and tackle the crisis in care. Reading it in Laos forced me to see the history of coercion behind the crisis Hester and Srnicek describe. It is not that we “find ourselves” in isolated nuclear families and impossible work–life imbalances. And not everyone lives that way today. But everyone is affected by the struggle over how to live. The fight for free time might not have drawn bombs and bloodshed in Australia and the rest of the rich world, but in other theatres it was violent and prolonged.

Understanding how we got into this mess is surely an important step towards finding a way out. That said, After Work is not really a history book. Perhaps a librarian would place it in the critical sociology section. I read it as myth.

It reminds me of a myth told by the ethnic Katu I work with in Laos. Before the flood, they say, everything was different. The stars were people and the people were stars. Animals were people and people were animals. With the flood, everything swapped places. Those who were rats turned into people, which is why today some people have a lot of hair and others are bald — the bald ones were rats that had been captured and plucked for eating when the flood came. And so on: every element of the current world is explained by how different things were before the flood, and how everything changed and bore the stamp of that change.

Hester and Srnicek describe the Industrial Revolution as an “unprecedented change” that “utterly transformed” domestic life: “Prior to this transformation, housework was exhaustingly laborious.” Heating was apparently a large part of this labour, but not cooling: so by implication they are describing life in a cold climate. We are also in a dystopian world: the authors tell us that children were usually put to work and demands for elder care were few because “working to death was standard.”

We are in a city, probably somewhere in Europe or America, because running water, electricity and gas appeared “as the twentieth century dawned” in this everywhere–nowhere home. The authors briefly mention “the Western household” but this is not a frequent phrase: most of the first half of the book describes an unspecified location.

Then came the flood. The “industrialisation of the home,” a “radical” change, “significantly reduced the burdens of domestic labour” and ushered in “peak family.” Labour was split between a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, producing the image of the nuclear family.

The “second key phase” in this history is the neoliberal stagnation of the 1970s through to the 1990s. The floodwaters receded, leaving a detritus of expectations about the home (for instance, as the key site of almost all unpaid care work); at the same time, anyone who could work for money was expected to do so. These demands bred “a universal sense of growing time pressures.” Today, say the authors, “We remain enmeshed in a world of domestic technologies whose potential to reduce work has gone largely unfulfilled.”

Hester and Srnicek take issue with Joel Salatin, the advocate of whole foods and farming, for evoking a mythical past. But here they offer another myth: that “most” of our great-grandparents “were more likely to be eating stale and monotonous food, plagued by scarcity.” If Salatin’s myth is a classic Garden of Eden story of paradise lost, Hester and Srnicek’s is of the Katu flood variety: everything swapped places, one dystopia replaced another.

The book’s discussion of bathing shows the limits such a view places on imagination. They write that “when bathing meant lugging water into the home, warming it up, and removing waste afterwards, the sheer amount of work required limited how often baths could be taken.” It is as if the only alternative the authors can imagine to a hot bath in a nuclear family’s bathroom is one where hapless family members create the conditions for such a bath using sheer manual labour.

Looking at bathing across cultures and times shows that we (and I use this word in its most inclusive sense) can and do bathe in many ways. We have bathed daily in the Mekong River as the sun set red over the rushing current. We have bathed in water captured from a mountain stream in bamboo pipes and fed across the village fence. We have bathed in Japanese sentō. We have bathed in Minoan palatial throne-room “lustration basins” under paintings depicting menstruation.

Following anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, we can see that “we” have a capacity for imagining new ways of living and bringing those imaginations into being. Innumerable experiments in living are evident across the anthropological, archaeological and historical record. There is not just one “before” and one “after” in the human story. This diversity is key to the thinking the way out that Hester and Srnicek so rightly seek.

Hester and Srnicek envision a post-scarcity world. By this they mean not an overabundance of consumer goods but a world in which selling one’s labour is not a prerequisite for remaining alive. They propose reducing necessary labour (“work”) as much as possible by improving domestic technologies, accepting lower standards (messier homes, wilder childhoods), and making care work more efficient by removing it where possible from private homes (think: kitchen-less apartments, laundry services). The goal is to expand freedom — defined as time spent in autonomously chosen activities — as much as possible.

The second part of After Work introduces historically grounded alternatives as inspiration: the Russian commune in the early twentieth century; social housing in Vienna; the hippie movement in North America. It is a relief to be grounded after the nowhere–everywhere of the previous chapters.

Hester and Srnicek dutifully mention the well-known shortcomings of each of these “missed futures.” They do include among their inspirations Cuba’s recent family code, which defines a family as “a union of people linked by an affective, psychological and sentimental bond, who commit themselves to sharing life such that they support each other.” But Cuba is not treated as an extended example and nor are criticisms identified. Uncomfortably, all the significant inspirations described in After Work are decidedly white.

“Even in the most gender-equal countries, such as Norway and Denmark, women continue to do nearly 1.5 times as much” unpaid domestic labour as men, Hester and Srnicek write. This is considerably less than the world average, in which women do 3.2 times more unpaid work than men. Here in Laos, though, women do only 1.4 times more such work than men. On this count, Laos outshines Norway and Denmark: by a tiny margin, true, but I still wonder why Laos was left out of the praise granted the Nordic countries.

Of course, I don’t expect all authors to write from a Laos-centric perspective. But living here and being part of a Lao extended family means I read from that perspective. I share Hester and Srnicek’s frustrations with work in the rich world: reading After Work felt like having a sociologist explain a typical week in my Australian life. But I also know that my typical is very strange from the perspective of my Lao family.

Khrushchev and Nixon’s kitchen debate shows how wild the misunderstandings can be when one way of life is perceived from the perspective of another. The mistake Nixon made was assuming that his vision of domestic labour and technology represented progress, and thus assuming that the Soviets were behind. Khrushchev, too, indulged in teleological visions.

Students of conflict in the twentieth century know the violence of such one-track stories. Hester and Srnicek speak truly when they say that typical lives in “the rich world” are now untenable. I agree. Better lives are possible. In building these, let’s not narrow our vision needlessly. The sparks of yet-to-be-realised futures may be hiding in plain sight. •

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
By Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek | Verso | $29.99 | 208 pages

The post How should we live? appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of us still carry grief from John’s sudden death, seven years ago now, chasing birds in the Grampians. Lorin has more cause for grief than the rest of us, but it just doesn’t seem the right word for so joyous a book. Instead, she has taken the time to create something luminous out of her loss. I read this book while coming down with a cold, and it made me feel a lot better, in heart and mind at least; unfortunately, it didn’t seem to do my chest any good.

The family happiness is real and the product of both experience and fortunate choices. It makes you realise that Tolstoy’s tragic vision is not something John could ever have warmed to. Come to think of it, impish and ironic minimalism is not among the more obvious characteristics of War and Peace. In Tinkering (2017) John does Anna Karenina in forty-three words, and the great Russian realist gets knocked off in the third round in The Tournament (2002), despite a high seeding. It’s a path not taken by the satirist with the twinkle in his eye.

Now Lorin, the elder of John’s two daughters, has her say, and shows that she has arrived as a writer. Her metier is the fragment, its supply responsive to local movements of thought and emotion. The remarkable thing is how deftly she deals with sentiment without becoming sentimental, how amusing she can be without becoming (unduly) competitive. The story she has to tell is one of an ensemble, not the more common tale of a towering genius who draws those around him into his vortex.

The central event in the family’s story really is the love of a good woman, Helen McDonald, who married John in 1973, reportedly so that she could work in New Zealand. No romantic nonsense in this relationship — just endlessly inventive and competitive play sustained by laconic affection. This was necessary to heal the wounds, and especially the sense of inferiority, that John bore from his parents’ rocky relationship. For that, the second world war is to blame.

Neva, John’s mother, went to war in Italy as a young secretary and ended up working directly with the major-general commanding the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Cruelly, she was twice defiancéed (if that’s a word), the second time after hostilities were supposed to have ceased. She returned to New Zealand, married Ted faute de mieux. Like many talented women of her generation, she discovered that she was supposed to rejoice in the life of a housewife, and forget that she had ever had other aspirations or capacities. She loved her children, but came to hate the suburban life.

Ted, meanwhile, was a successful and bottled-up retailer, disinclined to talk much about the years he had spent fighting Rommel, or to show much feeling about anything. He was also hard on his eldest son, John, who spent a couple of decades convinced he was never going to measure up. Ted and Neva’s marriage did not last, but long after the divorce, as Nevana and “the White Furry Fellow,” they got over the wounds and discovered separate talents as loyal and quizzical grandparents.

The crucial plot point came when John met Helen and her warm and supportive family, especially parents Charlie Boy and Gina de Babe (nomenclature is mostly for playing with in Clarke-world; the book comes with a useful glossary). Without this happy turn of fate there would have been no Fred Dagg and John may well have been just a funny bloke who remained a bit tortured and never amounted to much. With Helen and her family, his comic talent had found an anchor in a hyper-verbal but emotionally warm world. Some humourists seem to need the spur of insecurity to create, and a few wreak havoc in their private lives for fear of losing the creative spark. Not John and Helen.

Their warm homes in Greensborough and Fitzroy welcomed friends and extended family, then two daughters, Lorin and Lucia (“the sisterhood” as far as they are concerned, and the inspiration for John’s “Federated Under Tens”). The only battles seem to have been over the best way of framing words: “A topic our father could speak about for hours was how helpful form could be when writing something. By form he meant format, schema, structure, configuration, style, even genre. Sports scores. A news report. A legal letter. Furniture assembly instructions.”

Expression was always about craft in John’s work, and parody was a primary move in pretty much everything. The energy came from a sure inner compass straining against the automatic words of fools or the devious rhetoric of knaves. From Fred Dagg’s broad accents to the arcane terminology of farnarkeling and the two minutes and forty-six seconds of the Clarke and Dawe episodes, form was fundamental — not quite more important than delivering a message about fools and knaves, but utterly co-dependent. He’d have hated the job description of content-creator, because content is just stuff until you find the shape that belongs to it.

The business of writing for John and Lorin is not to cover things up, but to pierce their real significance. If you seek to understand the corruption of corporatised sport, can you do any better than this?

MR WILSON: So you’ve measured the track?

JOHN: Yes, we’ve measured the track, Mr Wilson.

MR WILSON: So you know how long the 100-metre track is?

JOHN: Yes, we do.

MR WILSON: Okay.

JOHN: How long is it, Mr Wilson?

MR WILSON: You know how long it is.

JOHN: I want to hear you say it.

MR WILSON: Ninety-four metres. (The Games)

This is the pure and precise anger of John’s satire, focused laser-like on the sin and its systemic sources in human weakness, while being almost gentle on the sinner. Could anyone really resent being caught up in his apt contempt? It has the detachment of justice and none of the animus that drove, say, Barry Humphries’s genius for comic disgust. John as satirist is the tolerant uncle who lets you know that you’ve fallen short. Maybe you will do better next time.

And we miss him. Imagine what he would have made of Morrison of the many ministries!

Meanwhile, in Would That Be Funny?, Lorin has found the right form to tell the family story. She mixes fragments of intimacy, blocks of narrative in far from rigorous chronological order, found documents, and many lists. The book is nearly always funny, apart from when it is suddenly intense, nearly always kind and celebratory, except when it is emotionally ruthless. It dances on the tightrope of tone that memoir demands, and succeeds with vim and lucidity. She grants us entry to a family of super-intelligent and playful eccentrics strangely like the aunts and uncles in the most perfect item in the Complete Book of Australian Verse, “A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool.”

Might Would That Be Funny? work for readers who do not know and love the works of the father? I can’t say, because my powers of detachment cannot take me that far outside the memory of John. But I think the book might just be good enough to lead new audiences to his works. It is certainly a treat if you miss that weekly moment of sanity on the 7.30 Report.

The Clarkes’ humour is polished to a fine edge, but it welcomes anyone who wants to laugh with those who dream of a juster and kinder world. One paragraph nails that:

The sisterhood regarded Dad as the Great Relaxer. Always zooming out on the picture and reminding us we’d be okay. He’d make me snort with laughter on my way to an exam I was terrified I’d fail. He’d say, “We still love you if you fail, you know. I don’t want to boast but I’m the clubhouse leader when it comes to failing stuff.”

When Beckett writes “Fail better” it comes through as a grim admonition. The Clarkes can make the same advice sparkle.

John’s genius was, often, for stopping. He did it in life as well. Many of us miss him, but none as deeply as the happy family he left behind. That is clear on every page of this fine and amusing memoir.

As an admirer of your father’s work, as a father of daughters, as a believer in the resilience good humour can give us, I just want to say, “Well played, Lorin.” •

Would That Be Funny? Growing Up With John Clarke
By Lorin Clarke | Text Publishing | $35 | 288 pages

The post Yes, it is funny appeared first on Inside Story.

Before 1988, grandparents had near-automatic right of entry. Over the next two decades a slow accretion of administrative, regulatory and legislative measures put permanent residency increasingly out of reach. Slowly but surely the focus of Australia’s migration program shifted to working age migrants with useful skills.

That shift might make a certain kind of economic sense, but what does it mean for grandparents who want to live near their Australian-based children and grandchildren but don’t have Australian citizenship? And what are the implications for families who might come to rely on grandparents for all kinds of help yet live in a country that makes permanent residence so difficult?

I began to get a sense of life on a long-stay temporary visa when I called Edward Adams for an interview about his experiences as a British citizen living in Australia. (Many of the names in this article have been changed to protect privacy.) He couldn’t talk because he was busy picking up a grandchild from school, but promised to call back later.

Seventy-two-year-old Edward and his wife Tracey, sixty-four, have lived in Australia for most of their grandchildren’s lives. “We just couldn’t imagine not being here to help in their formative years,” Edward tells me by phone from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast after delivering his grandchild safely home.

Along with school pick-ups and drop-offs two or three times a week, Edward and Tracey step in at short notice to look after the children if son Rory or daughter-in-law Matilda get caught up at work. They also provide extra support when Rory is travelling for business. “And that means our son and daughter in law have been able to be much more productive than they would have been if we weren’t here,” Edward argues.

When not with the grandchildren, the couple have other distractions. They’ve joined the local golf club and made lots of friends. For all intents and purposes, they are settled in Australia, just a short walk away from Rory, Matilda and the grandchildren. Because they aren’t permanent residents or citizens, buying land and building a house required approval from the Federal Investment Review Board. Edward estimates that this added $40,000 to the cost. Since they sold their house in England, their Sunshine Coast house is the only home they have.

Originally from Bath, west of London, Edward and Tracey both retired in 2014. They came to Australia at the end of that year, ahead of Rory and Matilda’s marriage the following March. Although Rory lived in Sydney, the wedding was held on the Sunshine Coast, and Edward and Tracey immediately fell in love with the area. Edward joked that if Rory moved north, then he and Tracey would consider migrating to Australia.

And that’s how it went. Soon after the wedding, Rory’s employer asked him to move and, in 2016, Edward and Tracey came back for a six-month stay on a standard visitor visa. They returned the following year, this time on a twelve-month visa that they were able to renew for a second year by making a short trip to New Zealand.

Edward and Tracey had put money aside — around $100,000 — to apply for permanent residency via contributory parent visas. But they hit the brick wall of the balance of family test. They needed to show that half of their children are Australian citizens or permanent residents — or, if the family is scattered across different countries, then more of their children live in Australia than in any other country.

They have another younger son, Phillip, in England, who doesn’t yet have a family, and if that had been the end of the story they wouldn’t have had a problem. With one son in each country they would meet the threshold having at least half their children settled in Australia.

But Edward has another son, now in his forties, from a previous marriage that ended acrimoniously when Edward’s first son was just two years old. Frequently overseas for work, Edward failed to meet the regular access requirements set down by the court to share custody. He supported his son financially but was otherwise largely absent as a parent. Edward and his first son are only rarely in contact.

The balance of family test is a pure numbers game: it takes no account of the depth or closeness of family bonds. Since Edward has two children in Britain and only one in Australia, the system locks him out, and so it locks Tracey out too. And it counts for nothing that they’ve been emotionally enmeshed in the lives of their three Australian grandchildren since the eldest was a baby, or that they frequently care for them.

In 2019, another option to stay in Australia opened up for Edward and Tracey, when the federal government introduced the sponsored parent (temporary) visa. This visa isn’t subject to the balance of family test and enables parents to live in Australia for up to a decade. In May 2019, Edward and Tracey’s son Rory was among the first to be approved as a sponsor, and in August the couple returned to Bath anticipating a three- to four-month wait. But within a week of submitting their medical checks they were granted visas and in early September they were on a plane to Australia.

“It was very swift,” says Edward. “Our dealings with the immigration department have been very satisfactory.” It came at a stiff price, though, which is part of the reason why this option hasn’t been anywhere near as popular as expected.

If they’d not been tripped up by the balance of family test, Edward and Tracey could have applied for permanent residency by pursuing one of two options. The first is the “contributory” parent visa, which costs at least $47,955 per person. Around 7000 were granted last financial year but 86,000 people are still waiting in the queue. Given the backlog, Home Affairs advises that a new application “may take at least 12 years to process [their emphasis].” The expert panel commissioned by the government to review Australia’s migration program reckons this is an underestimate; it puts the processing time at fifteen years.

The second, non-contributory, parent visa is much cheaper, with charges starting at $4560 per person, and there are “only” 51,000 people currently in the queue. But since far fewer visas are issued each year — just 1500 in 2022–23— the wait is much longer. Home Affairs advises it will take “at least 29 years” for a new application to be processed; the expert review panel warns it’s likely to be more than forty years.

Given the delays, costs and difficulty of getting a permanent visa, and the number of people, like Edward and Tracey, excluded by the balance of family test, you might expect more families to follow their lead in opting for the sponsored parent (temporary) visa. The government anticipated significant demand for the visa when it was introduced in 2019 and capped the program at 15,000 places annually “in recognition of the challenges of an ageing population, as well as the overall budget impact of older migrants.” It need not have worried — by March 2023, almost four years later, only 8204 visas had been issued.

Why has interest been so low?

Covid travel restrictions are part of the equation, but price is also a barrier. A three-year visa costs more than $5000 and a five-year visa more than $10,000. The same fee must be paid again when the visa is renewed — so a ten-year stay will cost $20,000 per person in two upfront payments.

Visaholders must also pay compulsory private medical insurance at about $5000 per year (although at least one big insurer will no longer provide cover for holders of this visa aged over seventy). And families who sponsor a parent must prove that they have a taxable income of at least $83,455.

There’s a sting in the tail, too: parents on this visa are barred from applying to settle permanently either under the contributory or non-contributory options.

Edward and Tracey might not have been able to establish their lives on the Sunshine Coast and watch their grandchildren grow up if it hadn’t been for the efforts of Arvind Duggal. For someone who insists he’s not “political” and just wants “a happy family life” Arvind has had a big impact during two Australian elections when he’s managed to put parent visas on the agenda and influence the policy promises of the Coalition and the Labor Party.

Arvind hails from Jalandhar, a city in Punjab famous for manufacturing cricket bats and other sports equipment. He migrated to Australia with his wife and two-year-old daughter in 2008 without realising he wouldn’t be able to bring his mother to join them. Because he has two older sisters living in India, the balance of family test prevented him from sponsoring his mother to settle in Australia permanently.

Arvind, who was working as a bus driver, discovered that two of his workmates, Parminder Sohal and Davinder Pal Singh, were also dissatisfied with the existing options for bringing parents to Australia. In 2015 the three men launched an online petition to then home affairs minister Peter Dutton.

Despite its far from catchy title — “Introduce Long Stay Visa for Parents Who Want to Spend Quality Time with Their Family”— the petition took flight and eventually attracted close to 30,000 signatures. The non-political Arvind was thrust into the unaccustomed role of activist and advocate. Having started out not even knowing the name of his local MP, before long he was well-versed in the crucial marginal seats where migrant votes might be influential.

Most mainstream media paid little attention, though SBS reported extensively on the issue, especially via its Hindi and Punjabi language services, as did news outlets catering to specific migrant communities. But in the closely fought 2016 federal election Arvind’s petition had the major parties scrambling to outbid each other to offer a new temporary long-stay parent visa.

Labor moved first. Two weeks before the poll opposition leader Bill Shorten promised a renewable three-year visa. At the end of their stay, parents would only have to leave Australia for four weeks and could then return for another three years. This was a big improvement on the existing visitor visa, which offered a maximum stay of just one year and forced parents to leave Australia for at least six months between visits.

Three days later, the Liberal Party trumped Labor by pledging that a re-elected Coalition government would introduce a five-year visa. Both parties would require parents to hold private medical insurance and post a bond to cover any future expense for government services. Labor set the bond at $5000; the Liberals based it on the existing Assurance of Support scheme (between $5000 and $15,000, depending on who sponsors whom and for how long).

The Coalition squeaked home and within months things started moving. The government launched a discussion paper and announced community consultations to help design the new visa, which it “envisaged” would be in place the following year.

Arvind’s supporters were elated. “My heart is in celebration by the chance of having my mum close to me for longer than six months sporadically,” wrote one of them on Facebook. “I cannot express how happy I am for reading this media release… having my mum for at least three years near her only grandchild is a dream… Gosh, I am in tears!!!!!!!”

But it wasn’t until March 2019, just before the next election rolled around, that details were announced. In the slow transition from generous campaign promise to concrete policy the new visa had been hedged about with bureaucratic conditions and high fees.

Arvind still works in transport, though these days he’s a customer service officer. “Peter Dutton betrayed us on his election promise,” he says when we meet for coffee in Adelaide at the end of his shift.

Eight days before the 2016 election, Arvind received a personally addressed email from the Office of the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection signed by Mr Dutton’s media advisor. It explained that the promised new visa would require sponsoring families to post a refundable bond “within the existing parameters.” There was no mention of a fee. Yet when details were finally announced in 2019, the application charge was a hefty $5000 for a three-year stay and $10,000 for five years.

The email also reassured Arvind that “the number of visas is not capped.” But when it eventually came to fruition, places in the program were limited to 15,000 annually.

Arvind says the Coalition chose to capitalise on the huge pent-up demand to bring parents to Australia. “It’s like selling a bottle of water in the desert,” he says. “You can choose the price… This is making money from grandparents visiting their grandchildren, which is un-Australian.”

Arvind was also disappointed with three other aspects of the new visa. A family must have a high taxable income to qualify as a sponsor, something not mentioned in the election campaign. It can only sponsor one set of parents. And parents must leave Australia for at least three months to renew their visas. (The email from Mr Dutton’s office said they’d need to leave Australia for “a minimum period of four weeks.”)

As Inside Story reported in the run up to the 2019 election, Labor promised to address some of Arvind’s concerns, saying it would remove the annual cap on the existing temporary long-stay parent visas and slash the fees by 75 per cent. The price of the three-year visa would come down to $1250 and a five-year visa to $2500.

After losing in 2019 Labor felt no need to publicly renew its promises ahead of winning the 2022 election, though Arvind says he was privately assured that an Albanese government would honour its earlier commitments. He’s now concerned that he’s seen no action.

“If Labor fails to deliver then migrant communities will have every reason to lose our faith in the Australian political system” he says. “It’s not setting a good example for our kids who just want family time with their grandparents.”

From the start, Arvind and his bus driver colleagues had modest ambitions for their campaign. All they asked for was an extension of existing visitor arrangements to allow parents to stay for up to three years. He doesn’t see why that should be so hard or cost so much extra.

The campaign has been stressful and taken a toll on family life. “If we didn’t have the balance of family test, I never would have done this,” Arvind says. “Just to get a long-stay visa took seven years.” He’d like to put the issue behind him, but he can’t quite let it go. “It’s not just about me,” he says. “So many people had faith in the campaign. They have worked really hard for it, but ultimately they’ve been very disappointed by the end product.”

Misook and her husband Soejun are also in Australia on long-stay parent visas, but their experience is far less happy than David and Tracey’s. They had no trouble with the balance of family test — their only child is an Australian citizen — and their long-stay visa enabled them to stay here while they endure the long wait for their contributory parent visas to be processed.

Misook and Soejun fall into the category of migrants “stuck in permanently temporary limbo,” in the words of home affairs minister Clare O’Neil. The expert review of Australia’s migration program calculated that 90,000 temporary visa holders have already lived in Australia for more than five years, long enough to “lose their connection with their home countries and become embedded in the Australian community.”

“My husband and I have stayed in Australia, legally, for almost eleven years in the hope of living here permanently and becoming Australian citizens,” Misook says.

The South Korean couple and their eighteen-year-old daughter Eun moved to Australia from Seoul in November 2012. Misook’s employer, a global company, sponsored her on a temporary skilled work visa to fill a vacancy in its Australian operations. She believed she would be able to seek permanent residence after being with the company for a year, only to find that this was out of reach due to her age. Applicants under the Employer Nomination Scheme must be under fifty, and Misook was already fifty-one. A possible exemption applied if Misook could stay with the same firm for four years and earn a salary above a very high threshold, but she had to leave her job in 2015 before meeting that condition.

By this time, Eun was at university. Having failed to meet the requirements for sponsorship, Misook and Soejun looked for other ways to stay in Australia with their only child. Since they were now too old to apply for skilled migration, Soejun got a student visa and went back to study.

By 2017, Eun had qualified as a lawyer, started working and become a citizen. This enabled Misook and Soejun to apply for contributory parent visas. Almost six years later, they are still waiting for a decision. In order to remain in Australia while the process drags on, they spent $20,000 to secure sponsored parent (temporary) visas valid for five years. The couple keep themselves engaged by volunteering for their local council, but Misook is frustrated that the visa conditions prevent them from working even when Australian employers are struggling to find qualified staff.

“Actually, my husband and I are healthy and have skill to work here in Australia, but we can’t work due to the ridiculous visa condition,” she says. “I have been suffering from a financial difficulty to pay all living cost due to the long delay of the visa process.”

Misook says she contributed more than $250,000 in taxes while working for the IT company; Soejun also worked and paid tax, and he and Eun paid thousands more in fees to study as international students. Yet they can’t use Medicare or any other government services. With their long-stay visas expiring in December 2024, the family’s anxiety and uncertainty grows.

Despite their generally positive experience, Edward says he and Tracey also have some concerns. The reality that their five-year visas expire in September 2024 is starting to weigh on their minds, and they are preoccupied with securing a second five-year stay. Their biggest worry is that they’ll be forced to leave Australia for at least three months to do so. Once processing times are added in, Edward reckons they could be away from their grandchildren for up to nine months, interrupting those close relationships and disrupting the lives of their son and daughter-in-law, who rely on help with childcare to manage busy professional lives.

Then there’s the cost. Since they have no home to go back to in England, Edward calculates they could be out of pocket $50,000 in accommodation and airfares.

“That’s money that would otherwise be spent here in Australia,” he says, noting that some of it would probably go to Rory and Matilda and their young family to help them weather rising prices and increasing mortgage repayments. “Most grandparents offer financial support to their families especially during today’s worldwide recession,” he says. “I don’t see any downside for the government in allowing us to apply onshore and granting us a bridging visa while our application is processed.”

Edward’s other concern is that he and Tracey won’t be eligible for travel insurance for the journey because they don’t hold Australian visas extending beyond the period of their trip. And once they’re in Britain they face a catch-22: because they’ve been away from that country for more than three months and are no longer considered residents, they can’t access the National Health Service unless they are returning permanently.

Edward has learned from Facebook that some three-year visa holders have been granted a waiver to apply for a renewal onshore because their presence in Australia is vital to enabling their adult children to stay in the workforce. But he’s unsure whether the rules were only relaxed because of Covid travel restrictions and fears he and Tracey may not get the same dispensation.

The rules appear clear cut. The Home Affairs website says permission to apply onshore “may” be approved if the parent is unable to depart Australia due to accident, serious illness or a disaster in the home country, but will not be approved because leaving Australia is inconvenient or the applicant has “sold assets in their home country”.

A letter to immigration minister Andrew Giles from Edward’s local MP brought no joy. The minister fobbed the inquiry off by referring to mandatory conditions applied to temporary visas under the migration regulations. But with its long duration, Edward thinks the sponsored parent (temporary) visa is in a different category to other temporary visas and doesn’t understand why it can’t be renewed in Australia.

“If we applied onshore and were granted the visa it’s not like we’re gaining any extra time on the ten-year limit,” he says.

The reasons for preventing subclass 870 visa holders from applying for a new visa onshore are opaque. It could be a manifestation of the “Genuine Temporary Entry requirement” — a demonstration that temporary parent migrants like Edward and Tracey still have a life elsewhere and aren’t trying to settle permanently. But given that the visa allows a ten-year stay, this is an absurd piece of bureaucratic rigamarole. Perhaps, as one government insider told me privately, “it’s just a very poorly designed visa.”

I have had serious reservations about the sponsored parent (temporary) visa from the outset. When it was first promised at the 2016 election, I described it for Inside Story as Claytons immigration, a reference to the faux whisky marketed in Australia in the 1970s with the tagline “the drink you have when you’re not having a drink.”

The visa offers neither permanent settlement nor a truly temporary stay. It’s a messy political compromise cooked up to appease migrant communities in marginal electorates.

The influence of the “ethnic vote” is not a new phenomenon. Historian Rachel Stevens records that Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government relaxed the requirements for family migration in its second term in “a pragmatic move designed to gain electoral votes from naturalized southern European migrants.” In the 1980s, Labor supported family migration for the same reason. Stevens cites veteran political journalist Michelle Grattan’s view that “without the southern European vote, the ALP would have lost the 1987 federal election by 2 per cent.”

Yet campaign-driven appeals to specific voters in marginal electorates rarely produce well thought out policy. The sponsored parent (temporary) parent visa is a good example. Designed to appeal to overseas born voters in key seats, it is likely to launch chickens that will come home to roost on some future minister’s desk.

What happens, at the end of a ten-year visa, if a parent has become too frail to return to their homeland, or if they no longer have the family or community supports to sustain them there? Human lives are messy and complicated and tend to explode administrative systems and rules, no matter how detailed and prescriptive. In fact, we already see stories like this, because of the absurd processing delays for permanent parent visa.

In 2020, SBS reported that ninety-eight-year-old grandmother Esmeralda Rosario was facing deportation to India after living in Australia on a bridging visa for twelve years. She had arrived on a tourist visa and then applied for an aged parent visa. In 2019 her application was refused because, unsurprisingly, the nonagenarian failed to meet the health requirement and her care was judged likely to impose significant costs on the Australian community.

SBS also documented the similar case of 93-year-old Mollie Manley. She had been living in Australia on a bridging visa for eleven years when her application for permanent residence was refused. The great grandmother had passed all relevant medical tests when she first arrived in Australia, but by the time her application was assessed she was blind and in aged care. She too was slated as a potential burden on the healthcare system.

Cases like these generally end up in drawn-out appeals before they finally land on the desk of the immigration minister with a request to intervene and grant a visa on compassionate grounds. The minister’s public interest powers can only be exercised after every administrative and legal avenue has been exhausted — a stressful, expensive and inefficient process that takes years.

Plenty of similar cases are yet to come. In March 2023, 17,223 parents were living in Australia on bridging visas — a subset of the 137,000 parents in the combined queue for contributory and non-contributory visas. Most of those people will either die waiting for a decision or end up being rejected because they have become too old and frail to meet Australia’s health requirements.

In 2016, I warned that a long stay parent visa could attract a lot of elderly migrants to Australia. At the time, there were already 80,0000 applicants queuing up for permanent visas, and I figured demand would be significantly higher after factoring in people who were put off applying by the cost or the endless delays for a permanent visa, plus those like Arvind’s mother and Edward who had been excluded by the balance-of-family test.

When the Labor opposition promised to remove the cap on numbers and slash the visa fee, the same concerns re-emerged. Migration expert Bob Birrell predicted “at least 200,000 parent applications” in three years if Labor won government. Demographer Peter McDonald estimated that up to two million families could be interested in sponsoring a parent.

So far, the sponsored parent (temporary) visa hasn’t proved anywhere near that popular, and not because the cap of 15,000 places remained in place or because Covid has interrupted travel plans. The likely reason is that the visa is cumbersome and expensive. But the government would be wise to tread carefully in reforming it. If it was cheaper and easier to access, then the ten-year visa may well become as widely used as Birrell and McDonald suggested, and that would invite a range of unintended consequences.

The Clayton’s approach to migration satisfies nobody and simply defers difficult choices. The government should have the courage of its convictions and either commit to parents being considered “close family” with a near automatic right to join their children in Australia, or say, no, sorry, such a policy is not acceptable to most Australian voters and the best we can offer is a genuinely temporary stay of shorter duration. •

This article is adapted from The Parent Conundrum, a narrative exploring Australia’s troubled approach to parent migration commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, although the views expressed should not be taken represent its views.

The post The visa that missed its mark appeared first on Inside Story.

At my Catholic high school our science teacher drew images of fallopian tubes that looked like languid tropical flowers and sperm resembling frisky tadpoles. He said the words penis and vagina, the class erupted in giggles, and he muttered darkly about HIV and AIDS. Of course, I already knew about AIDS from the endless advertisements showing the Grim Reaper knocking down innocents in a bowling alley.

In short, sex education for my generation was not only seriously confusing and terrifying, it was also monolithically heterosexual, innocent of pleasure outside procreation and ignorant of violence, and only referenced queer sexuality to note the dangers attached.

Cut to 2019 and author Katrina Marson meets primary schoolchildren in Shropshire walking towards each other and learning to say when physical proximity makes them uncomfortable, children in the Netherlands touching feathers, sponges and other materials and expressing how these physical sensations make them feel, children in Yorkshire being shown slides of two girls hugging with the caption “Sometimes two girls will grow up to be women and love each other and that’s called lesbian,” and high-school students in Australia demanding better relationships and sexuality education to prevent sexual assault.

In her new book Legitimate Sexpectations Marson argues that a direct line exists between inadequate sex education and sexual assault. Encouraging children to be literate about their feelings, teaching them they are entitled to pleasure, and showing them how to inquire about, listen to and respect the emotions of their peers is, she says, crucial to their understanding of consent and to their sexual wellbeing as a whole.

Marson joins a panoply of feminist theorists in arguing that consent is a low threshold for sexual autonomy. What children need — and what they are entitled to as a matter of health, safety and human rights — is full sexual citizenship. Judged against this standard, Australian students are woefully disenfranchised. If we are serious about reducing rates of sexual violence in Australia, she says, then we need to begin not with the criminal justice system, which is little more than an “ambulance at the bottom of a cliff,” but with holistic sexual education. We need prevention and pleasure, not simply responses to coercion and crimes.

Marson’s book is ultimately an argument in favour of comprehensive sex education, but her background as a criminal prosecutor lends a fascinating dual perspective to her work, bringing courtroom and classroom into dialogue with each other. Tired of the grim “conveyor belt” that was dropping sexual assault files on to her desk each day, she set out in 2019 to investigate what could be done to stop the damage.

To do that, she revisited an argument she originally made in her honours thesis: that sex education was more effective than law in preventing sexual violence. Then, courtesy of a Churchill Fellowship, she met with teachers, sex-ed experts, researchers and public policymakers involved in innovative relationships and sexuality education programs in Europe, the United Kingdom and North America.

Part memoir, part fiction, part policy paper and part chat with a friend over cocktails, her book makes a compelling argument for Australian parents, schools and governments to adopt a form of sex education for children that goes beyond “don’t get raped” to teach children critical sexual literacy.

Each of Marson’s nine chapters begins with a fictional vignette taken from real situations she has encountered in her work. With ten years’ experience in the criminal justice system, she has an intimate understanding of sexual harms in their most banal and brutal forms, and of the inadequacy of law to redress them. She explains the violence underpinning what might once have been seen as a fumbling in a car or an unwanted romantic encounter at a party by imagining the internal monologues of each person: whether they believed they were entitled to pleasure, what their definitions of consent were, and the social scripts they had been given about masculinity and femininity or about heterosexuality and homosexuality. She showcases a vast spectrum of sexual harms, from cases where consent is clearly lacking to sex that may have been consensual but was ultimately unwanted, a product of social pressure.

I imagine most readers will find these vignettes uncomfortable reading, less because of the anatomical detail with which they are narrated than because of their familiarity. What for so many generations was passed off as bad sex reflects gendered asymmetries of power embedded in scripts about what sex should look like. From cinematic sex scenes entirely oblivious to the clitoris, to reality television shows where women worry more about how they are seen than how they feel, to compulsory heterosexuality, to parents telling a daughter to pull her skirt down or smiling that “boys will be boys,” we learn bad sex in a lot of places.

But what has been learned, Marson argues, can also be unlearned. The need for better communication — mutuality, literacy in knowing and expressing your own feelings and asking about and listening to your partner’s desires — runs through every story, as does the need to challenge binary notions of gender. Australian young people need critical literacy in sexuality that is best offered through relationships and sexuality education.

This is much more than sex education as most of us knew it. At its most comprehensive, it is a form of pedagogy that “aims to provide adolescents with knowledge, skills, attitudes and values.” It views sexuality “in a holistic manner, as an integral part of adolescents’ emotional and social development.” It dispenses with humanistic myths of childhood innocence and embraces young people’s right to sexual knowledge as a human and civil right that ensures sexual safety and wellbeing. It is also one of the most highly politicised and controversial areas of any national educational curriculum.

Remember Scott Morrison saying that a sex-ed program in Victoria made his “skin curl” or the furore that erupted around Safe Schools, an anti-bullying program designed to make schools inclusive for queer kids? At their heart, these moral panics reflect paternalistic notions that children, if given sexual knowledge, will indiscriminately leap on each other with lascivious intent. Like Adam and Eve eating the apple of knowledge, they will be cast out of the garden of childhood innocence, forever sinners, forever corrupted.

This reflects, at least partly, the role school plays in socialisation. Because it is the place where future citizens are moulded and shaped, the nation and the public have a stake in pedagogy, and any recognition of queer sexuality is immediately seen (in conservative columnist Miranda Devine’s words) as a “sexual indoctrination program.” It is why sex education has tended to envisage heterosexual, cis-gendered, married couples as the ideal.

Although data suggests that most parents are in favour of comprehensive sex education that includes recognition of sexual diversity, Australian schools are vulnerable to pressure from conservative and religious minorities because there is no national regulated standard of sex education, unlike in some European countries. Every Australian school in every state has the autonomy to determine sex-education content and delivery, with wildly varying standards of teaching.

Public schools have the additional problem of being vulnerable to the funding whims of governments at state and federal level. Marson contrasts this with Germany, where the Federal Centre for Health Education employs “qualified experts to conduct research, develop teaching packages and online platforms.” This government body then works with the education department in each state to deliver top-quality, standardised and well-resourced modules.

Unlike Australia, where sex-ed programs are framed in negative terms around risks of pregnancy, disease or sexual violence, German sex education is framed in positive terms. As Marson puts it, “They recognise the harm that comes from… failing to set a standard of holistic sexual wellbeing, from failing to paint a picture of what that looks like and what young people should expect: a picture of joy, fun, fulfilment and connection.” Germans start from this baseline and include violence prevention as a supplement. It’s a form of sex education that works with an affirmative model of consent, where consent is based less on a simple yes or no and more on ideas of pleasure and intimacy, where, as Marson puts it, “everyone present is really into it, wants to be there and is getting a lot out of the experience.”

It is the institutionalisation of sex education — as a matter of public policy rather than private values — that explains the title of the book. It’s a play on the administrative law notion of legitimate expectations, under which citizens can hold government to account for certain promises. If we promise children a life free of sexual violence then, as a community, we need to be responsible for funding and developing sex education. Reared in a culture of prudery, most teachers and parents are ill-equipped for the task. We need specialised teachers or qualified professionals if we are not to let our children down on this promise.

While I agree wholeheartedly with Marson’s linking of the institutional with the intimate, there is a certain paternalism to her tone throughout the book. “If anyone is at fault, it is us. As the village that raises you, we have let you down,” she self-lacerates. The rhetoric reflects a top-down model of sex education and is premised on an exaltation of childhood innocence. (We sexually literate adults need to teach you sexually innocent young people.)

Unlike scholarly literature in the field, particularly that of Kerry Robinson and Bronwyn Davies, Marson doesn’t address the myth of childhood innocence that underpins the moral panics around sex education, and in one instance claims that better education “protects” their innocence. This is not just a missed opportunity to examine the class- and race-based nature of a myth that emerged with the privatisation of the Christian middle-class home in the nineteenth century — excluding working-class and non-white children, who were seen as too sexually knowledgeable to be considered real children. It also explains why no young people were interviewed for the book.

At the level of policy, there is significant research, as Marson notes, that suggests the most effective sex education programs are those written alongside young people or indeed conducted by them. And given that adults are not particularly literate in the various forms of social media that are teaching adolescents about sex, it seems odd not to have included their voices and perspectives.

Equally troubling is the omission of any non-white interviewees. While I can accept that Marson decided to focus on North America and Europe, where the education systems are similar to Australia’s, I am baffled by why she would not have interviewed people of colour in the countries she visited, many of which are just as multicultural as Australia. Notions of childhood and sexuality differ across cultures and, as Marson herself notes, “shame around sex and sexuality… are colonial and patriarchal concepts.”

Marson confesses to this deficiency, which I think hints at the broader problem with books written as a “research journey.” As memoir, they can fall short of scholarly standards because the genre is personalised, intimate, vulnerable and confessional. Rather than organising more interviews to redress the problem, Marson simply admits her sin — “my research is the poorer for it” — and carries on. It’s not just a problem in terms of the book’s findings, but also makes me worry about the kinds of books currently being churned out in Australia, where sloppy research passes under the cloak of personal epiphany.

These reservations aside, Marson has written an important book that you will want to thrust into the hands of every parent and educator you know. It is a significant intervention into a field overly dominated by legal perspectives, and I have no doubt that comprehensive relationships and sex education can do far more to prevent sexual violence than changing the legal standard of consent. More than this, it will help raise a generation for which violence, disease or pregnancy is not the prompt for sex education but rather an essential element of a conversation about pleasure, intimacy, fun and desire. •

Legitimate Sexpectations: The Power of Sex-Ed
By Katrina Marson | Scribe | $32.99 | 258 pages

The post Pleasure and intimacy appeared first on Inside Story.

I grew up in Hobart, but I had never been to this part of Tasmania before. Liffey is a very beautiful place, not a town but a cluster of small farms following the valley of the Liffey River. The cemetery is clearly marked on the map, but on the ground a cemetery without a church is an easy thing to miss. Suddenly, a glimpse of white showed above the tall yellow grass — white where there shouldn’t have been any white. We pulled over.

The cemetery’s double iron gates have crosses worked into them, signalling that this is consecrated ground. A lichen-encrusted sign tells us that the Mountain Vale Methodist Church occupied the site from 1867 until 1952. Behind us was Mountain Vale Hill, and across some green paddocks to the west, rearing up grimly on the other side of the Liffey River, were the densely forested Cluan Tiers.

We stomped through a patch of long grass and Scotch thistles, where the church must have stood, and past the remnants of a paling fence. The white headstone we’d seen from the road turned out to belong to Bertram Henry Saunders, who died in 1906 aged nineteen, and his sister Lily, who died in 1910 aged twenty-eight. Inscribed on their headstone is a pair of clasped hands surrounded by leaves and flowers. We could only see about twenty marked graves, none more recent than the 1930s. All were humbler than the tall marble headstone dedicated to young Bertram and Lily Saunders reaching out above the grass to beg passers-by that they not be forgotten.

Saunders. I knew the name. I’d been researching the impact of the first world war in this district and I knew that five men named Saunders had enlisted from around here, and that they feature on local war memorials. Bertram and Lily must have been from that family.

War memorials were why we had come. I had written an article about memorial tree-plantings in Tasmania’s northern midlands. Our visit to Liffey was to take some photographs of trees planted in 2015 at the old Liffey school to replace those planted in 1918 in honour of the men from Liffey who had volunteered for war. That done, we’d be on our way. We were snatching a few days’ holiday over Easter and would be spending that night in Longford.

But you can’t stand in an old cemetery, as we were doing, and not wonder about the entire history of the place and the people, and whether, after all, war was the defining event in their lives. I could see by the dates that these must have been some of the first white settler families in this district. Some had sent grandsons and sons to the war; others — whose names I did not recognise from local war memorials — had obviously not.

Anzac has narrowed our focus too much. It reduces our questions to those that treat the war as an inevitability. But it was not inevitable for Bertram and Lily, who died before 1914. These young people died quite innocent of one of the twentieth century’s great tragedies. The war, so soon to grind itself into Australia’s national psyche, never happened for them.

Glancing up and around, I had an uneasy sense that there were stories folded into those hills that it might not be my business to pry into. And yet I was so desperately curious about these people I would gladly have got down on my knees, right there and then, and scraped though thistles and bare earth if only that would reveal their lives to me. It wouldn’t, of course. I would have to wait until I got home to Canberra to dig into the traditional historical record.

But the experience of being in a place allows us to shift our gaze. What else happened here? How did the land and environment shape people’s ambitions, work and family life? Investigating this might produce histories that don’t sit comfortably with one another.

Victoria Falls, one of the four waterfalls on the Liffey River, c. 1940–50. State Library of Tasmania

The headwaters of the Liffey River gather in Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers and take a wild course through rainforest before plunging down four magnificent cascades known collectively as the Liffey Falls. The river is close to the boundaries of three nations of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and several clans within these nations made seasonal journeys through the area. The Pallittorre clan of the North nation was based at Quamby Bluff, not far from Liffey Falls.

On 24 June 1827 a group of Pallittorre people camped between the Liffey Falls (then known as Laycock Falls) and Quamby Bluff, a prominent nearby mountain peak. They woke late in the evening to the barking of their dogs. Their fires had revealed their location to five white settlers — two soldiers, a police constable and two stockmen — intent upon reprisal for the murder the previous day of a white stockman, William Knight. The settlers fired on the Pallittorre people as they ran into the bush.

Depositions given the following week in Launceston by two of the settlers stated that only one round was fired on the Aboriginal people (many more on their dogs) and that one person had been wounded. But the Hobart Colonial Times reported — almost gleefully — that up to sixty Aboriginal people had been “killed and wounded.” Historians who have studied the incident accept that a massacre took place, with more killings on both sides in the ensuing days, part of what historian Lyndall Ryan has called an “eighteen-day killing spree” in June 1827.

The Pallittorre survivors may have been too frightened to return to the killing sites to observe funerary customs over the dead. Their normal practice was to cremate bodies, but fires would have given away their location. Without these rites, the spirits of the dead would never rest. In later years, stockmen and timber cutters passing through might have heard stories about the killing of the “Blacks,” might even have found a few bones here and there. Today, no memorials mark the sites near Liffey where the Pallittorre people died.

By the 1860s land outside Tasmania’s central midland corridor had been opened up for closer settlement. In Liffey, one of the first white arrivals was James Green, and it was he who donated a sliver of land for the building of the Methodist church in 1867, naming it Mountain Vale after his own property. Timber for the church was cut at his steam sawmill. The structure was so austere you might almost mistake it for a barn, not a church. A flourishing community grew up around it, and every year, for many years, Green gave his workers a day off so that they and their families could celebrate the founding of the church.

Mountain Vale Methodist Church, date unknown. Churches of Tasmania

Most of the blocks sold or leased in Liffey were just a few hundred acres each, and located in difficult country. Fertile certainly, but densely timbered, wet, very cold in winter, and remote from markets for the settlers’ produce. Clearing enough land to establish a viable farm could take a lifetime, but landholders were at least entitled to vote in local and colonial elections, which gave them some say in the sort of society they wanted to live in.

Until then much of the colony’s best land had been granted to free immigrants with plenty of capital who had used convict labour to establish vast pastoral estates. But now, new generations of settlers were pushing into “new” country and helping to level out old social inequalities.

The Saunders family were among that cohort. There were two couples: Caroline and John Saunders, and Maria and William Saunders. Caroline and Maria were sisters, and their husbands were probably cousins. Such couplings were not uncommon. Caroline and Maria’s parents, Jane and John Jones, had taken up land in Liffey in 1863. John was killed by a falling tree while he was building a house for his young family.

Caroline and John Saunders married in 1881 and had ten children. Eventually they did well enough to build a six-room farmhouse, quite fine for Liffey then, which they called Silverburn, but like many bush families they probably started out in a simple timber hut. With too many people living in unsanitary conditions, disease was common. Rose, their third-born, died of typhoid in 1884 at just ten months. She was probably buried in the Mountain Vale cemetery under a simple wooden cross, but if so, the grave marker is long gone.

Bertram and Lily at least survived to adulthood. I don’t know what carried them off, Bertram in 1906 and Lily in 1910. Tuberculosis perhaps. By then, the Saunders parents could afford an elaborately carved headstone for them. Unusually for a woman of twenty-eight, Lily was unmarried.

War came. Caroline and John still had four sons, and all enlisted. Leslie and Colin had moved to Queensland and were living in Gordonvale, a sugar-growing town near Cairns, when they signed up in August 1914, only weeks after war was declared. Both were at the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915. Colin went missing that day, but his death was only confirmed for his parents eighteen months later. Leslie survived Gallipoli but was killed in France in August 1916. Neither man’s remains were ever found; they are commemorated on memorials at Lone Pine, on Gallipoli, and at Villers-Bretonneux.

Their younger brother, Alan, enlisted from Tasmania in March 1915 and managed to have himself transferred to the same battalion as his brothers, presumably to be closer to them. After a few months on Gallipoli he joined the fighting in France. After Leslie’s death, Alan requested and was granted a compassionate discharge from the army on the grounds that his parents had lost two sons and were partly dependent on him as the only son left. He arrived home in Liffey in November 1916.

But here’s the twist. Alan had not told the truth. He was not in fact the last surviving brother in the family because all along, his oldest brother, Walter, had been living in Bracknell with his wife and four children. Walter did eventually enlist, in late 1917. He made it to France just before the armistice, when it was too late for him to see much action, and returned to Tasmania unscathed in October 1919. He took up a soldier-settlement block near Longford, and had four more children.

You can learn a lot from archival records and local newspapers. That’s how I put this story together. But there are limits. Often you can uncover “what happened” — or some of it — but not “why.” The emotional coherence that once held people’s decisions together is lost.

For instance, Leslie and Colin had left Tasmania before the war to strike out in Queensland. Why? Was there a family argument? Perhaps they were looking for work, which is why most young people leave Tasmania, but perhaps they just wanted to get out of this remote, tight-knit community where everyone seemed to be related to everyone else. But why go so far, to a place so different?

Young Alan seemed a troubled soul. He rushed to the war when, at age twenty, he still needed parental permission to enlist, but after his brothers died he lied his way out of the army to get back home again. Did his family connive at this? Given how long it took for letters to travel between continents, I would say not.

Clearly this was a family in acute emotional distress. How did Alan explain his return? What was said around the kitchen table at Silverburn in late 1916? None of us can suggest Alan was a coward. We weren’t there. But the fact that no one in authority checked his story (for instance, by requesting information from the local police) suggests that Alan may not have been an effective soldier, and that the army was willing to quietly let him go. Did his older brother Walter know of Alan’s duplicity? If so, it must have placed Walter in a most dreadful position. Perhaps — here’s a thought — the decision to volunteer for the war was more agonising for Walter than his actual experience.

The postwar years brought fresh worry for Caroline and John. In 1921 their oldest daughter, Beryl, died, leaving her own three children to Caroline and John to care for. Alan married and had a daughter but in the mid 1920s he and his family moved to Queensland, to Gordonvale, where his brothers had lived before the war. He died there in 1930, of war-related illness according to his family. He was thirty-five.

Caroline Saunders died in 1926 aged sixty-two. When John died in 1937, aged seventy-nine, he had been predeceased by seven of his ten children. The three who were left buried their parents next to their sister Beryl under a single, unadorned headstone at Mountain Vale, and added the names of their solider brothers — Leslie, Colin and Alan — who had died “For King and Country.” Thus were these adventurous, impetuous boys brought home to rest with their family.

Social historians of the first world war invariably point out that bereavement in war — the scale of it, the shock of it, and the fact that relatives could not be present at the death or bury their dead with traditional rites — was not the same as in peacetime. It isn’t natural that adult children should die before their parents. All true. And yet if we go back before 1914 we discover that many people were already in mourning when the war broke out. Each of my two Saunders couples in Liffey lost three children before 1914, and that can hardly have been a unique experience.

Maria and William Saunders married in 1886 and also established a farm in Liffey, and had eleven children. In 1901, diphtheria broke out among children in Liffey. This bacterial infection, transmitted by coughing and sneezing, was made worse in small houses where children shared cots and beds. It attacks the respiratory system; if unchecked, a toxin creates a thick grey film in the nose and throat. Many victims who die are unable to breathe.

In the space of a week, Maria and William watched three of their children die in this way: Stanley, aged nineteen months; Horace, thirteen years; and finally baby Grace, only a few months old. All three received separate funerals at Mountain Vale. Three times a procession set out from the Saunders’ house to travel a few kilometres on foot, surrounded by forest, behind a horse-drawn hearse to the little wooden church at Mountain Vale. Nothing marks their graves now.

Not surprisingly, Maria and William sold up and moved. They had more children, and were living in Hadspen, near Launceston, when war came. They had lost two sons who might have volunteered for the war, but still had three eligible sons, Harold (known as Errol) and twins Lawrence and Clarence. These young men would have had plenty of friends who rushed to the colours — including their own Saunders cousins — and yet they hesitated.

Many did. In Tasmania the enlistment rate among eligible men was 37.8 per cent. Pragmatically, men weighed up their various duties and obligations, calculated the pay and allowances made to soldiers and their families, and decided not to go. Others attempted to enlist but were rejected on medical and other grounds. But that left huge numbers who never went near a recruiting depot.

Tasmania voted twice in favour of conscription, in the plebiscites of 1916 and 1917, but the debate was bitterly divisive. For those who stayed home it must have taken a particular sort of courage to accept that their lot would be to plant potatoes, mend fences and get the harvest in; that they would be shooting rabbits and possums, not the beastly Hun.

Under the weight of all this, only Lawrence went. He enlisted in October 1916 and served on the Western Front until he was killed in action in Belgium in February 1918. He is buried in a cemetery near Ypres. Clarence, his twin brother, stayed home, married and had a family, and lived a long and outwardly uneventful life. There are tales aplenty of twins who enlisted, fought and died together, but these two didn’t. How did they decide who would stay and who would go? Could it possibly have come down to the toss of a coin?

The more we attempt to dwell inside the lives of people in the past, especially ordinary people who leave little trace of themselves in the historical record, the more questions we uncover that elude easy answers. So be it. My stories from Liffey are fragmented and unresolved. But small stories inspired by encounters with local places often ask us to reconsider broader national narratives: Anzac, or something else that we cherish. They nibble away at accepted versions of history and propose new relationships between apparently disparate experiences.

Who is a hero and who is a coward? Who is remembered and who is forgotten? How is the memory of the dead to be preserved? That man with a gun — that man with a spear — is he a patriot or is he a criminal? These binary questions are probably not useful. What is important is that we are attentive to whatever unquiet stories the land might reveal. •

The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of historian Dr Shayne Breen in the preparation of this article.

The post Unquiet stories from Liffey appeared first on Inside Story.

As anyone with a HECS debt can tell you, education is no longer a process. It’s a commodity. At the non-compulsory ends of the education spectrum — early childhood at one end, university at the other — education is a business enterprise, even if the business is run on a not-for-profit basis. What if the right “policy lens” could help us understand the pressures and the competing interests better? Would that help us to better plan and deliver education and care to young children? After reading Neoliberalism and Early Childhood Education, my answer is a qualified “yes” — accompanied by nagging thoughts about where this book could have taken us.

Guy Roberts-Holmes and Peter Moss set out to do something potentially very powerful: to “emphasise the significance of the political and economic for early childhood education.” But their book is not a straight work of analysis: their purpose is forcefully subversive. They are here to explain not only how neoliberalism operates in early childhood education and care, but also how to resist it. They want to convince the rest of us that neoliberalism is “deeply problematic, eminently resistible and eventually replaceable.”

A historian by training, Peter Moss has devoted his academic career to interrogating the assumptions and ideologies that underpin early childhood policy and practice. His colleague at University College London, Guy Roberts-Holmes, is a former early childhood teacher who entered academia after several years working with children. They therefore bring experience to bear, along with a strong sense of mission.

The revolutionary framing might seem odd for a book about the early childhood education and care sector. At times, it feels that way — particularly when Roberts-Holmes and Moss draw their bows too long. Nonetheless, the pairing of these two subjects — neoliberalism and early childhood education — makes sense. As the authors note, neoliberal economics is the lingua franca of policymakers across the globe, and education systems have not escaped its reach. While there are piles of analysis on neoliberalism in the university sector and in schools, preschools, kindergartens and long daycare centres have received relatively little attention.

For those not familiar with how neoliberalism grew from a boutique economic theory to a manual for business and government, Roberts-Holmes and Moss only skim the surface. But they get away with it because they are writing not so much about neoliberalism as about resisting the dominant paradigm — which, at the moment, happens to be neoliberalism.

The authors define neoliberalism as a “meta-narrative” that “reduces everything to the economic.” The market mediates both economic and social relations, and citizens are replaced by customers. Their analysis has a strong sociological bent, and it takes a wide frame, describing “the conversion of non-economic domains, activities and subjects into economic ones.”

Roberts-Holmes and Moss survey the school education system to provide context for their study and get a head start on building their thesis. They are mightily displeased with what they see, mapping neoliberalism’s “infection” of education systems across the developed world, tracing it through the spread of policy ideas and assessment tools like the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA.

The book focuses heavily on Britain, although the policy environment there is familiar enough to be accessible for Australian readers. Elements of the story will ring a bell (or, for some, welcome heralds of change) among Australian readers. These include national control of previously disparate and diverse school curricula; standardised national testing; and a relentless narrative of “parent choice” in school selection, even in the public sector.

For the authors, the “marketisation” of early learning and care is objectionable largely because it has fostered the emergence of private, for-profit providers, who compete with government and not-for-profit providers in a mixed market. In Britain, the number of private providers skyrocketed over the course of the 1990s, driven by demand from working families. By 2019, commercial providers accounted for 82 per cent, by value, of the long daycare sector.

The private sector has not come to such prominence everywhere. In Germany and Norway, for example, not-for-profit providers still dominate early learning and care. Roberts-Holmes and Moss demonstrate market similarities across the Anglosphere, from the United States to Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, but private capital has also found opportunities elsewhere across the globe, particularly in Asia. By 2013, two-thirds of the kindergartens in China were privately owned.

So how and why did the private sector come to play such a significant role in early learning in so many countries? As the authors show, where rapid expansion of the early learning sector was required it was private providers who were ready to move quickly enough to meet demand. The dynamic runs thus: the government neglects early childhood education and care; the government has an epiphany and realises it needs more of those services, in a hurry; private capital mobilises to meet demand.

While Roberts-Holmes and Moss are trenchant critics of neoliberalism, they also argue that, even if we accept the terms and tenets of orthodox economics, the operation of the open market in early childhood education and care is not “a roaring success.” The authors identify particular elements of market failure in the system, beginning with the fact that competition can’t drive down costs for parents because staffing is by far the largest expense for all providers, and pay and conditions for early childhood educators can’t be cut any further.

Using research from Europe, they also highlight the role of poorly informed consumers in driving the market. Parents are generally time-poor and find it difficult to compare the quality of competing early learning and care services. They are a long way from embodying Homo economicus, so they have little capacity to drive up quality by only purchasing services from the best providers.

Neoliberalism and Early Childhood Education includes a detailed account of the governance and assessment systems for early childhood and school education introduced in England over the past twenty-five years. For Roberts-Holmes and Moss, the very notion of national frameworks, curricula and quality standards — and the data they generate — is frightening. Disturbed by this evidence of intensified “surveillance capitalism,” they predict that our current trajectory will lead us to “monitoring and measuring children’s emotions” and trying to make them more “compliant,” and to “mass surveillance of school populations.” It’s sweeping and Orwellian. It’s also a shame they didn’t look further afield, to Australia.

Australia has leapfrogged most of the world in codifying and regulating high-quality early learning and care, via the National Quality Framework, a rigorous set of principles, policies and practices designed to ensure high-quality early learning and care for children. The curriculum document that underpins the Australian system, the Early Years Learning Framework, does not (as Roberts-Holmes and Moss might expect) reduce young children to passive, two-dimensional economic units. It treats them as capable, wonder-filled people and active citizens. Interviews with the highly respected team of Australian pedagogues who developed the Early Years Learning Framework might have provided a very helpful counterweight in this book.

Of course, the book contains a kernel of truth. Measuring human beings’ attributes, knowledge and performance is highly contested territory, and has been for millennia. But the idea that we mustn’t engage in any measurement at all, because it is invariably reductionist and a neoliberal trap, removes any possibility that we can improve children’s learning, wellbeing and development by assessing what we’re doing right now.

The sense of doom grows as the book develops. Neoliberalism has forced us to see the long daycare centre or preschool as “a factory or processing plant… that will ready children for the future.” Roberts-Holmes and Moss loathe the term “school readiness,” and they have a point: it’s dangerous to imagine that early childhood education and care services should, for example, teach children to read and write. It’s also sound to insist that children are not “empty vessels” who need to be filled with knowledge and skills before they start school. But I’m not sure that most commentators in Australia have that in mind when they speak about “school readiness.” Mostly, people who talk or write about the importance of pre-primary education want to see children arrive at school confident and happy, ready to thrive and learn.

Roberts-Holmes and Moss also take a swipe at Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman. The “Heckman curve” has proven a very effective tool in explaining the importance of investing public funds in the first five years of a child’s life. But Roberts-Holmes and Moss are having none of it — not even in relation to children in vulnerable and disadvantaged circumstances. In fact, they dismiss talk of early education as a leveller, or a tool of equality of opportunity, because it “negates the need for more radical political measures,” such as government redistribution of wealth. To be sure, a Marxian approach would even things up, but in the meantime, is it so wrong to want all children to have the same chance at getting a high-quality early education?.

The final chapter of the book is a call to action, with the authors asserting that “neoliberalism is entering into crisis” and that “the end may well be nigh.” (Those who claimed the same at the time of the global financial crisis, only to be disappointed, might disagree.) Drawing heavily on Foucault, Roberts-Holmes and Moss call on their readers to resist. They hold up the prospect of radical action to create alternative pathways for early childhood education and care: for example, “scrapping a system of commodified private services competing in a market-place,” and replacing it with “a system of early childhood services based on cooperative networks and public provision.”

Their method for achieving this? To redirect public funding away from the private for-profit sector. Confusingly, they concede that “private, for-profit services will continue to exist and can continue to compete with each other, but will do so without the benefit of public money or public encouragement.” This raises the obvious question: if the goal is to create a nirvana for all children, why develop a bifurcated system? And which children get the “good” early learning and care (provided by government and community groups) and which get the “bad” alternative?

The conclusion highlights a weakness woven throughout the book: the binaries of “good” and “bad,” and what they gloss over or ignore. For example, Roberts-Holmes and Moss lament the rise of competition and choice in the early childhood education and care sector, looking back wistfully to the old days (pre-1980s) when parents simply enrolled their child in “a good local centre, perhaps provided by the local council, along with other children from the neighbourhood — a public service for the community.” But what if that local centre wasn’t so good? What if its opening hours didn’t match that parent’s work commitments (or job aspirations)? What if the “neighbourhood” was in a low socioeconomic status area and the council couldn’t invest the resources required to meet the needs of all those children?

For the authors, it’s as though neoliberalism has wiped the slate clean, leaving us in a wasteland dominated by new technocratic, managerial structures that are killing us. Neoliberalism has certainly draped itself like a veil over the top of what we already had in the West: community, government and economy (none of it perfect, mind you). But it hasn’t suffocated the world as we knew it. Parents still care about their children; early childhood educators are still interested in children’s welfare; early childhood education and care services still deliver good services for children and their families.

In essence, Roberts-Holmes and Moss over-egg the pudding. In order to demonstrate that neoliberalism has changed and challenged the early childhood education and care system, it isn’t necessary to prove that it has sucked all the goodness out of it. Because it hasn’t. As a piece of polemic, this book is impassioned; as a work of analysis, it is often frustrating; as a roadmap for how to improve early childhood education and care, it is incomplete. But the book is certainly thought-provoking — and perhaps this is what really matters, because any discussion about the importance of early childhood education and care is to be welcomed. •

The post Early childhood economics appeared first on Inside Story.

In reality, though, most domestic abuse involves coercive control: a pattern of physical, sexual, financial and psychological abuse that one person (usually a man) uses to control and dominate another person (usually a woman, and usually an intimate partner).

This week a multi-party parliamentary committee recommended that New South Wales become the first jurisdiction in mainland Australia to criminalise coercive control. (Tasmania introduced related offences sixteen years ago.) After nearly a year of research and consultation, a committee of Liberal, Labor, Greens and One Nation MPs unanimously recommended that coercively controlling a current or former intimate partner should become a crime.

The committee didn’t specify the precise wording or scope of the new offence. But because these laws exist in Britain and elsewhere — as the committee highlights in its report — we can expect two key elements to feature.

First, like stalking laws, a coercive control offence will focus on a pattern of abuse, not on isolated incidents. This means the justice system will be forced to see abuse the way victims experience it, as an ever-present threat. This focus on repeat behaviour will present challenges to investigating police. But it will also deal with a key shortcoming in the main response to family violence: intervention orders. These orders sometimes result in women being mistakenly identified as the primary aggressor, because they limit police’s consideration to the immediate event (disregarding the possibility that her actions, if any, may have been taken in self-defence). By looking at the whole of the relationship, rather than just the most recent incident of violence, the new offence provides a better lens for assessing who is the real abuser.

Second, the new offence will outlaw psychological, emotional and financial abuse. Isolation from family and friends, degrading and humiliating conduct, and deprivation of necessary financial resources will be prohibited. This is behaviour that has traditionally fallen outside the scope of the criminal law. The offence won’t, though, apply to reasonable behaviour, and it will only apply if the offender intended the behaviour to cause harm to the victim or if a reasonable person would have known that harm was likely. Concerns that the new offence will prevent parents from disciplining their children, or spouses from taking the family car without the consent of their partner are wrong and inflammatory.

Other elements of the new offence are less settled. For instance, while overseas jurisdictions limit their coercive control offences to familial relationships, or some more narrowly to intimate partners, the committee left open the possibility of including broader relationships.

It is also important to realise that as groundbreaking as this proposed reform is, in some ways it isn’t new. Most states and territories already indirectly criminalise coercion, psychological abuse, control, emotional abuse and financial abuse when it occurs as a breach of an intervention order. What is novel is that the new offence wouldn’t require victims to first go to court and obtain an intervention order before the abuse became criminal. Instead, they could directly seek the assistance of police, who would now be better able to respond.

So, how might this new law work in practice? The case of Natalie Curtis, who lived with her husband just east of London, is illustrative. By the end of their six-year relationship, he was calling her up to forty times a day, threatening to kill her, throwing her belongings out of the house and smashing their furniture. He blamed Natalie for his behaviour.

As is often the case, the relationship didn’t start out that way. He initially seemed attentive and caring, but over time that attentiveness became surveillance, and care became control. Natalie describes it as “a drip effect, each event gets a bit worse and a bit worse… And then someone has control over you.” She developed severe anxiety and panic attacks, and eventually went to the police. Her husband was charged with controlling or coercive behaviour and ultimately sentenced to two years’ jail.

Of course, some of his behaviour, such as threats and property damage, was already criminal. But the justice system, viewing them in isolation, often doesn’t take these offences seriously enough. In fact, two years before Natalie left him for good, her husband received a suspended prison sentence for threatening to kill her. A few weeks later, after he promised to reform and begged her to take him back, they moved back in together. It got worse after that.

To be clear, criminalising coercive control is not a panacea for the shadow pandemic of family violence that costs our country lives, untold misery and billions of dollars every year. And there are still important tasks ahead. The NSW committee recommended establishing a taskforce to oversee careful drafting of the new offence, to consult about its final form, and to monitor its implementation. That taskforce will need to deal with concerns about the ability of our justice systems to deal with domestic violence and “invisible” harms. The new law must also be drafted and implemented carefully to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians.

The committee made it clear that a new offence was contingent on broader, systemic reforms occurring concurrently: widespread community education campaigns; extensive training for everyone whose work will be affected by the new law; and additional resources for domestic violence services and criminal justice agencies to help them absorb the extra workloads created by the new offence.

With nearly all states and territories now considering whether to criminalise these forms of family violence, New South Wales leads the way. A new law that directly outlaws these forms of abuse will give effect to what victims, frontline workers and researchers have known for decades: that coercion and control, rather than physical violence, are the core of domestic and family violence. •

The post Shadow pandemic appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s only got weirder since then, of course, and the walls at home are closing in fast. The dog’s loving it though. Walks are longer and more frequent; he’s got plenty of friends down at the park and social distancing doesn’t appear to be a huge concern for any of them. My son’s loving it too. Nothing focuses a fifteen-year-old boy on what’s important like a school lockout. For him it’s the perfect crime with zero downside: arson minus the fire and the risk. My daughter? Bored. That’s not all that remarkable — she’s twelve and it’s a common refrain among her cohort. She’s been going okay though, hanging out in the kitchen with a friend of hers she’s known since prep. His kitchen’s in San Francisco. He’s bored too.

Given the more pressing problems around, boredom doesn’t qualify as a problem at all. Virus or no virus, it never really has. I don’t know who said it but we’ll struggle for a decent novelist in the future if no one ever gets bored and stares out a window. Perhaps, and if we do what’s being asked of us and stay indoors, we can look forward to some good art coming out of Covid-19. If the artists survive it, that is, which they surely will. If the arts community is familiar with anything it’s the bones of its collective arse. If you need proof of that, try googling “ministry for the arts in Australia.” You’ll end up deep in the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. There’s an office in there somewhere with Arts on the door. Maybe.

While it’s not only the arts that have been devastated, no other trade has been shut down so swiftly and unceremoniously. Sport dragged its heels in a protracted farce, Crown Casino likewise. Restaurants are hanging by a thread and the best a waiter can hope for is a gig as a delivery driver. But the arts? A couple of weeks ago now a friend who manages a band sent me a text: “Tonight’s our last show for quite a while… last coin for a while too.” This after a period that saw a multitude of benefit gigs across the country for bushfire victims and their communities. Those with shallow pockets have always dug the deepest. No surprises there.

A while ago now, in the interests of mental health and a desire for clear air on matters of public importance, I ditched Facebook. It was a good decision, for me at least. Friends may disagree, though, because now I send rants directly, via text.

Like most, I have an assortment of contacts in my phone: friends, acquaintances, immediate and extended family, work colleagues, professional connections and any number of less intimates. There’s a plumber, a couple of builders and a mechanic, musos, politicos, thespians, academics, workaholics, alcoholics, new-age hippies, office workers, business owners, people I don’t like much, people who don’t like me much, names I don’t recognise. You get the picture. Left, right and all that’s in between.

In equal parts inspiration and irritation, I texted a request for responses to a simple prompt in relation to Covid-19: “I find it curious/amusing that…” The replies came quickly, and the willingness of people to share then, and in the days following, made me regret I’d boxed them in with a such a narrow request and left deeper questions unasked. There isn’t much that’s amusing about Covid-19 after all. Some of them texted just to tell me that.

The general tenor of the responses suggests that Scott Morrison’s been presented with an opportunity to redeem himself after a summer that left many wondering if he was up to the job. For the most part, it has to be said, they’re still wondering. For many, that the prime minister has been only too keen to surround himself with experts in relation to the public health crisis is at stark odds with his inclination to distance himself from people who know a lot about the environmental one. Morrison was also criticised for his “It’s ridiculous, it’s un-Australian and it must stop” rebuke to panic buying: “I find it curious,” texted someone, “that the PM finds it necessary to chastise ‘quiet’ Australians for being rampant market-driven capitalists for buying and selling toilet paper.”

Market-driven capitalism, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it, came in for sharp critique. As one (now jobless) texter noted, “We have to look long and hard at a system that folds in on itself so spectacularly that it can barely sustain society beyond the loss of a single weekly pay cheque.” The challenge now is that it’s far more monumental than a single pay cheque.

Those in the privileged position of having a job — for now anyway — wonder what type of workplace they’ll be returning to once the virus subsides. At the very least, employers will have a picture of who among their staff works best autonomously, who needs the social setting of an office, and who’s best left at home, free of the nine-to-five factory settings that society mostly just endures because they’re too hard to change.

Massive change, of course, has also hit the education sector. While online education has hung like a Damoclean sword over more traditional forms of teaching and learning for a couple of decades, despite the zeal of its many champions it’s a tough sell, not necessarily because of what it is as much as because of what it isn’t. Anyone who’s been conducting social and work interactions full-time for the past couple of weeks via Zoom, Skype or Facetime will appreciate what is lost. At universities at least, and particularly in arts faculties where a contest of ideas is vital to the pursuit of knowledge and shifting truths, the mooted demise of face-to-face teaching is lamentable. No matter how good sound and video quality is, the virtual classroom is no substitute for being in a room together, in each other’s company, where subtlety, nuance and body language contribute so much to modify behaviour and maintain civility.

Among tales that arrived in my phone of being swept up, or not, in panic-buying melees, there was concern about the rush on egg-laying chooks in the scramble for self-sufficiency. In the not-so-olden days, the minute a chicken stopped producing eggs at a reasonable tempo it ended up in a casserole dish. Stories of headless, bloody chickens chucking laps of the Hills hoist in the backyards of yesteryear are rife among the over-fifties and pretty much all of them involve impossible-to-shift memories of mum and dad tag teaming in the domestic slaughter. Now, your best laying hen’s called Molly or Fluffy and you have adorable photographs of your three-year-old daughter and five-year-old son cuddling her in the backyard. Even if by some miracle you manage to get the idea of Molly’s beheading past the kids, you probably don’t even own a tomahawk, much less the skill or conviction to use it.

I know all this because I have adorable photos of my three-year-old daughter and five-year-old son cuddling Molly, our best laying hen, in the backyard. Molly died of natural causes six years after we last saw an egg. Fluffy, Rusty, Muffy and Twinkle had similarly long and semi-productive lives, which is no small feat given the preponderance of foxes in the suburbs of Melbourne.

The hard lesson from the summer that Scott Morrison only just bumbled his way through is that the public needs and expects good governance in a crisis, and, importantly, when they don’t think you’re up for it, you’ll hear about it long and loud. At the very least they expect the prime minister to be in the country.

In that respect, at least, Morrison is going well. He couldn’t get a flight to Hawaii right now even if he wanted one. In the other? While it’s still early, his stocks appear to be rising. •

The post Fending for ourselves appeared first on Inside Story.

Let’s start at the beginning, or at the least the Australian beginning for Rudi and his first wife, Veronica. (I’m using pseudonyms because Rudi’s situation is delicately balanced.) About ten years ago, Rudi, Veronica and their toddler Maja left Europe for Australia. Veronica was an international student and the primary visa holder. Rudi and Maja were classified as her dependants.

About a year later, Rudi and Veronica’s relationship fell apart. Rudi needed his own visa if he wanted to stay in Australia and remain a father to Maja. He returned to study, starting with an English course then moving on to vocational qualifications in management and IT. At each stage he gained a new student visa.

For reasons that will become apparent, it’s important to stress that Rudi mentioned his daughter whenever he applied for a new visa, and that staying close to Maja was important to him. Technically, such honesty could have cost Rudi dearly, because all international students must satisfy a genuine temporary entrant requirement designed to identify — and potentially exclude — applicants who use the student visa program “for motives other than gaining a quality education.” Personal ties that “present a strong incentive to stay in Australia” are grounds for a refusal.

Rudi’s visas were routinely granted, though, which meant he could study and work during the week and care for Maja at weekends. “It was a good arrangement,” he says, because his relations with Veronica were amicable. “A verbal agreement on shared custody was all we needed.” But that didn’t last.

Over time, Rudi and Veronica both started other relationships. Veronica’s new partner was Australian, and their marriage meant that she and Maja would eventually become Australian citizens. Rudi fell in love with Maria Rosa, an international student from Latin America. Maria and Rudi married and had a baby, Maja’s half-brother Robbie, who is now a toddler.

Somewhere along the way, relations between Rudi and Veronica soured, and they could no longer agree on arrangements for sharing Maja’s care. When months of mediation failed, they ended up in the Family Court. (The involvement of the Family Court is another reason for blurring personal details in this story; Section 121 of the Family Law Act makes it an offence to report on proceedings in a manner that may identify the individuals involved in a particular case.) After a process that lasted eighteen months, the Family Court granted Rudi shared custody of Maja in a roughly 40–60 split with Veronica: Maja spends five nights a fortnight with Rudi, Maria and Robbie during school terms and is with them for half the school holidays.

While the Family Court recognises Rudi’s central role in the life of his daughter, these legally sanctioned shared-custody arrangements have no bearing on his immigration status. So, as Rudi completed his final course and his last student visa neared its end date, he faced a dilemma — how could he stay in Australia and maintain his role as Maja’s father? Although he was steadily employed, he lacked the qualifications that would secure him a visa as a skilled migrant.

As I have reported before in Inside Story, no visa category exists to allow the foreign parent of an Australian child to stay here in order to share his or her care and maintain their relationship. Desperate foreign parents must find complex workarounds, wriggle through migration loopholes, or leave the country and lose access to their child.

Rudi tried two things, and this is where his visa problems got really serious.

One approach involved an application for a contributory parent visa (subclass 143) supported by the church Rudi attends. As the wrinkled faces gracing the relevant pages of the Home Affairs website indicate, this visa is designed for a completely different purpose — to enable adult migrants who have settled in Australia to sponsor their ageing parents to join them here. As Rudi’s child, Maja is eligible to sponsor her father to stay in Australia; as a minor, however, this would require her mother’s consent and signing on her behalf. With the deteriorated relationship between Rudi and Veronica this was not an option, which is why the church stepped in.

This visa category has other drawbacks. It costs around $45,000 per applicant, it presently takes at least four years to process and it can only be granted if the applicant is outside Australia. Unlike many other visas, lodging an application doesn’t make you eligible for a bridging visa — in other words, it doesn’t help Rudi stay in Australia in the short term.

If Rudi, Maria and Robbie were forced to leave Australia until the visa was granted, they would be separated from Rudi’s daughter for four crucial years of her life — years in which she would go from being a teenager to a young adult. “You show love for children by being there,” says Rudi’s migration agent, who is advising him pro-bono. “If you are not present, they feel like they are not loved. When they grow up, they will say, ‘you left me’ and they won’t necessarily understand why.”

“I don’t want to be one of those absent fathers,” says Rudi. Of course, he could maintain a relationship with Maja online, through video calls and messaging apps. But his ability to stay in touch with his daughter would be at the discretion of his former wife. Given their estrangement, Rudi fears that Veronica might not allow such contact. As his migration agent points out, the Family Court’s decision on shared custody doesn’t say anything about the terms of any contact with Maja from overseas. Nor, once he has left Australia, can he go back to the court to seek new orders enabling him to keep in touch with Maja online.

Rudi and Maria also pursued a second option to keep Rudi in Australia. Maria applied for a new student visa, with Rudi and their son Robbie as her dependents. If she were granted a visa, then the family could all live in Australia while she studied, and the contributory parent visa would be much closer to being finalised by the time she completed her course.

But Maria’s visa application was denied. And when she appealed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, it was denied there too.

The fly in the ointment was the genuine temporary entrant requirement. Given the family’s extended student visa history in Australia, the presence of an Australian citizen child (Maja) and a lodged contributory parent visa, Home Affairs and the AAT both concluded, quite reasonably, that Maria was not a genuine temporary entrant. A key purpose of her student visa application was to enable Rudi to remain in Australia close to his daughter.

As Rudi’s migration agent acknowledges, Home Affairs and the AAT are not doing anything wrong in a legal sense. They are applying migration law correctly, but the effect of doing so produces a manifest injustice.

Cases like this are not just about rights of foreign parents; they are also about the rights of Australian children. Maja, an Australian citizen, risks being denied a close bond with her father and her younger brother. This contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires signatory states like Australia to ensure “that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when competent authorities… determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child.” In Rudi and Maja’s case, the competent authorities — at the Family Court — have determined exactly the opposite: that it is in Maja’s best interests to have an ongoing relationship with her father.

The convention goes on to say that governments “shall respect the right of the child who is separated from one or both parents to maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis.” States must deal with a parent’s applications to enter or leave a country for the purpose of family reunification “in a positive, humane and expeditious manner.”

There is nothing positive, humane or expeditious about the operation of Australia’s migration law in such circumstances. The lack of a simple visa pathway forces families to live for years in a state of anxious uncertainty. And in Rudi’s case, that limbo could last a long time yet.

Rudi’s last hope rests with an application for the immigration minister to personally consider his case. The minister has the discretion to replace the tribunal’s decision with one that is “more favourable” if he or she thinks it is “in the public interest to do so.” In short, the minister could choose to grant Rudi and his family visas.

Sometimes referred to as the God powers, ministerial discretion is non-delegable, non-compellable and non-reviewable. In other words, the minister alone makes such decisions; he or she can’t be forced to consider any particular case; there is no set timeline for reaching a decision; and no decision made in this way can be challenged in any court or tribunal.

The process is also entirely opaque. Home Affairs no longer publishes data on requests for intervention, but in the last year it did, back in 2011–12, more than 8000 individual applications were received. It is reasonable to assume the number is higher today. If the minister were to resolve 8000 cases within a year, that would mean working seven days a week and considering and finalising twenty-two applications every day. Of course, the minister doesn’t consider each case personally. Gatekeeping staff vet applications against a set of guidelines to try to identify which ones should progress to the minister’s desk. As the Home Affairs website warns, only a small number do.

So, the fair resolution of exceptional cases like Rudi’s — ones that migration law does not cater for — rely on the discretion of the minister. And yet there is no guarantee the minister will even look at such cases personally.

“We have to work with the legislation we’ve got,” says Rudi’s migration agent. “We’ve been up front and honest all the way.” The agent is buoyed by the fact that Rudi, Maria and Robbie have been granted three-month bridging visas. That suggests that the application didn’t fall at the first hurdle when it was vetted by staff in the minister’s office. But that also means the process could drag on for an unknown period. The responsible minister, David Coleman, has just taken indefinite leave from his portfolio, and his duties have been handed to Alan Tudge. Given the holiday season, and the fact that Mr Tudge will continue as minister for population, cities and urban infrastructure too, it seems unlikely that he’ll get around to considering Rudi’s plight any time soon.

As a result, Rudi and his family could find themselves living on one short-term bridging visa after another, never knowing if it will be renewed, and unable to travel outside the country in the meantime. Rudi worries that if one of his parents back in Europe were to fall seriously ill, he would be unable to visit them.

Rudi knows that sharing his story with me won’t alter his own fate. But he wants Australians to know what is happening to his family, because he thinks the way the law operates is wrong and should be changed.

Cases like his are not common, but as the number of temporary migrants living in Australia continues to grow, more families will be caught up in legal and administrative complexity, trapped between migration law and family law, two systems that don’t talk to one another. For those involved, the stakes are extraordinarily high. Yet it would be relatively easy for the government to create a straightforward visa pathway to enable foreign parents to live in the same country as their Australian children. • 

The post “I don’t want to be one of those absent fathers” appeared first on Inside Story.

No author was ever more preoccupied with families than Ivy Compton-Burnett. In her brilliant talkfests, family ties could never be relied on as a bulwark against mounting tensions, or worse. In fact, she once claimed that more harm is done in the name of the family than of any other institution. Well, this may be true; most of what she said was; but while The Farewell certainly has some tense moments, what emerges is essentially a benign concern for a family’s matriarch.

The film opens with a telephone call from New York–based Chinese student Billi (Awkwafina) to her grandmother in Changchun, Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao). The two of them seem to have a very warm relationship undiminished by intercontinental separation. But what sets the narrative in motion is the news received by Billi’s parents, Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and Lu Jian (Diana Lin), that Nai Nai — who is Haiyan’s mother — has been diagnosed with cancer and may have only a very short time to live.

To protect Nai Nai from this knowledge in what they believe to be her final month, the family plans a hasty wedding between her only grandson, Hao Hao (Han Chen), and his recently acquired girlfriend, Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara). Billi’s parents, fearful that Billi won’t be able to control her distress, try to persuade her not to accompany them to China for the wedding. But Billi, who is very Americanised, believes that she is perfectly able to tell the odd, more or less harmless, lie, and follows her parents to Changchun. In one of the film’s many engaging moments of gentle humour, a surprised Nai Nai asks her, “Did you fly?” “No, I swam,” comes her reply.

Soon the family gathers for a meal. A gathering like this — as in, say, the very different Palm Beach — seems to announce a unity, a harmony, that we feel is likely to become strained. Nai Nai, still unaware of how serious things are, blames her sister for telling the distant family members that she’s been unwell; the young soon-to-be-weds seem constrained by the circumstance that is pushing them towards marriage; Billi’s mother doesn’t quite join in the conviviality that Nai Nai exudes. But there’s nothing like the vicious outbreak that happens in Palm Beach.

What does emerge is the easy, affectionate rapport between Billi and her grandmother, including a scene in which the latter trains Billi in what I suspect are called “wellness” exercises, to be echoed in the film’s last moments. Director Wang has secured superb performances from Zhao Shuzhen and Awkwafina in roles that become central to the film’s texture and tone. This is not a film with a conventional cause-and-effect narrative structure, but one that depends on closely observing what goes on among members of a family. (I am reminded of the 2005 US drama of family tensions, Phil Morrison’s Junebug, a film of similar tonal astuteness.)

The Farewell may seem to be animated by the approaching wedding but its real purpose lies in observing how people react in shifting situations. Anna Franquesa Solano’s superb cinematography fluently locates their reactions, her framing of Billi’s affectless gaze at the daunting apartment blocks she passes, and fetches up at, on arrival at Changchun very effectively showing how much more at home she felt in the opening scenes in New York streets.

While the film is unerring in its revelation of its characters’ interactions, its texture is also enriched by an ongoing concern with ideas, though it avoids becoming merely didactic. The “lie” that sets the whole thing in motion — the wedding — becomes more than a mere plot device. Echoing the words of the film’s subtitle, “based on an actual lie,” contrasts are made between Nai Nai’s sister’s effortless, well-intended deceit, Billi’s desire to tell the truth, and the claim of one doctor that “it’s a good lie.” Through such reactions, the film canvasses the complex morality that this kind of untruth may involve, and its consequences

The Farewell is one of the richest films of the year, engaging our attention through its characters and how they react to each other and to the “lie” at its heart, and by touching on the accepted mores of East and West as understood by those who live on opposite sides of the Pacific. You don’t have to agree with what one character suggests, that the West is only interested in individuals while the East views family as part of a whole scene: it is simply an aspect of the thinking and lived experience of Wang’s people.

The no doubt eagerly anticipated film version of Downton Abbey offers another kind of family whose members are sometimes at odds with each other. Though I’m not a dedicated fan of the series, I should in fairness add that the film passes the time (two hours) easily enough, perhaps above all because of its great cast. Most of them are repeating the roles they played in the series, though a few are entering the sacred world of Downton Abbey for the first time.

When a royal visit is announced, the family is of course excited, as are the downstairs staff. But the servants find they are to be replaced by the royal entourage under the smugly superior Wilson (David Haig), and their services will not be required during the visit. This leads to some farcically contrived plotting, and indeed the film as a whole is overcrowded with incident and characters.

In the end, it’s really all about hierarchy, above and below stairs. Wilson makes it plain that his own underlings know their place, while upstairs there is never any question that Maggie Smith’s Countess of Grantham sits and sniffs at the top of the ladder, even more elevated than her lord-of-the-manor son, the earl (Hugh Bonneville), and certainly above his American wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and the Baroness Isobel (Penelope Wilton), while the earl’s Irish son-in-law is clearly the lowest-placed at the table.

If you want merely to pass two hours more or less painlessly, Downton Abbey may fit the bill. But an hour and a half spent in the company of The Farewell is time spent with what may just be a great film. •

The post The lie that binds appeared first on Inside Story.

It didn’t take long for those questions to be answered. Two years later, in March 1974, women from Sydney Women’s Liberation squatted in an abandoned house in Sydney’s Glebe, and Elsie, Australia’s first women’s refuge, was born. Our Canberra refuge, Beryl, was set up the next year in a house leased from the territory authority. As it turned out, the demand for these services was enormous, and other women’s shelters followed in other cities. By then, I was one of Australia’s early femocrats, heading the women’s affairs unit in the prime minister’s department, and one of my biggest challenges was finding funds for what had become a network of refuges around the country.

It’s a problem that has dogged women’s services ever since. No sooner is the funding secured than a change in government dries it up. Not surprisingly, funding is maintained and often increased under Labor, then whittled back by the Coalition. Labor governments have been more accepting, moreover, of the need for refuges specifically for women, while the Coalition will bunch them together with gender-neutral shelters run by churches or groups like the Salvation Army. For most of this past decade, despite government-initiated community awareness campaigns, funding for women’s refuges has been savagely cut, with countless women and children turned away from the few remaining ones. Yet all this is happening as the incidence of domestic violence and intimate partner homicides has surged.

This, in a nutshell, is the situation that investigative reporter Jess Hill has grappled with over four years to produce See What You Made Me Do. The work she’s put into it shows. In all my long acquaintance with the subject, I’ve never come across such a thorough examination of domestic violence — or domestic abuse, as Hill prefers to call it. In this, I don’t seem to be alone; less than a month after its release, the book was already being reprinted.

Yet while Hill and her book have had extensive coverage, her findings have tended to be cherry-picked by readers or reviewers. Rather than any incomprehension on their part, this results from the very breadth and depth of Hill’s analysis, and the difficulty of absorbing her many disturbing findings. As Helen Garner puts it on the cover, this is indeed a “shattering” book. The horror of the incidents Hill documents; the meticulous fairmindedness of her approach; the conclusions she draws — all demand attention. But the reading is necessarily hard-going. Chapter by chapter, right to the end, Hill demonstrates incontrovertibly that what Australia is now experiencing amounts to a genuine state of emergency.

Early in the book we are introduced to Rosie Batty, the 2014 Australian of the Year whose eleven-year-old son was murdered by his father in full view of other parents and children. Batty was brave enough to turn what could fairly be described as any mother’s worst nightmare into a campaign to raise awareness of the extent of family violence and the inherent risk of homicide it poses. She thus became the poster woman for domestic abuse, if at great personal cost. “In the eyes of mainstream Australia,” Hill writes, “Batty was everyone — not from the stigmatised poor or the privileged rich, but from the demilitarised zone of the white middle class.”

One thing that’s prevented appropriate responses from police and the judicial system is the “battered woman profile,” a pernicious but entrenched belief that victimhood has something to do with a victim’s personality. What else could explain a woman returning time and again to a partner who repeatedly abuses her? For answers Hill has researched as far afield as studies of brainwashing during the Korean war, and she concludes that a victim of domestic abuse can be so sapped of confidence and vitality that she’ll come to question her own reality. It can take colossal determination and energy, then, as well as help and resources, to escape.

The experience of those running crisis hotlines and women’s shelters is that on average a victim will go back as many as nine times before she can finally leave an abusive partner. She then risks his stalking, assaulting or even murdering her — risks that can multiply when children are caught in the crossfire. But while women who’ve experienced extreme abuse can exhibit a range of psychological symptoms, not to mention bodily injuries, Hill convincingly argues that there’s no such thing as a type.

After tracking survivors and their children who have escaped to “the underground,” a shadowy world of aliases and motel rooms akin to witness protection, Hill shines a light on the men who have driven them there. Perpetrators, too, come in all ethnicities and classes, but whatever their standing in the community, their methods are strikingly similar. “Speak to anyone who’s worked with survivors and perpetrators,” writes Hill, “and they’ll tell you the same thing: domestic abuse almost always follows the same script. It’s a truly confounding phenomenon: how is it that men from vastly different cultures know to use the same basic techniques of oppression?”

Here Hill identifies two different types of perpetrators, “coercive controllers” and “insecure reactors.” These are broad categories, and abusers in either can exhibit characteristics of the other. But, broadly speaking, coercive controllers tend to be practised manipulators whose techniques are often premeditated, and insecure reactors tend to be less conscious of their motives, though their responses can be more explosive and often more dangerous.

I’m aware that so far I’ve only mentioned men. Hill devotes a chapter to female abusers, but their numbers are comparatively few, their male partners often ashamed and mute, and the violence usually comes after the women themselves have copped years of abuse themselves. The fact remains that most perpetrators are men.

The literature on domestic abuse appears to fall into two camps, one holding that violence results from escalating “family conflict,” the other resting on a feminist analysis in which gender inequality is the cause. These two quite different perspectives have produced different sets of statistics. The family conflict school focuses on the number of police call-outs, overlooking the unequal power relationships in which violent incidents occur. Feminists point to the wider and less easily measured impact of patriarchy, and Hill agrees. From my own experience and on the strength of her explanations, so do I.

But what does this mean? What’s good about Hill’s approach is that it isn’t about blaming men. She goes much deeper than that. The fact that we live in a patriarchy doesn’t mean that all men are powerful. On the contrary, few men are. But patriarchal culture makes many believe that because they are men they’re entitled to be powerful, and if they aren’t, that makes them losers. Hill maintains it’s this unfulfilled sense of entitlement that fuels the rage men can feel against women.

Of course, I’m oversimplifying an insight that Hill gives many pages to. But the closer we look at how our society is structured and the values on which it’s based, the easier it is to see why domestic abuse has increased so alarmingly in recent years and why public-awareness campaigns have served to ramp up the violence by triggering a backlash.

Changing community attitudes is an excellent policy for the long term, but in the meantime other measures are necessary. What we desperately need are more refuges, more affordable housing, better schooling of police and the judiciary, more listening to women and children, more effective programs for reforming perpetrators, and a more humane, less adversarial family law regime. All this takes money, mostly government money, and there’s not much chance of that in the years of likely austerity ahead.

I’ve left out any mention of Hill’s heartbreaking chapter on abuse in Indigenous communities; in the space here I could never do the subject justice. But read the book. In the present climate it’s hard to make predictions, but it’s my bet that See What You Made Me Do will be the definitive text on domestic abuse for some time. •

The post Rewriting the script appeared first on Inside Story.

The setting is a stroke of genius from co-creators and writers Bell and Sarah Scheller, and the show plumbs these depths magnificently, to the extent that I’ve heard more than one new parent describe their own introduction to parents’ groups as “like walking into the first episode of The Letdown!” Indeed, it’s so realistically depicted, right down to Noni Hazlehurst’s acerbic child health nurse, that at times it feels more like a documentary than a comedy.

I’m exactly in The Letdown’s target market — I binged the first season last year when my daughter was two months old and loved it, and now that she’s closing in on her first birthday I was eager to see what the second season has to say about this new stage.

We pick up the story with Audrey still in Sydney while her partner Jeremy (Duncan Fellows) works in Adelaide, commuting back on weekends. As the babies approach their first birthdays, the parents’ group crew are facing new challenges: looking for childcare, coping with difficult relationships, expecting baby number two. Season two has broadened into an exploration of the family, but while this allows for a wider range of stories it detracts from the universality of experience that struck such a chord with new parents the first time around.

One of the reasons the first season worked so well is that parents’ groups are one of the few remaining places that truly cut across social divides. The only characteristics the participants share are location and the babies’ ages. For the writers, this mix is storytelling gold. Over the course of the first season, much as in a real parents’ group, the parents reveal their nuances and Audrey realises that they are all struggling in their own ways. By the end, the group has achieved a kind of solidarity — not necessarily long-term friendship, but a bond born of shared experience. Even the apparently obnoxious characters, such as the picture-perfect Sophie (Lucy Durack), don’t remain stereotypes. Structurally, the season is tightly bounded, exploring a different secondary character each episode in addition to Audrey’s overarching story.

The second season’s wider focus and looser structure mean that, rather than speaking to a universal experience of parenthood that bridges social barriers, Audrey and her friends are now facing a set of manufactured and decidedly upper-middle-class problems. Fertility is a big theme, and right from the start the season takes a darker turn. Television shouldn’t shy away from discussing difficult issues, of course — abortion and IVF are the big two in this case — but by doing so The Letdown has lost something that made it special. This was one of the only series about babies that new parents felt safe watching.

New parenthood is an emotional rollercoaster, and many, if not most, of the current crop of television shows and movies that deal with it have been taking an unflinching look at the darker sides, such as child loss and mental illness. The Letdown, although not afraid to discuss close-to-home issues like birth trauma and identity crises, did so in a way that was warm, funny and compassionate. It reassured, rather than terrified, new parents. This is bloody hard, it said, but you’re doing just fine. By following the current trend towards grittiness, season two has let that charm slip away, perhaps without realising what it’s lost.

There are still laugh-out-loud moments, such as in the first episode, when Audrey bakes Stevie’s birthday cake from the beloved Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, with interesting results. Overall, though, the characters have been ramped up to caricature level. Newly pregnant Sophie, for example — a character made human in the first season by her struggles with postpartum incontinence — has become little more than a walking sex joke. Almost all the characters are less likeable, which is a shame, as one of The Letdown’s major strengths was that it portrayed a diverse group of women without descending into the “mummy wars.” This goes out the window in the opening minutes of season two, where we see Audrey panicking about Stevie’s birthday party, and at the party itself the mums give her grief about scheduling it for 10am, which apparently is “everybody’s nap time.” Indeed, the most authentic expression of female friendship in the first two episodes is a scene between Audrey and her pre-baby friend Emma, leaving the viewer wondering why she keeps the parents’ group mums in her life at all.

The one character who undergoes any meaningful development is Jeremy, who’s taken beyond his season one “dopey dad” characterisation and given some complexity as he figures out his role as a partner, father and employee. An especially poignant scene at the end of the first episode lends nuance to a relationship that’s often dysfunctional.

Season two revolves around the question of what happens after the newborn craziness is over. In reality, life gets easier. Leaving the house no longer requires logistics worthy of a military operation, sleep improves, and babies get a lot more interesting once they start interacting with the world. But that doesn’t really make for good television. While moving away from the close-knit structure of the parents’ group has undoubtedly given the writers more creative freedom, The Letdown has essentially become just another light drama series with a few gags thrown in, and it’s the poorer for it. •

The Letdown season two premieres on ABC1 at 9pm on Wednesday 29 May. The full season will also be available on iView and Netflix.

Our regular TV reviewer Jane Goodall returns next month.

The post A setback for The Letdown appeared first on Inside Story.

While O’Dwyer has faced criticism from both opponents and colleagues, she has been a competent minister and will be a loss to a party already struggling for talent, and particularly for talented women — or, as she put it herself, a party broadly seen as “homophobic, anti-women, climate change deniers.” These are challenges O’Dwyer has faced her entire career, from claims during her 2009 preselection campaign that a “leadership seat” like Higgins was unsuitable for a woman and a job in federal politics would put her marriage at risk, to a 2017 push to unseat her while she was on maternity leave, ostensibly over opposition to entirely reasonable superannuation reforms. It is perhaps a saving grace of the party’s current travails that, despite resistance to cultural reform, let alone the adoption of formal quotas or other affirmative policies, it seems likely she will be succeeded by another female candidate.

Yet there is perhaps something in those arguments, although it’s quite different from what was intended by those making them. The sad reality is that senior political roles and a healthy work–life balance seem simply incompatible. As Katharine Murphy titled her excellent analysis of the demands of the job, the political life is no life at all, with federal ministers working frankly obscene hours and spending extended periods away from their families, all on top of the normal workload of a local member. Coupling this with the (admittedly vital) media scrutiny ministers face, O’Dwyer might well share Peta Credlin’s view that political life is like “chewing glass.”

Politics is getting no easier. Policymakers face intractable problems and a divided public resistant to personal sacrifice in the name of environmental and economic sustainability. The pressures and scrutiny are greater than ever, and parties old and new are fracturing under the strain. Burnout is an entirely predictable response. It would be no shock if others made the same decision as O’Dwyer, just as Greg Combet and many others have done before.

So what then for Higgins? The seat is a long-term target for the Greens, dating back to the 2009 by-election at which O’Dwyer succeeded her former boss, Peter Costello. As your correspondent has previously argued in these pages, such ambitions are optimistic at best. The local demographics are simply not (yet, perhaps) in place. Higgins resembles a sandwich — a progressive Green northwest in Prahran and an old Labor southeast in Murrumbeena are both comfortably outweighed by a Liberal heartland centred on Malvern. Meanwhile, internal squabbles and policy disputes have hampered the Greens’ capacity to campaign effectively.

Yet Labor may still pose a threat. That a seat held by a comfortable two-digit margin (58–42 per cent from the Greens and 61–39 from Labor) should be deemed to be in play may seem strange, and indeed would have prior to the 2018 Victorian election in November. But in that landslide result the Andrews government collected a host of formerly safe Liberal seats across Melbourne’s east, including the district of Hawthorn, just north of Higgins, where shadow attorney-general — and leader-in-waiting — John Pesutto was toppled by a 9 per cent swing. In Malvern, deep in Higgins, Michael O’Brien survived an even greater swing of just over 10 per cent. If such a result were echoed in a federal poll, magnified by the loss of O’Dwyer’s incumbent vote, Higgins could very much be in play.

But while the voters of Malvern are also voters of Higgins, federal politics is not Victorian politics. Bereft of ideas under Matthew Guy, the Victorian opposition took an entirely cynical approach to the 2018 election and was duly punished. While the Morrison government seems similarly adrift, clutching at the old rosaries of migration, culture wars and even a transparent attempt to recycle Robert Menzies’s forgotten people, the main distinction lies in their opponents.

The Andrews government capitalised on Guy’s rudderless leadership with a carefully cultivated image of progress — of skyrail lines built, level crossings removed, and a pipeline of infrastructure to come (stamp duty revenue permitting) — along with the boon of a healthy state economy. Whatever you think of the Victorian government, it is hard to argue that it did not have a clear track record to sell, sufficient to outweigh the occasional scandal. The federal opposition under Bill Shorten has not had that opportunity. Labor may well have an array of well-thought-out policy proposals, but proposals don’t carry the weight of achievements, and like the Brackslide of 2002 it took successful incumbency to achieve a truly momentous victory in Victoria.

The Liberals are right to be concerned, and Labor right to smell an opportunity. It seems highly likely that the Morrison government will soon fall, and with it a raft of seats and more than a few ministerial careers. But Higgins, Liberal heartland, the seat of Holt, Gorton and Costello, should again prove a bridge too far.

And whatever the result, spare a thought for the poor soul jetting off to Canberra in spring. They may not know quite what they’re in for. •

The post An unsuitable job for a human appeared first on Inside Story.

This is probably not the first or even the second or third time they have sought assistance to resolve their dispute, each previous attempt having failed to resolve intractable issues. They may even have decisions pending in other courts. They have probably had contact with an array of lawyers, doctors, police, psychologists and community services departments, and they are feeling vulnerable, frightened, angry and frustrated.

Above all, they are keenly aware that the decision you make could change their lives forever. And your decision could also dramatically affect the lives of other, even more vulnerable and frightened people: their children. Ultimately you must determine what the best interests of those children are and how you can best protect them.

This is the task judges in the family courts of Australia undertake daily. If the parents of these children can’t resolve disputes like these between themselves, or with the help of a mediator, they must go to court to find a resolution and even then the dispute might remain unresolved.

Under the present system, the family law caseload is divided between the Family Court of Australia and the Federal Circuit Court, or FCC, depending on how complex or serious the issues are. The Family Court is supposed to deal with more complex matters — including family violence, child abuse and disputes involving property worth more than $500,000 — leaving the FCC to deal with less complex cases. Yet their work overlaps significantly, with the FCC frequently dealing with cases of high complexity, including those involving family violence.

With cases becoming more complex, delays have become longer and more frequent. The system has undoubtedly become costly and time-consuming for parties to family disputes. So does this mean the Family Court has had its day? Attorney-General Christian Porter thinks so. He argues that abolishing the court is the only way to solve the problems that plague the system.

Last week’s release of the federal government’s vision for a new family law system has given new urgency to the long-running and often acrimonious debate about the Family Court’s work. The attorney-general proposes a new federal court, the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, or FCFCA, which would take over the Family Court’s caseload. The FCFCA would have two divisions: Division 1, made up of existing Family Court judges dealing exclusively with family law matters, and Division 2, made up of existing FCC judges who would hear other family law matters, along with migration, bankruptcy, intellectual property disputes and other federal cases.

A new appeal system would also operate. The existing appeal process from the FCC to the Family Court would be replaced by a new Family Law Appeal Division in the Federal Court of Australia, which would hear all appeals of family law matters from the FCFCA. The changes would also mean that the current roles of chief justice of the Family Court and chief judge of the FCC would be abolished and replaced by two new roles within the FCFCA, chief justice and deputy chief justice.

The government argues that these changes will ease the increasing costs and delays in family law proceedings. In its view, these inefficiencies are caused by the overlap in the workloads of the two courts and the different ways they manage cases. The FCFCA will provide what could be described as a one-stop shop, overcoming the confusion, added costs and delays experienced by litigants. The backlog of cases will be resolved by abolishing appeals to the Family Court (usually to a Full Court of three justices), giving judges more time to resolve newly launched cases.

It all sounds very logical and attractive. We all want an effective and efficient family law system that is attentive to its clients’ needs. No one wants unnecessary duplication and confusion. It is only when we consider what was not included in the announcement, and what wasn’t done before it was made, that the shortcomings of the plan become apparent.

The decision to establish the Family Court was made in 1974 following recommendations from the Senate’s constitutional and legal affairs committee, which were strongly supported by the Law Council of Australia and Sydney University’s law graduates family law committee. The decision to abolish the Family Court has been made without any similar inquiry. Considering that the court deals with some of the most sensitive issues families might ever face, it seems extraordinary that the government didn’t wait for the results of its own inquiry and consider the issues more thoroughly.

“Sometimes people want decisions rather than delays from their government,” says Christian Porter. “It was a matter of such obviousness that the present structure was not working.” But the government’s announcement comes just weeks after the closing date for submissions to the Australian Law Reform Commission’s review of the family law system, and quite some time before that inquiry reports. It’s hard to understand why the government didn’t wait to see what its expert agency, the ALRC, had to say.

For the attorney-general’s department, the overlaps and inconsistencies of a dual-court system are the root of the problem. But the present system is not as disjointed as the government appears to believe. The Family Court and the FCC share a single registry, along with common buildings and resources across the country. The registries apply consistent principles in allocating cases between the two courts based on their complexity. It is also important to remember that the current two-court system was created by the Howard government (when it established the Federal Magistrate’s Court in 2000, which became the FCC in 2013) despite the Family Court’s call for a lower-level court within the Family Court structure.

There is a persuasive case for strengthening the Family Court rather than abolishing it. When it was first established, the court’s main responsibility was to apply the new no-fault divorce provisions and help couples bring their marriages to a dignified end without being subjected to the unwanted moralising they often faced in Supreme Courts. Once divorce was no longer stigmatised, the work of the Family Court evolved. It oversees cases that often involve the most vulnerable members of our community: the child and adult victims of family violence. Uniquely, the Family Court assists these members of our community with resources ranging from specialist judicial expertise through to free child-minding facilities for litigants.

The court’s former chief justice, Diana Bryant, has for years been calling for a commensurate increase in resources, but to no avail. Inadequate resourcing is undoubtedly a key contributing factor to the problems facing the court.

In its carefully crafted announcement of the plan for abolition, the attorney-general’s department appears to recognise the need for judicial expertise and sufficient resources. With the creation of one court to oversee all family law proceedings, it asserts, the management of cases will improve. Matters will be assigned to the appropriate division and heard by the judge who possesses the necessary expertise. But will that expertise necessarily be in family law, as currently required for judges of the Family Court? We will have to wait to see what the government has in mind when it introduces the new legislation.

The proposed changes potentially mean that there will no longer be family law specialisation in any of Australia’s federal courts. Reports indicate that the government intends to make no new appointments to Division 1 of the new FCFCA, to where the present justices of the Family Court will be moved. Whether any of these judges will be appointed to the proposed Family Law Appeal Division is also uncertain. It could be that appeals will be confined to generalist judges in the Federal Court.

Just as the Titanic had too few lifeboats for the number of passengers on board, the Family Court has not been allocated the necessary resources to deal with the 22,000 cases funnelled through its system each year. The attorney-general’s plan doesn’t appear to involve hiring more judges, more registrars or, in fact, any extra staff at all. Shifting cases between the two divisions of the proposed FCFCA is unlikely to be a great improvement on the current sharing between the Family Court and the FCC. Unless further registry resources are provided — an option on which Porter has remained staunchly silent — then the shunting of cases is likely to continue.

By focusing on the inefficiencies of the current system, the government has avoided mentioning the resourcing issues that plague the Family Court. Australian government funding of the legal aid sector is at its lowest in twenty years. The Productivity Commission has found that many disadvantaged clients can’t obtain legal aid funding. In family law, coverage was far from comprehensive, it reported, and cases involving children were particularly worrying. Managing increasing numbers of self-represented litigants is expensive and time-consuming for courts.

While the government’s desire for better, more comprehensible rules of procedure is understandable, it is unrealistic to expect that creating a list of dry procedural rules will significantly reduce costs. Procedures become complex because society and relationships are complex and therefore elude simple solutions. The government can’t make family disputes simple just by wishing they were.

The increased workforce productivity and the social benefits that would result from increased funding of legal aid and the Family Court would more than repay the financial investment it needs from the government. It might prove a far more astute investment in the economy than corporate tax cuts and would be likely to improve more than just GDP.

One last but very important point. The proposed changes will effectively downgrade the Family Court — the court with the highest female judicial representation, at 41 per cent, compared to the Federal Court’s 26 per cent — to the current level of the FCC. Whether there will be future appointments of specialist family law judges to the proposed FCFCA or the Family Law Appeal Division remains uncertain. If none are appointed, there will eventually be no specialist family law judges on the court. The remaining Family Court judges will be demoted — something that has never happened to their counterparts in the more male-dominated Federal Court. In other words, the decision to abolish the Family Court will exacerbate existing gender inequality among the judiciary. The result is deeply ironic: in a court designed partly to protect the rights of women, the role of women within Australia’s judiciary is being diminished. ●

The post Why the Family Court is worth fighting for appeared first on Inside Story.

The married mayor, it seems, had an affair with the married head of the mayor’s security detail. Not surprisingly, the mayor is now under pressure to resign. And irregularities in travel arrangements could yet bring this about.

It all sounds so familiar, even down to the fact that Tamworth, in the heart of Mr Joyce’s electorate, is Australia’s answer to Nashville. But there’s one major difference: Nashville’s mayor is a woman.

Megan Barry, a Democrat, was elected Nashville’s first female mayor in September 2015. Before entering politics she worked — ironically enough — as an ethics and compliance officer for large corporations.

When a TV news show began to investigate whether her private and public lives might be overlapping in inappropriate ways, Barry chose to pre-empt any speculation with a public announcement. “This is about two middle-aged, consenting adults who had feelings for each other, who were human and had failings,” she told a televised media conference a fortnight ago.

Standing alone in the camera lights, without the supportive spouse — so beloved of errant male politicians everywhere — at her side, Barry was sombre; she was apologetic; and she threw herself on the mercy of the press and the voters.

“I am embarrassed and I am sad and I am so sorry for all the pain that I have caused my family and his family,” she said, referring to her married paramour, a former Nashville police officer named Robert Forrest Jr. Forrest had resigned earlier that day, ending a highly regarded thirty-one-year career.

In the course of the presser, Barry uttered a phrase that had obviously been handcrafted by experts. “And I know that God will forgive me, but that Nashville doesn’t have to.” In other words, feel free to judge me harshly, but remember that God won’t.

Barry denied any professional misconduct, admitted to starting the affair in mid 2016, and stuck to her script with a laser-like focus that would impress an Olympic snowboarder entering the halfpipe for a last shot at a medal.

When asked if the relationship had now ended, she replied, “Yes, it’s over.”

“Can you say when?” a reporter inquired.

“Yes, it’s over,” Barry repeated with studied illogicality.

“When did it end?”

“It’s over.”

“How did it end?”

“It ended with saying, ‘It’s over.’”

A week later, halfway around the world, the Sydney Daily Telegraph did what tabloids do: it published a picture designed to gain and retain paying customers.

It showed an obviously pregnant Vikki Campion — herself a former Tele journalist, no less — and revealed that the father was none other than that self-declared paragon of moral values, Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce.

The deputy prime minister received a murmured chorus of sympathy from across the political spectrum. The Greens’ Adam Bandt, Labor’s Chris Bowen and Joyce’s fellow National Party member Darren Chester all agreed: this was a private matter. And that night Mr Joyce went on 7.30 to assure the ABC’s viewers that this was indeed a private matter, of no public interest, and did not, of course, involve the misspending of public money.

He did not, however, apologise to his wife and four daughters. He wouldn’t get around to that until four days later, in a statement in which he also denied an allegation that he had pinched a woman on the bum during a drunken altercation several years earlier. Unfortunately, better late than never just doesn’t cut it in situations like this.

If only Barnaby had taken a look at Mayor Barry’s press conference on YouTube. He might have learnt how to handle this kind of thing: fess up straight away, apologise sincerely; then shut up and cross your fingers.

Besides handling the media with aplomb, Mayor Barry’s tale also has some natural advantages that are missing from Barnaby’s mishap.

Unlike the rest of Tennessee, Nashville is “a bastion of social liberalism,” in the words of the New York Times. Not much like Barnaby’s political homeland, in other words.

Mayor Barry can’t be accused of hypocrisy. She’s never moralised about marriage. Indeed, in 2015, as a city councillor, she performed Nashville’s first same-sex wedding.

Mayor Barry is fifty-four; Sergeant Forrest is fifty-eight. Enough said.

Mayor Barry is (currently) still with her husband.

No one got pregnant.

And maybe the voters of Tennessee are just jaded by admissions of mayoral adultery. Back in 1990 a Nashville mayor called Bill Boner (yes, Bill Boner) very publicly left his third wife for a country-and-western singer named Traci Peel, who was more than ten years his junior. And then wisely didn’t seek re-election.

So who will survive: the Straying Mayor of Nashville or the National Party’s Beetrooter-in-Chief?

Despite her adept handling of the media, Mayor Barry still faces several weeks of political danger.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is examining whether she broke any laws by misusing public funds. As mayor she took numerous business trips with other city officials, but the Tennessean has reported that Barry took nine of these trips, including one to the Greek capital Athens, only with Sergeant Forrest.

For the moment it seems that Barnaby has dodged the coup de grâce, but his party’s officers are said to be reloading their revolvers. In the absence of a federal ICAC, Mr Joyce’s future will most likely be decided by politics.

As a general rule, pollies caught with their pants down must endeavour to shift the media narrative as far away as possible from our reality TV zeitgeist. More importantly, they must hope to God they never get caught out using public money to facilitate the slaking of their private desires.

Barnaby Joyce probably doesn’t talk to him, and Megan Barry probably doesn’t even know who he is, but both should have heeded the blunt advice of former prime minister Paul Keating: “If you want to be in power, you can’t afford to fuck around.” ●

The post Standing by your man appeared first on Inside Story.

The Harvey Weinstein scandal had broken on 5 October, and dominated the following week’s news as a succession of Hollywood A-listers came out with accusations and denunciations. British actress Romola Garai told the story of how she was lured into Weinstein’s hotel room at the age of eighteen for an “audition,” only to be confronted by Weinstein in a bathrobe, clearly expecting some very personal attention. Over the next few weeks, the list of Weinstein’s accusers grew to include Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Rose McGowan, Lena Headey and Uma Thurman. The common theme was that senior operatives in the industry had systematically covered up abuses of power, and that the encounters had a deeply disturbing impact on the young women targeted.

The allegations were undoubtedly serious enough to warrant the call for radical culture change in Hollywood. But there’s also something disturbing about the stark disparity between the glamorous figures who Weinstein preyed on and the victims of childhood abuse whose names we don’t know. Although many of Weinstein’s victims testified to the difficulty of speaking out about what they had been through, there they were on camera, some of the wealthiest and most successful people on the planet, attracting public sympathy and approbation.

Any note of scepticism, though, jars with supporters of #MeToo. The social media campaign was sparked on 15 October by Alyssa Milano, who sent out a tweet inviting anyone who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to write “me too” in response. Her aim was to encourage women from all walks of life to take advantage of the fallout from the Weinstein case and contribute to a collective testimony. It worked. Within twenty-four hours, the hashtag count for #MeToo was approaching half a million; on the evening of 17 October, CBS News reported more than twelve million Facebook posts, comments and reactions.

The rage, as Van Badham expressed it in a powerful article in the Guardian on 17 October, was the manifestation of a “mass, collective de-shaming.” She had a story of her own to tell, about falling into the hands of a predator whose pattern of behaviour replicated Weinstein’s in many respects. It was a coveted professional opportunity — his to grant, hers to merit. Young, sassy and over-confident, she thought she could handle the situation, but she found herself outmatched. Confronted with a sense of her own “peasant vulgarity” in the face of a sophisticated and fine-tuned strategy of enticement, she was unable to escape. Many years later, she was still blaming herself:

How palpable my envy is of the fleeing girls whose sense of self-worth was greater than mine. How deep my empathy runs for those whose social exclusion or inexperience recruits them into the universal premise of all cons: convincing the prey that the precise act of sin was always — always — their own idea.

One of the cruellest things about these acts, according to Jia Tolentino, writing in the New Yorker on 11 October, “is the way that they entangle, and attempt to contaminate, all of the best things about you.” Afterwards, she says, “you are rarely presented with a single good option.” After that piece was published, Tolentino’s inbox was flooded with personal accounts of rape and harassment. And shame. She replied to all of them, crushed, she said, “by how little they expected.”

Tolentino has no difficulty in sympathising with Weinstein’s more high-profile victims, recognising in them the same tone of “muted sadness” and “long-kept knowledge of diminishment.” And perhaps not all of those “fleeing girls” who got away from him were blessed with the sense of self-worth Badham might accord to them. In Tolentino’s verdict, “there is no good exit from a hotel room with Harvey Weinstein.” And, she says, she saw a backlash coming almost from the moment the Weinstein story broke.

If the #MeToo wave was a tsunami, the backlash is a choppy mess of contending currents. First comes the legal question. Germaine Greer warned that powerful men were already briefing their lawyers and “women who have given testimony now will be taken to pieces.” The defamation suits are already mounting, with potential for huge damages to be claimed in compensation for broken contracts. Predators do not themselves make easy prey.

Which raises another issue. Not all the prey are on one side of the equation. In a cultural environment in which accusation can lead to an immediate public attribution of guilt, men who are not predators may become the subject of vexatious and injurious allegations.

On 8 January, a letter to Le Monde signed by one hundred prominent women including actress Catherine Deneuve denounced the movement as “a craze for sending pigs to the abattoir.” Margaret Atwood’s use of the term “witch trial” to describe cases in which the subject was guilty because accused drew a virulent counterattack; Atwood had to defend herself against the charge of being a “bad feminist” for implying that the accusers were like the hysterical teenagers of Salem. There are three kinds of “witch” language, says Atwood: the first is simple name-calling, the second is the use of the term “witch-hunt” for a chase after something that doesn’t exist, and the third is a description of a trial in which accusation is taken as evidence.

The interventions by Greer, Deneuve and Atwood, all in their seventies, generated a counter-backlash focused on the generation gap. Postwar feminists were in a different social world, the argument goes, and their assumption that it is all about agency, about having the guts and the presence of mind to say no, is out of touch with the circumstances in which younger women now find themselves.

Even the aged can be naive, and it is naive to suggest that someone who has been through what Badham describes has simply failed the challenge of agency. That amounts to a glib denial of a complex social and psychological reality. But the scale of the #MeToo campaign, and the level of heat with which it is invested, have created the conditions for a fraught and unhealthy environment in which witch-hunts may also become a reality. These realities coexist, and the challenge we are faced with now is to hold them in some kind of balance.

So, what of the role of Hollywood in all this? From one point of view, it was the denunciation of Weinstein that got the ball rolling. The example of those charismatic actresses may encourage other women — “the women whose names we’ll never know,” in the words of Oprah Winfrey — to follow. It’s a case of mustering star power in the cause of social justice, in the best Hollywood tradition.

That, at least, seems to have been the intention behind the 7 January Golden Globe ceremony, where the catchcry “me too” was paired with the ultimatum “time’s up.” Winfrey delivered a barnstorming speech about new horizons, new dawns and the magnificent women who were going to take us to a time “when nobody ever has to say ‘me too’ again.” She sought to include some consciousness of hard experience in the rhetoric. “In my career, what I’ve always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave,” she said.

In an attempt to bring some of the reality onto the red carpet, eight prominent female activists, each paired with a leading actress, were persuaded to join the procession. Michelle Williams arrived arm in arm with Tarana Burke, a Brooklyn social worker who came up with the “Me Too” slogan in 2006 as an expression for “survivors supporting survivors.” Burke has been sceptical of the current media campaign, insisting that there must be a continuing focus on marginalised people in marginalised communities.

When Williams first approached her with an invitation to the Globes, her response was, “Why? I’m trying very hard not to be the black woman who is trotted out when you all need to validate your work.” She agreed to go only as one of a contingent of women working on the front line to address problems of sexual violence and bullying. In the event, if it was window-dressing, at least the window was full enough to provide an effective group photo. But Burke’s shot across the bows was a much-needed alert.

Hollywood awards ceremonies are a festival of narcissism, and part of the self-love is a need to present oneself as the champion of higher and better causes. From the moment the stars stepped out onto the red carpet to when they rose, faces streaming tears, to applaud Winfrey’s oration, it was a chorus of virtue signalling. Who is this supposed to impress, and to what end?

One thing that could be said in its favour is that it was a coming together of the generations, as younger actresses alternated with veterans of the profession to contribute to the chorus of solidarity. Most significantly, it became evident that there were not two generations here, but three. The child actors from the television series Stranger Things have a growing fan following, as do many of the other stars who came to prominence in juvenile roles.

Dove Cameron, a hot property for Disney in The Descendants, a fantasy in which she plays the teenage daughter of the fairy Maleficent, is also a doyenne of the twittersphere, where she has over 1.3 million followers. Her admirers include the four young fashionistas commenting on the “best and worst dressed” for the YouTube channel Dirty Laundry, which garnered 1.1 million views:

Holy moly — Dove Cameron, oh my god, she is like — perfect shit — she’s so cute and she is supervocal about so many important movements going on that I think a lot of stars aren’t but if you check her Twitter, she speaks up, so I’m not surprised she joined in on this movement.

I did check Dove Cameron’s Twitter, and among the relentless parade of kooky selfies was a message for her legions of followers:

Women’s sexuality (and sensuality) is a natural, awe inspiring, SHIP-LAUNCHING energy that is a thing to be celebrated. It is the spark of life. It is the reason we are all here.

I am so thankful that there is no record of the platitudes I came out with at the age of twenty-one. Aside from that, there is cause for some reflection. I am a baby boomer, closer in age to Atwood and Greer than to Cameron, who is almost a generation younger than Van Badham. We’re looking at three generations who came to adulthood under widely different formative influences.

Greer and the feminist movement she inspired taught women not to be “sex objects.” That meant avoiding the kinds of clothing, make-up and general presentation associated with male fantasy. High heels and red lipstick were anathema, as were push-up bras, tight dresses, glitzy jewellery and pouty facial expressions. Cameron’s image is a concentrated fusion of all those things, but the idea of being an object does not trouble her.

Sexuality is energy, she says — and “celebrating” it seems to have little to do with the seduction of anyone else. It’s about self-image and self-affirmation, which become a currency of exchange between peers. The effusions of love and admiration on Cameron’s Twitter feed are mainly from other young women. She is their mirror. If there is absurdity in this, it seems an innocent kind of absurdity, but where do men figure, if at all? Perhaps such narcissism serves as a protective shell, but the risk is that it does nothing of the kind.

The #MeToo movement is predominantly focused on workplace harassment, and workplace conditions have changed radically since the baby-boom era. We may have had bosses who leered or insisted on short skirts and thought their secretaries were fair game, but if you didn’t like it, you could leave. There were always other jobs, and joblessness was not so hard to deal with in the hippie era, when it was easy to move between social circles or from place to place.

Workplace harassment now is a problem intensified by insecure contract work conditions and the growing number of migrant workers in precarious circumstances. Given that it is usually impossible to mount a legal case in situations of chronic harassment, the onus is on institutions of employment to deal with them, and establish protocols to prevent them, but who or what is to ensure that they do this?

In an industrial environment where corporate profits are the overriding concern, and where the practice of over-rewarding those at the top of the hierarchy feeds a sense of entitlement, we have the optimal conditions for predatory behaviour. Sexual abuse is an institutional perversion and a cultural pathology as much as it is an individual transgression. Here the concerns of #MeToo may converge with those of the Care Leavers Australasia Network, and if the “me” aspect of #MeToo can be reined in, there may be some lasting impact. •

The post The #MeToo generations appeared first on Inside Story.

In its recent report on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the commission’s laudatory superlatives just keep flowing. It describes the scheme as “a complex and highly valued national reform” that, if implemented well, “will substantially improve the wellbeing of people with disability and Australians more generally.” With the scale, pace and nature of the changes under the scheme “unprecedented in Australia,” the level of commitment to its success and sustainability among governments, people with disability and those working with them is “extraordinary.” The commission cites descriptions of the scheme as “ground-breaking” and a “once-in-many-generations reform.”

On one level, this is not surprising. It was the commission itself that came up with the model for the scheme that was largely implemented by the Gillard government and its successors. Its most recent report responds to a reference from treasurer Scott Morrison for a review of the scheme’s costs, including how to manage any cost overruns, and the scheme’s prospects for ultimate sustainability. Despite the open invitation to suggest savings and despite a series of problems in implementation, the commission continues to accentuate the positive.

But it also rings some warning bells. By June this year, twelve months after the start of the national rollout of the NDIS (though trials have been under way since 2013), 122,065 people had participated. Forty-three per cent of current participants (a small number had left the scheme by June) were under fifteen, compared to the 30 per cent figure assumed in the earlier modelling of full operation in 2019–20. Twenty-nine per cent of current participants (including those under fifteen) had autism as their primary disability; another 37 per cent had an intellectual disability. In short, two-thirds of scheme participants were in these two categories, far ahead of the other twelve categories listed under the NDIS.

Assuming current proportions are maintained and the NDIS scales up to the expected total of 475,000 participants, the current figure would equate to almost 138,000 people with autism, compared to a 2011 Productivity Commission estimate of about 75,000. In addition, almost 176,000 would have an intellectual disability, including those with developmental delay — a condition not included in the commission’s original modelling but added later by the Gillard government. The Productivity Commission report says that the term developmental delay, which the NDIS distinguishes from autism, applies to children who take longer to reach age-specific milestones than others. It is used in the absence of a diagnosed condition: that is, there is usually a specific condition causing the delay but this has yet to be formally identified, often because of the age and capabilities of the child.

The report includes the startling finding that 40 per cent of children who entered the scheme after being assessed with developmental delay had no identified deficits in functional capacity compared to the normal range for their age. “Children with mild or no deficits in the NDIS clearly runs counter to the objectives of the scheme and, depending on the volume of supports that these children receive, could have significant cost and equity implications,” it says. “As such a tighter gateway that better assesses eligibility is necessary.”

The National Disability Insurance Agency, which administers the NDIS, offers the explanation that children had entered the scheme on the basis of a medical diagnosis rather than an assessment of functional impairment. Given that a substantial reduction in functional capacity is supposed to be one of the requirements of NDIS funding, this suggests some serious teething problems, if not worse.

The report’s findings about unexpectedly high numbers of children with autism or intellectual disability entering the NDIS come as no surprise to some who work in the field. Speaking before its release, David Roberts, who has practised as a paediatrician for more than thirty years and is a former president of the Western Australian branch of the Australian Medical Association, told Inside Story: “A large number of children are being diagnosed with autism who don’t actually have it. Over the past ten years I have run across cases in the hundreds where the diagnosis has been made but the assessment has been conducted improperly and where there have been conflicts of interest in the diagnosticians.”

Roberts feels strongly enough to speak publicly about the issue because of a wider concern. “The introduction of Medicare was an absolute revolution in how Australian healthcare was delivered and it has been an outstanding success. The introduction of the NDIS has the potential to be a similar if not just as great a success. But it is going to go pear-shaped if we can’t stop the rorting. It is clearly unsustainable.”

Few others practising in the field are prepared to be as direct as Roberts, at least in public. Nevertheless, there is significant support for his view.

Peter Parry, a child psychiatrist and senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, has long argued that there is an “over-diagnosis epidemic” in autism. One of the issues, he tells Inside Story, is the trend towards medicalising differences, encouraged by the pharmaceutical industry and “the human desire for simple answers.” Another contributing factor is the resources available: for example, in Queensland, funding has been allocated to schools on the basis of the number of children in specific disability categories. The Queensland Education Department has reported rates of autism diagnosis as high as one in fifty students — three times Parry’s best estimate of the rate worldwide, which itself has seen at least a twenty-fold increase since the 1950s. A survey of psychiatrists and paediatricians in Queensland in 2005 found that, in the face of diagnostic uncertainty, 58 per cent had erred on the side of providing an autism diagnosis to enable access to educational funding. In New South Wales, the term “autism diagnostic factories” is used informally to refer to some specialist practices.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that diagnosing autism is subjective and imprecise. Autism is a type of developmental abnormality whose symptoms include difficulties in social interaction, and restricted and repetitive behaviours, activities and interests. It can’t be determined by a blood test or a scan, at least not solely. Rather, it is based on an assessment of behaviour and the child’s development.

A standard measure used in diagnosis is whether the child needs “substantial support” — a term open to wide interpretation. “Many children with normal development have one or two features that are autistic but don’t require substantial support, and as they mature, the traits fade away,” says Roberts. The problem, he argues, is that “people lower the bar on ‘substantial support’ to the point where they grant parents access to funding because it is in their own interests to do so.” The process is improper, he adds, “because the funding organisations, such as the federal government through the NDIS and Medicare, don’t make sure that the clinicians involved aren’t conflicted.”

The way the diagnostic process should work is that the child sees three health professionals with expertise in the field: a paediatrician, a clinical psychologist and a speech pathologist, who make independent assessments. If there is agreement on a diagnosis of autism, advisers funded by the federal government — “partners” under the NDIS — then direct parents to the right source of funding for the child’s treatment. And the diagnosticians, those who design the treatment program, and the therapists who deliver the services should all operate at arm’s length from each other.

In practice, argues Roberts, bodies such as the Autism Association of Western Australia, or AAWA, and other private-sector autism therapy providers have relationships with clinicians who conduct the diagnostic assessments. In short, they seek out clinicians who they think are most likely to diagnose autism, and thus facilitate access to the NDIS and Medicare funding packages. Moreover, the same people who provide the services to autism patients organise the diagnostic process and write a treatment program. “They dress it up as an interdisciplinary approach but all of these people inter-refer,” Roberts says. The treatment program should be tailored to the child’s specific needs, he adds, but is instead often based on the resources that providers have available.

This is not the only conflict. In Perth, the advisers who connect parents to funding, whether through Medicare, the NDIS or the state government program, work in the same building as the AAWA and often appear to work for it. The AAWA originally operated as a charity but now is a service provider in competition with other private organisations. When diagnosed, says Roberts, patients visiting the AAWA will typically be referred to advisers in the same building, who in turn send them back to the AAWA rather than to other companies. He adds that the WA Department of Communities has a similar arrangement, offering diagnostics to parents and then, through its allied health service, “capturing” the child for therapy services funded by the federal government. As a consultant paediatrician, Roberts is involved in diagnosis of autism but not in its treatment.

Mandy Mason, whose daughter has been a patient of Roberts, recalls taking her to see an autism adviser in Perth and being told that she could use her funding to “come next door to us” — a reference to the AAWA. She says the word “us” stuck in her mind because the advisers were supposed to be an independent source of information on available services.

It quickly becomes clear that many involved in this area see discretion as the better part of valour. After I submitted detailed questions to the National Disability Insurance Agency, it responded that it would be “inappropriate” to comment on an individual’s views — in other words, those of Roberts. The office of social services minister Christian Porter referred me to his department, which referred me back to the National Disability Insurance Agency. The AAWA did not respond to repeated requests, including in a detailed email, for comment.

A spokesperson for the National Disability Insurance Agency did acknowledge that “there is strong evidence which suggests the way health professionals diagnose autism varies considerably across Australia,” but added that this was being addressed. One expert familiar with the operations of the NDIS, who did not want to be identified, says professionals can come under “huge moral pressure from the family to give a diagnosis because that is the key to getting funding.”

The diagnostic uncertainties are highlighted in a draft national guideline for diagnosing autism released in September by the federal government–funded Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism. There is no consistent process for diagnosing autism, says the centre, and “this inconsistency has led to uneven service provision across the Australian states and territories, along with confusion within the community about the diagnostic process.” It points out that appraisal of behaviours “is an inherently subjective task that relies heavily on clinician experience and skill” and that the “gold standard” diagnosis is no more than a best-estimate clinical judgement. The guideline itself runs to seventy-two pages, not including references, and emphasises a tiered process, including different settings in which behaviours should be assessed and a focus on the degree of functional impairment.

The chief research officer at the Cooperative Research Centre, professor of autism research at the University of Western Australia Andrew Whitehouse, tells me that the guideline is being developed with the sole purpose of achieving a common approach and he is unsure what effect it will have on the number of children diagnosed. When I put David Roberts’s concerns to him, he says, “Are there children getting a diagnosis of autism because it might help provide support? Yes, I think there are. I attach no value judgement to that whatsoever.” He adds that this was where the NDIS eligibility criterion of the degree of functional impairment was important. As far back as 2011, a review commissioned by the federal government reported “concern that some autism advisers were also service providers, presenting a clear conflict of interest and therefore potential inability to offer unbiased advice or information to families.”

Whitehouse says that “any number of reasons” could help explain increased rates of autism, including more diagnoses of children with mild symptoms, more types of behaviour now meeting the criteria for diagnosis, a greater survival rate among children born prematurely — known to be associated with an increased risk of autism — and greater awareness of the condition, not only among clinicians but also among parents. “On the family side, if a child is developing differently, we start to think about autism now, whereas twenty to thirty years ago we didn’t.”

Overall, the commission found that utilisation of the NDIS was lower than expected but that this was largely because assistance that had been committed had yet to be taken up. But there were higher rates than expected for children and higher than expected costs for individual funding packages.

Canberra’s response to the higher rates has been the introduction of an Early Childhood Early Intervention program for children six years or younger, designed as a “gateway,” or perhaps more accurately as a hurdle, through which families are directed by therapists with experience in early childhood intervention to alternative mainstream services, as well as to the NDIS. It includes the specific aim that fewer than 50 per cent of those assessed should be given access to the NDIS. The Productivity Commission recommends this target be removed because it is incompatible with one of the key features of the NDIS: that it is open to anyone who meets the eligibility criteria.

While most working in the autism field are reluctant to question the high numbers entering the NDIS, Roberts’s view is different. He sees a threat to the very future of the scheme. The Productivity Commission and the government seem more sanguine, but the warning signs are clear. The commission says the NDIS came in under budget at the end of the trial period last year but this was because early cost pressures, such as the greater than expected number of children, were more than offset by lower than expected utilisation of the scheme overall. It says that the schedule for rolling out the full scheme is too ambitious and “poses risks to the financial sustainability of the scheme.”

The commission’s report spells out how costs have escalated since its initial modelling in 2011, when it estimated a total gross cost of $13.6 billion a year when the NDIS is fully operating. This figure has now increased to $22 billion, based on an estimate by the National Disability Insurance Agency, with the difference largely attributable to population increases and pay rises for social and community services employees since 2012. Moreover, the Department of Social Services has estimated a cost of $32 billion a year by 2029, with costs expected to increase above long-term inflation and population growth. But the commission also quotes estimates in 2011 by the Australian Government Actuary of offsetting costs of $11 billion reflecting savings in other government programs, and listed further indirect savings through better health, less crime and less need for supported accommodation.

Apart from Morrison’s asking the Productivity Commission to look at the scheme’s sustainability, there is little sign that the government is blanching at the escalating costs. The only significant response from Canberra to the commission’s report has been a statement from Christian Porter stating that the commission, “while identifying known issues and risks, had confirmed that the NDIS costs are on track.” As for emerging cost pressures, he argues that they “are being appropriately monitored and addressed.” The government will work with the National Disability Insurance Agency, the states and the territories to consider the report’s findings and recommendations, said Porter, but he rejected the idea of delaying the timetable for the full rollout.

The NDIS is worth fighting for. Though there have been frustrations, disappointments and teething problems, it is giving new hope and opportunity to tens of thousands of people whose struggles with disability had gone largely unrecognised. It gives them a measure of control over the services and facilities they need, replacing a system that the Productivity Commission called under-funded, unfair, fragmented, inefficient and unsustainable. Taking a lifetime approach based on insurance principles and with an emphasis on early intervention, it is an investment in the future, aimed at allowing more people with disability and their carers to lead fulfilling lives, including earning incomes. And while its cost is bracing, the commission, among others, argues that it will save money in the long run.

The ultimate justification for the NDIS is the telling comment made by the commission in its initial report in 2011: that “were government to be starting with a blank slate in determining its funding priorities, there would be a strong rationale for provision of disability services to be one of its highest spending priorities.”

The government has taken steps to tackle the risks that the scheme will be overwhelmed by those diagnosed with autism and developmental delays. The commission says it is too early to assess the success of these initiatives. If they are not adequate, the danger is that the government will take more brutal action that harms those most in need. ●

The post Autism and the NDIS: a matter of interpretation appeared first on Inside Story.

The people at Newspoll, whose results are published in the Australian, estimate the first figure. They posed the question in their fortnightly voting-intentions survey between last Thursday and Sunday and found that only 15 per cent had already “voted.” The electoral roll contains a touch over sixteen million people, and 15 per cent of that is 2.4 million.

Essential Vision’s latest survey, conducted from Friday to Monday and published in the Guardian, found 36 per cent. And “leaked” internal polling from Yes campaign headquarters (online panel, 1000 respondents, Thursday lunchtime to Friday lunchtime) throws up some startling numbers: 90 per cent have received their forms, 88 per cent of those have filled them in, and 73 per cent of the 90 per cent have already posted them back.

Now, leaked internal polling should always be handled with kid gloves. It is placed in the public arena for a reason. And this finding would mean that 65 per cent of voters have already returned their forms, which is flabbergasting.

But what could account for the difference between Newspoll and Essential? Newspoll had an introductory question, “Are you in favour or opposed to the postal plebiscite?” (Presumably this was preceded by something like, “You may have heard about the postal plebiscite run by the ABS to change the law to…”) Then they asked how the respondent voted or will vote, how likely they are to vote, or if they indeed already had.

Essential skipped the first question. Could that account for the difference? Newspoll’s question includes the words, “voting in the plebiscite is not compulsory.” That might explain the divergence, although both get about the same percentage of respondents saying they won’t vote. In six weeks’ time, when the results are in, we’ll know much more about this question.

Leaving that aside, what do these surveys tell us about what the Yes and No votes are likely to be?

Here, the two pollsters sing from the same sheet: 58 per cent Yes to 33 per cent No for Essential, and 57–34 for Newspoll. Assuming the undecideds don’t vote, that comes to about 63 or 64 per cent Yes. Assuming they do vote, and split 50–50 between Yes and No, those Yes numbers fall by only a little over a percentage point.

The two pollsters’ Yes or No questions are different, with Newspoll asking how people will respond to the survey and Essential replicating the ABS’s question, “Do you support changing the law to allow same-sex couples to marry?” This is a potentially important distinction because the No case is attempting, in a reprise of the 1999 republic referendum, to convince marriage-equality supporters to vote No because we haven’t seen the legislation and it’s better to be safe than sorry. Ideally, it would love to turn the survey into a vote against “cosmopolitan elites” and “bullies” — 1999 again.

I much prefer the Newspoll question, but it’s good to have both because we can watch for divergence between the two. Unless that “leaked” internal polling is right, of course, in which case it’s pretty much all over.

This campaign has also seen the reappearance of that old stager, John Howard, proselytising for the No side. Commentators have been cooing, equality supporters trembling, for the Master — he who held the electorate in the palm of his hand for over a decade — is back, weaving his magic.

Now, it’s true that most Australians retain positive feelings towards Howard and his government, representing as they do life before the bottom fell out of the economy. Wallets were open, spending was in fashion, government coffers overflowed, and it seemed the good times would last forever. Talk about stability: one prime minister for almost twelve years. Most believe Howard ran a good government and ran a good economy. He routinely tops the poll figures for “best” recent prime minister.

But that doesn’t make him a persuasive figure on social issues like this. Apart from anything else, Australians also believe he was a very clever politician, which is another way of saying he stretched the truth from time to time. This was, after all, the prime minister who in 2004 felt the need to reclaim the word “trust,” as in: forget about who you trust to tell the truth, who do you trust to run the country?

Politicians are never as wonderful or as terrible practitioners of the art as history depicts. They make their own luck, to a point, but are also hostage to timing and good fortune, and most importantly to economic and electoral cycles.

Some Yes supporters, in their panic, are recalling how eighteen years ago the evil genius manipulated the republic referendum to make it a vote on a particular model, rather than a Yes or a No. Oh no, he’s going to do it again!

But that 1999 hurdle was a constitutional reality. Any move to a republic will require majority support for a specific change (and a majority in four states), whether or not an “indicative plebiscite” is held first. That wasn’t John Howard’s doing.

So, yes, he’s been up to his old tricks, campaigning against change, which is what all politicians are most comfortable doing. But his rhetorical skills are not all they’re cracked up to be. And his special topic, religious freedom, is a niche issue.

Anyway, we haven’t heard much from that quarter over the past week. Maybe he’s been shown some internal polling. ●

The post Marriage polling and the warhorse factor appeared first on Inside Story.

The two challenges involved three individual plaintiffs — Andrew Wilkie MP, Felicity Marlowe and Greens senator Janet Rice — along with Australian Marriage Equality and the PFLAG organisation (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). Between them they presented a number of arguments. It was argued, for example, that the last-minute decision to convert the idea of a “plebiscite” (presumably to be conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission) into a “postal survey” (to be conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics) was invalid because the polling of yes-or-no answers to a question about same-sex marriage did not involve “statistical” information. It was also argued that arrangements for the Australian Electoral Commission to assist the Bureau of Statistics in conducting the “survey,” in part by supplying it with information from the electoral roll, went beyond the AEC’s statutory powers and functions.

The central issue, however, related to the decision by senator Mathias Cormann, in his capacity as finance minister, to increase the departmental allocation for the Australian Bureau of Statistics by an additional $122 million to enable it to conduct the survey. That decision was made under section 10 of the Appropriation Act (No. 1) for 2017, which authorises the minister effectively to increase a departmental allocation (by “so much… as the finance minister determines”) if he “is satisfied that there is an urgent need” for additional expenditure, arising “because the expenditure was unforeseen” at the time of the May budget. In short, the minister could only grant such an increase if he were “satisfied” that the need for it was both “urgent” and “unforeseen.”

An ordinary reader, applying common sense to ordinary English usage, might have thought that the question of whether the minister was “satisfied” was a subjective question which could only be answered by the minister himself. But the ordinary reader would have been wrong. The decision made by the minister in such a case is an administrative decision potentially subject to judicial review. If the process by which the minister has satisfied himself depends on an error — if, for instance, he has misapplied or misunderstood the criteria on which his satisfaction depends — then his decision can be overturned. Accordingly, it was legitimate to ask not merely whether the minister was satisfied, but whether the criteria were satisfied.

The criteria here were twofold: that the need for special funding was “urgent” (at the time of the decision in August) and had been “unforeseen” (at the time of the annual budget in May). Again, an ordinary reader, applying common sense to ordinary English usage, might think that neither criterion was satisfied. The controversy over the government’s failure to deal with the issue of same-sex marriage had rolled on for at least four years, and the possibility of a plebiscite to be conducted by an optional postal vote had been actively canvassed at least since March. The decisions made on 9 August were taken because, earlier that day, the Senate had (for the second time) failed to pass legislation which would have referred the issue of same-sex marriage to a compulsory plebiscite to be conducted by normal electoral procedures. But that failure in the Senate came as no surprise; Senator Cormann himself had predicted it as early as February. In any event, far from being treated as urgent, both the unsuccessful proposal for a compulsory plebiscite and the substitute proposal for a postal survey were widely perceived as delaying tactics by which the Turnbull government was seeking to evade or defer its own responsibility to act on the issue.

Again, however, the ordinary reader would have been wrong. As Stephen Donaghue told the court on Wednesday, precisely because the word “urgent” is “just an ordinary English word,” it follows that urgency “is a relative concept” — “some things are relatively more urgent than others.” Donaghue was on safe ground here because on 24 August, in the context of fixing a timetable for the hearing of issues arising from section 44 of the Constitution, the chief justice had told him that “there is urgency and urgency.” As Donaghue now elaborated on that idea in the context of Senator Cormann’s decision:

The level of urgency requires an evaluative judgment to be made between different and competing priorities and in that context we submit it is entirely appropriate… to repose that judgment in the Executive on the satisfaction of the Executive because it is not a judgment… which can lend itself to bright lines enforceable in litigation.

In short, though the question whether the minister is “satisfied” is not in itself a subjective question to be answered only by him, the question whether he is satisfied that a matter is “urgent” is subjective in precisely that sense. At the very least, Donaghue told the court:

where the cabinet has decided that a particular policy should be pursued and that it should be pursued in a particular timeframe — it is open to the finance minister to be satisfied that that generates urgency of the kind to which the section is directed.

As for whether the need was “unforeseen,” there was no attempt to deny that the possibility of a postal survey had been foreseen; but Senator Cormann had explained in an affidavit that what had been “unforeseen” at the time of the budget was the possibility that the postal survey might be conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This, of course, is the ultimate irony: the reason why the government’s decisions in August were greeted with such incredulity was precisely that no reasonable person could have imagined that such a task might be thrust upon the Bureau of Statistics. To say that such a solution was unforeseen (and indeed unforeseeable) is entirely convincing.

In any event, Donaghue’s submissions to the court put the point in a statutory context. The effect of an additional allocation of funds by the finance minister under section 10 is to add to a particular “departmental item.” Thus, what Senator Cormann did on 9 August was precisely to provide additional funding for the Bureau of Statistics; and the need for a further allocation to the Bureau of Statistics was precisely what, under section 10, was required to have been “unforeseen.”

Incidentally, a careless slip in one of Senator Cormann’s statements had led the plaintiffs to argue that he had conflated the words “urgent” and “unforeseen” into a single criterion, and had therefore failed to give each criterion the separate consideration required. In the wider context, however, it was clear that Cormann had not failed to do this. The difference between the two criteria was neatly explained in Donaghue’s argument:

The unforeseen criterion is a criterion directed to why the expense was not included in the last Appropriation Act, why it was not included in the budget, and the urgency requirement is an explanation of why it is not waiting for the next one.

Behind the immediate question of whether the criteria in section 10 of the Act had been satisfied was a larger question of whether the entire procedure for additional funding under section 10 was constitutionally valid. Only one of the two cases before the court had sought to raise that question, and it did so without success. But the reasons for the court’s unanimous rejection of the argument are potentially of much greater constitutional importance than the immediate issue about the postal survey. They relate to the extent to which the executive government can act without parliamentary approval, and in particular the extent to which it can appropriate money without such approval.

According to Section 83 of the Constitution, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury of the Commonwealth except under appropriation made by law.” In 1924, in an appeal from New Zealand, the Privy Council was even more emphatic: “no money can be taken out of the consolidated Fund… excepting under a distinct authorisation from parliament itself.” The principle is fundamental, and reflects the historical assertion of parliamentary control over the Crown.

On the face of it, the power of the finance minister to make a “determination” permitting additional expenditure is an exception to this principle. The exception is authorised by parliament (through section 10 of the Appropriation Act) and is subject to an upper limit (the combined total of all such additional expenditures in any one year must not exceed $295 million); but it is not reviewable by parliament. Section 10(4) provides that such a determination is “a legislative instrument,” but is not subject to the normal rules according to which a “legislative instrument” can be disallowed by the Senate.

A basic departure from the separation of powers in the Westminster system of government is the fact that the executive government can be authorised to make regulations: that is, legislative power is delegated by the parliament to the executive. In 1931, when the High Court held that this exception to basic constitutional principles was sanctioned by long historical usage, the court emphasised that the exception was still subject to parliamentary control because regulations could be disallowed by the Senate. That ultimate possibility of control has always been regarded as important. But for ministerial “determinations” of a need for additional finance, that possibility is expressly negated by section 10(4).

The fundamental issue is an important one, especially at a time when the constitutional relationship between legislative and executive power is attracting increasing judicial scrutiny. When the court’s written reasons for judgement are delivered, what is said about this issue is likely to be of particular interest. But in this immediate context the attack on the minister’s power under section 10 was difficult to establish, and it is not surprising that it failed.

It failed essentially because here, too, the exception to fundamental principle was established by long historical usage. A provision for ministerial advances of additional funds for unforeseen circumstances has been a feature of Australian legislation since the very beginning — going back, as Stephen Donaghue put it, to “the very first Act ever passed by the Commonwealth Parliament, Act No. 1 of 1901.” Indeed, as Donaghue demonstrated in an exhaustive historical survey, the scope for ministerial discretion in allocating additional funds had until quite recently been much less circumscribed by statutory safeguards than it is now.

An even more fundamental issue was whether the plaintiffs were entitled to challenge the additional funding at all. In 1974 the Whitlam government included in its annual Appropriation Act a sum of almost $6 million for the Australian Assistance Plan, a project established to advance a policy of regional decentralisation for which there was no legislative basis. In a High Court of seven, three judges held that the appropriation was valid, and three judges held that it was not. The seventh judge, Sir Ninian Stephen, held that a mere appropriation of money was not subject to legal challenge. In order to bring legal proceedings in a federal court, plaintiffs must show that the issue directly affects them in some way that entitles them to “standing”; but according to Stephen, an appropriation of money merely “earmarks” the money in a way that affects no one.

The result was that the challenge to the appropriation failed, by a majority of four judges to three, but with no majority support for any reason for that result. Stephen’s view that no one can have “standing” to challenge an appropriation of money was decisive of the outcome, but it was the view of only one judge. But in 1988 three High Court judges (Mason, Deane and Gaudron) said of the 1974 case:

The case… stands as an authority for the proposition that the validity of an appropriation act is not ordinarily susceptible to effective legal challenge. It is unnecessary to consider whether there are extraordinary circumstances in which an appropriation of money by the parliament may be susceptible to such challenge. It suffices to say that, if there be such cases, the present is not one of them.

The rules about “standing” have been greatly relaxed since 1975, especially in constitutional cases, and the view taken by Ninian Stephen in the AAP case is unlikely to have survived in precisely that form. Nevertheless, Stephen Donaghue used it to suggest, at the forefront of his argument before the High Court last Wednesday, that the plaintiffs challenging the allocation of money for the “postal survey” had no standing to do so. Of the many questions raised by the case, this may be the most interesting of all. On that question, though, the formal order announced by Chief Justice Kiefel on Thursday said simply: “Inappropriate to answer.” •

The post Urgent, unforeseen — and far-reaching? appeared first on Inside Story.

The pages before that date were dense with appointments typical for a late-stage PhD student, nicely positioned in their designated times: “super­visor”; “submit book review”; “conference”; “seminar”; “teach.” All in ink, obviously. The pages crackled a bit from where the biro had pressed in hard. The pages after the “Baby!” entry were smooth and blank. I was living with my husband in a London council flat, seduced from my Australian home by the promise of a life in the knowledge-worker class. All my experience to date had taught me that ink in my diary meant work. Blank space meant not-work. The ink meant constraint. The blank space meant freedom.

As it turned out, the date of the “Baby!” entry was the least of my delusions. The eight-hour labour I learnt about in National Childbirth Trust antenatal classes went for thirty-five. The birth plan I’d thought­fully printed out in triplicate to distribute to the midwives at the birth centre (“warm water, no pain relief, Bach cellos, dim light please”) was instead labour in a fluorescent-lit four-bed ward, oxytocin in my arm, metal in my spine. The thesis plan (“revise introduction, rewrite conclusion, fix footnotes, submit in three weeks”) became nine months of tremulous writing in naptime stretches that varied between twenty seconds and two hours. I developed a dread of small domestic sounds: a door click, a plastic shampoo bottle falling over in the bathroom or a glass clinking on the sink all had the devastating power to wake the baby and unceremoniously terminate my working day.

With an awake baby came life lived in the diary’s blank space. It certainly didn’t feel like freedom. It was more like living in a coral reef: beautiful, yes, but slow-moving and lonely, with little opportunity to venture into the wider ocean.

Years later, I would make sense of this time in terms of Hannah Arendt’s division of human activity into categories of “labour,” “work” and “action” in her 1958 book The Human Condition. Life in the blank space was what Arendt termed “labour” – biologically necessary activity that was, in her words, “futile but necessary.” Always consumed at the point of production, labour is unproductive in a literal sense, leaving nothing tangible behind. It differs profoundly from “work,” Arendt’s concept for activity performed in relation to human-made things. The construction of a table, the building of a road, the painting of a house are all work. Work’s logic is instrumental and utilitarian; it can be contained and planned within the time lines of a diary. Arendt proposed “action” as a category for activities by which people disclose themselves to others. It was the sphere of the ancient polis, the domain in which people apprehend and distinguish each other as incommutable and unique creatures. The writing of a play, the composition of a blog and the delivery of a lecture are all action. As a middle-class, able-bodied nascent academic,

I had the good fortune to spend a considerable portion of time before having a baby engaging in action, and a fair bit in work too. My experience of labour had not been much more than a toe dip. It was no wonder that I did not grasp its logic, its splendour, or its strange rhythms in comparison to the worlds of work and action. It is unsurprising, if not excusable, that I had taken it utterly for granted.

Pregnancy and birth might be one of the most inexorably linear experiences on offer in the twenty-first century. Ask any woman who has given birth about the experience and you are likely to hear a story with events that are powerfully placed in narrative sequence, and an ending that doesn’t just punctuate the story but becomes a sort of temporal frame for her entire life.

The major processes shaping the future of work aren’t much like that. The transgression of planetary boundaries and the displacement of human activity by machines are stealthy and incremental processes, hard to fathom on a day-to-day basis and utterly unamenable to diarisation. They have uneven beginnings, moments of great acceleration (the Industrial Revolution; the period from 1950 to the present) and inconceivable end-points, on a scale far larger than a human life. We are perpetually “in them,” yet their full collective impacts defy the senses. Increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere cannot be heard or smelled; a bleached Great Barrier Reef or a fifty-mile crack in West Antarctica can be cheerfully disregarded with a quick scroll through a newsfeed.

Algorithms that set the price of labour for digital-platform work are designed to invisibly calculate value from moment to moment, unencumbered by human judgement and without scope for negotiation or appeal. Casualisation and digital scheduling are, in combination, reducing the visibility of structural unemployment and the wounds of shame and despair it can inflict. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, unemployed and precariously employed people took up space on the road, forming lines and gatherings that had names like “The Hungry Mile” and “The Bull Pit.” We don’t have a name yet for the experience of sitting alone in a bedroom, in a car or on the toilet in a state of distraction and latent expectation, awaiting a text message that will signal the prospect of work or its absence. Hundreds of thousands of people do this daily. Yet they now do it privately, without ritual or witnesses.

That these non-linear, largely undetectable processes are collectively whittling away at the foundations of “work” as we presently understand it is inarguable. If the Committee for Economic Development of Australia is even partly correct in its prediction that 40 per cent of Australian jobs will be automated by 2025, the changes that the millennial generation will witness to existing patterns of work and education will be epic, and magnified by the imperative to decarbonise the entire system.

Understandably, the first tranche of thinkers who have attempted to grapple with climate change, automation and late capitalism as a joined-up set of challenges have tended to focus on what will be lost, rather than what will stay the same. Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism (2016), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future (2015) and Tim Dunlop’s Why the Future Is Workless (2016), for instance, all overwhelmingly focus on the appropriate psychological and policy responses to the jobs that are set to disappear, leaving the cyclical work of social reproduction – “labour,” in Arendt’s sense of it – as an afterthought. Just as I had done with my pre-baby diary, they contemplate the moment when the dense ink gives way to white space, but can only imagine the latter as lack.

How might our perception of the future of work change if we looked on the “white space” differently? Whether we recognise it or not, the job of maintaining the biological processes of the earth will be a major dimension of human activity in a low-carbon, highly automated world. This applies to the work of looking after human bodies as much as it does to the stewardship of ocean, sky and land. As we rethink and refashion our forms of agriculture, transport, mining, forestry, energy and chemical industries into low-carbon equivalents adequate to sustain life within planetary boundaries, labour will remain a constant. Aged and disability carers, early childhood educators and nurses – low-carbon occupations all – will endure through the thousands of micro-revolutions wrought by automation. No doubt many self-styled innovators will attempt to replace them with robots, tone deaf to how inextricable human relationships are in such jobs. All of us want to be seen and heard by another human being in the moments of vulnerability that constitute the basis for these forms of work. No one wants to die in the company of a robot.

An Arendtian framework can assist us to think through our predicament. Arendt was not a sentimental admirer of labour, although she understood that a life that was structured around a simple dichotomy of “work” and “leisure” risked triviality without it. Unlike many modern theorists, she was not moved by psychoanalytic conceptions of personhood that accorded a pre-eminent role to parents and intimate others in shaping the self of a small child. The low value Arendt attached to labour was, as she readily acknowledged, nothing new. Societies from the ancient Greeks to medieval Christians to patriarchal Victorians all placed it as the degraded partner in a binary with a more exalted form of existence, whether it be the polis, the spirit or the “public sphere.”

While our current age is not alone in taking the maintenance of our physical and social spaces for granted, we have certainly given it a twenty-first-century, neoliberal spin. Many early childhood educators earn so little that they cannot afford to buy a house or have children of their own, despite significant post-secondary qualifications. Aged carers are paid so poorly they risk poverty. People with jobs in the world of work and action who take time away to care for elderly parents or young children are punished for their “choice,” not just once through foregone income but twice as a result of a grotesque superannuation system that magnifies wage gaps in retire­ment. Through neoliberal goggles, labour is not recognised as the essential foundation for civilisation but rather is seen as a cost burden on the public purse that should rightly be turned into a profit-making opportunity. Treasurer Scott Morrison, speaking at the ACOSS National Conference in 2016, said, “What I am basically saying is that welfare must become a good deal for investors – for private investors. We have to make it a good deal, for the returns to be there.”

Arendt would not, I suspect, exactly have leapt to advance the status of our modern practitioners of labour, but she probably would have considered Morrison’s comments pretty strange. The extraction of “returns” is work logic rather than labour logic. It is what we do to coal when we take it out of the earth, and wool when we shear it off the sheep. The framing of relationships of care and attention as profit-making opportunities is, in Arendt’s schema, a category error.

Bringing labour to the foreground highlights the extent to which devel­opments in technology amplify, rather than diminish, the urgency of asking old and familiar questions about power, collective action and institutional design in the way our society organises care work. Who should own and design the technology? How should the work be shared out across classes and genders? What role should profit-making play? Who should set the mechanisms for measuring, monitoring and communicating “quality”? Do we fundamentally see the recipients of care as customers or citizens? If these questions are not asked democratically, and with the explicit involvement of the present and future workers who will do this labour, then they will continue to be implicitly answered for us by the owners of capital.

The last instance of a societal shift on anything like the scale that is currently required occurred at the end of the second world war. The intellects that shaped that change, from William Beveridge to H.C. Coombs, faced the immense challenge of working in wartime conditions, with an infrastructure almost wholly devoted to militarisation and a population wracked by privation and grief. The war also presented them with some key advantages, though, not least an acceptance of centralised government planning and authority, a society-wide willingness to make individual sacri­fices for collective aims, and an acknowledged legitimacy in protecting and promoting forms of work on the basis of their usefulness rather than their profit-making capacity. Such thinkers and policy-makers arguably had an imaginative advantage over our age too: a vivid sense of the society they were moving away from – a planned wartime economy – and of the one they were moving towards – a peacetime society not afflicted with the hardships of the Depression.

The current generation of the left, by contrast, shares no such consensus. The backdrop of nationalism that provided a common teleological frame­work to its citizens has been dismantled – a matter for celebration, without question, given its bloody legacy. But we must also recognise that erosion of nationalist (and, before them, religious) structures of meaning has also resulted in diminished conceptual tools for conducting a public democratic conversation about where we are, and where we must go in a climate-altered and highly automated planet. Young people must work in a landscape of political communication that fosters presentism, virtue signalling, impatience with and suspicion of institutional authority, and an overdeveloped sense that individual “feelings” are an adequate proxy for political action.

Like the baby boomers, millennials are also shaped by a deep, post-imperial anxiety about the morality of imposing visions of a collective good onto others. This did not afflict the planners of the 1940s, for better and for worse. Beveridge, for instance, inherited a worldview that stretched back to Comte and the positivist tradition. He passed through Oxford, Toynbee Hall, the British civil service and the LSE – all institutions that emphasised, albeit in very different ways, the subordination of private interests to the common good. Today, by contrast, the political left must repeatedly make the case for collec­tive action and argue for the principles that underpin a flourishing society, in a public realm that is chronically afflicted by amnesia and distraction.

In the absence of societal consensus, it can be easy to resort to despair in the face of an ailing system. But we’re far from empty-handed. We can start with the givens, the timeless things that will inevitably be present in the future, rather than an overwhelming focus on what we are going to lack. We know that there will be children, and they will crave belonging, love and learning. Citizens of all ages will all seek togetherness, connection to each other and to the generations before and after. We will express ourselves through culture, endeavouring to make sense of our uniqueness as human beings and our shared cultural inheritance. Some of our bodies will work imperfectly from birth, some will become diseased. All of them will get old. We will need sources of energy that are generated in ways that don’t violate any of the planetary boundaries for existence.

We will need a grasp on all three of Arendt’s categories of “labour,” “work” and “action” in this impending world. But more than this, we need to acknowl­edge that their relative proportions will change, and work won’t simply disappear. If a larger share of human activity is to be taken up by labour – by the maintenance of our physical, social and intimate worlds – then perhaps it should be shared around a bit more fairly. And perhaps it should be handled with a set of conceptual tools that are more apt. Words such as “efficiency” and “competition” and “choice” have been deployed far too widely – well beyond the bounds of the domain of work, where they rightly belong (and even then, in far more limited circumstances than is standard). They are alien to labour and corrode the foundations of trust, continuity and judgement that enable its proper performance. We need to develop a public vocabulary that gives value and space to labour and action on their own terms, as foundations for our common human flourishing.

I followed the birth plan for the early stages of labour. The contractions of the first morning did involve white pillows, a red balloon visualisation I’d read about in a hypnobirthing book and a sort of figure-eight swaying of the hips I’d learnt in prenatal yoga. They also included the use of a contraction-timing app that seemed ingenious the week before but that, in practice, required the irritating re-entry of my pin number every few minutes. I ditched it a few hours in, submitting to the more reliable “are you in so much pain you cannot talk to the midwife on the phone” test as a measure for when the moment was right to go to the hospital.

I let my hair fall entirely in front of my face as I shuffled with my husband from our ground-floor council flat through the common area to the black cab on the street. It was mid-morning, and the space was like a theatre in the round, observable from five levels of balconies. Given the deep guttural sounds I was making, I suppose more than a few people would have come out to watch me, but from behind the veil of hair, I could not see them. Remarkably, the only witnesses I could perceive were three ginger cats, all residents in our block, lined up near the door in a sort of guard of honour to mark the passage of a fellow animal.

I brayed on the floor of the black cab, through slow traffic and sharp turns, desperate to reach experienced hands at St Mary’s Paddington. A thick paper file was exchanged on arrival (credit card details were not) and a miraculous system of science, planning and institutional design invisibly pulsed into life. Dozens of professionals seamlessly co-ordinated their time and attention, wordlessly sharing scientific knowledge derived from 200 years of research and experience, enmeshed with the particular and specific observations that had been made about me and my baby over the past nine months. I met some of the midwives twice over twenty-eight hours, once at the end of their shift and again at the start of the next. They spoke a common language in accents from Ireland, Australia, Wales, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Jamaica. After more than an hour of pushing, I was politely asked if I would consent to being in an Imperial College univer­sity study about a novel episiotomy technique, and play my tiny part in nudging the scientific frontier forward for others. Yes, God, please, please do it. I signed the paper with a biro and turned my eyes away from the scissors. Then hands on thighs, feet braced, and a deep Jamaican voice of the latest midwife roaring, “Puuuuuuuuush.”

If my daughter is to give birth to a child at the same age, it will be 2040. Her ride to the place she delivers her baby will be, I suppose, a driverless and smoother affair than mine was; the monitoring of heartbeats, effacement and contractions “smarter,” more accurate and less invasive. I’m confident she won’t be required to enter a pin number at any stage. Perhaps the whole thing will happen at her home, with medication and medical-examination cameras alighting to the scene by solar-powered drone. If such technology is useful for keeping her safe, I hope she gets it all, and that her entitlement to do so has nothing to do with her status or income (or mine).

Please let there be people with her, though, no matter what. Let them be experienced, and kind. Let them have chosen this work because they want to do it, and because it is recognised as crucial in a low-carbon world, and not because they cannot find anything else to do. Let them give her their attention, free from concern for ratings or efficiency measures, from worry about where their next job is going to be or how they are going to care for their own children. If something goes wrong, please let there be someone to hold her and help her and calm her, and not just a beeping machine. And when my daughter first hears her baby’s cry, please let there be someone there to meet her gaze, to lift her new child up, and to pass her on with eyes shining. •

This essay first appeared in Griffith Review 52: Millennials Strike Back, edited by Julianne Schultz and Jareth Head.

The post A consensus for care appeared first on Inside Story.

My specialty is heatwaves, so ordinarily I would be captivated by weather like this. I study the weather charts to work out where the mass of hot air has originated, how long it might last, and whether another one will follow. I discuss with my team how natural climate variability and other physical mechanisms might be influencing the weather pattern, and formulate and conduct experiments to determine whether human-induced climate change had a role to play. My phone rings hot as media requests roll in, and in interviews I find myself stressing how heatwaves are becoming longer, hotter and more frequent, with summers like the last one just a taste of what is to come.

As a scientist, I’m trained to be exceptionally careful. The publication process subjects all my findings are subject to critical peer review. Before that, they are discussed extensively with colleagues to ensure the validity of my interpretation and the significance of the results. Along the way are many control checks, which mean that when I say that summers like 2016–17 will become the new normal, I have the evidence to back it up. Feelings don’t figure in the process, only the presentation of the most accurate and scientifically robust results.

Essentially, being a climate scientist takes the human element out of the daunting implications of climate change. But I am also a human being, and a new mother-to-be. So this summer evoked a whole new set of thoughts and feelings about our future, and caught me more off-guard than perhaps they should have.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was approached to talk about my views on climate change by a producer at ABC TV’s Lateline, who knew that I was thirty-two weeks pregnant with my first child. (The interview hasn’t yet gone to air.) At about the same time, a well-respected colleague and friend, Sophie Lewis, bravely shared her grave concerns about the world her unborn daughter will inherit in the Sydney Morning Herald. It seems like a good time to share my own thoughts in more detail.

My most sobering thought was simple. Am I doing the right thing by starting a family? This struck me during a climate conference in Canberra during the last heatwave, while I was listening to a well-known health expert talk about the heat exposure my child will experience each summer when she or he is my age. The supporting climate projections were familiar to me, yet it was disheartening to hear exactly how they will affect the health and wellbeing of my child and his or her peers. These impacts were no longer distant or irrelevant, but very real and ever-present.

I have never assumed that my family would be safeguarded from climate change. But I have always wanted to have children, and nothing had made me reassess that wish. I am the youngest of seven kids and have always seen myself with my own largish brood (though my husband might disagree with me here!). But now I find myself questioning whether, as a parent, it is morally responsible for me to bring life into this world, knowing the health challenges my offspring will face.

During summer, I found myself asking questions I had never asked before. Is it too hot to hang the washing out? Can the dog and I cope with a walk? How on earth am I going to get some sleep when it is still 39°C inside? Keeping our old weatherboard house a habitable temperature was an exceptional challenge, with my husband and I living in the only room with air-conditioning for days on end. (Air-conditioning is always a last resort for us.) Given that summers like these will be the new normal in the next few decades, it follows that challenges like these will also become the new normal.

So how will my children’s daily life be affected by relentless extreme heat? Will I even be able to safely raise my family in a typical Australian house? While these decisions may simply be the norm in the coming decades, I doubt any parent would want this as their children’s future. Of course, I can, and will, encourage my kids to make decisions and adapt their lifestyle so that beating the heat isn’t as much of an issue. But these choices may be easier to imagine than to adopt. The cost of setting up an energy-efficient house, at least in the near future, is more than many people can afford. And it’s troubling to consider a time when we might actively discourage our children from enjoying the great outdoors.

I also can envisage a certain level of frustration on their part as to why my generation, and those before us, let climate change get this bad. Indeed, these conversations are already taking place. I recall similar conversations with my own father after I questioned the roaring rate of economic growth after the second world war and the lack of consideration of the long-term impacts of excessive industry.

At the time, though, that growth was only ever viewed as a positive – they were providing for future generations, making life easier for their descendants. We know better now. We know that industry has polluted the earth and atmosphere, and while we can already measure the effects on global and regional climates, we also know that the worst is yet to come. We know we are not making life easier for our descendants, and they will inherit the world in a worse state than we did. Yet, at best, we do very little to fix the issue, and bury our heads even further in the sand.

As a climate scientist I am continuously frustrated at how the overwhelming scientific evidence is ripped to shreds by the general public and politicians. The Australian government continues to support coal, and the US government now says that the science of climate change is unsound. We listen to our doctors when we are sick, and to our mechanics when our cars break down, yet we do not trust climate scientists.

Many of the issues I have highlighted here could be considered “first world problems.” At least my family will have options for sheltering from the impact of climate change, a luxury that residents of developing countries won’t have. Future generations will have the responsibility of ensuring the wellbeing of those who will be hit hardest by climate change.

These are incredibly real issues facing all kids being born today. If the challenge had been taken more seriously, their future would look a little brighter than it currently does. After all, why should future generations inherit a world they had no hand in destroying? •

The post Suddenly, the future doesn’t seem so far away appeared first on Inside Story.

Now, the Turnbull government is attempting to manage the problem by introducing an entirely new five-year temporary visa, commencing next July. With the immigration department apparently unable to provide basic information about how great the demand for such a visa might be, it looks like a political fix rather than a coherent policy initiative, and is likely to create a new set of problems. To understand how we arrived at this point, it helps to go back to Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs on that March night more than a decade and a half ago.

In his opening presentation, Philip Ruddock proudly described the government’s success in swinging the pendulum of permanent migration away from family reunions and towards skills. Under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, family visas had made up around two-thirds of all places in the migration program; after the Coalition took office under John Howard in 1996, the share soon fell to less than half. (Since then the share has fallen further; for many years now, the family stream has made up only about a third of the permanent migration program, or 57,400 of 190,000 places in 2015–16.)

Ruddock bolstered his bias towards skills with numbers. According to the neat charts he projected onto the screen, every 1000 people who entered the country as skilled or business migrants created a net gain to the federal budget of $36.7 million over five years. The same number of family migrants, by contrast, cost the budget $1.8 million. And because not all family visas were alike – migrant parents impose “a significantly higher ongoing cost” than spouses and partners, for instance – he had changed the character of family migration by capping parent visas at 500 places per year. With 20,000 applications pending, he cheerfully revealed, the waiting time to bring aged parents to Australia was roughly forty years.

For many in the audience – Australians of migrant backgrounds who were keen to find ways of bringing older relatives to join them here – that last piece of information wasn’t at all cheering. But it wasn’t news. Ruddock’s capping of parent visa numbers was one salvo in a war of attrition with the Senate. In 1998, the Coalition had attempted to manage the growing demand for parent migration by introducing a contributory parent visa, which would have allowed sponsors to bring their parents to Australia as permanent migrants as long as they were willing to stump up $17,000 – a revenue-raising measure designed to offset some of the costs these migrants might impose on the community as they aged. Labor and the Senate crossbenches initially disallowed the new visa on the basis that it amounted to “queue jumping”: the rich would have the capacity to bring their parents swiftly to Australia; the poor would wait forever. Ruddock returned fire by imposing his 500-place cap.

In Knox that night, I saw how this blunt instrument had swung many migrant families to his side. Given the choice between an indefinite and uncertain wait for an affordable parent visa and a relatively short wait for an expensive one, they would choose the latter. I recall passionate pleas from participants at the consultation, promising to take full responsibility for their parents living expenses, to provide for their housing and to guarantee their healthcare costs, if only the minister would allow them to bring parents to Australia quickly. The government had to understand how crucial it was in their culture to honour and care for your parents in their elder years, and how essential it was for grandchildren to know their grandparents and hear their stories. If required, migrant families of all backgrounds were willing to pay large sums to get their parents to Australia.

Ruddock’s tactics were ultimately successful. When the Senate relented in 2003, the contributory visa immediately became the main mechanism used by families to bring parents to Australia. In 2003–04 the cap on parent visas was raised from 500 to 5000 places, but around 70 per cent of visas were in the new contributory category. In recent years 80 to 85 per cent of parent places have been set aside for contributory visas. (In 2015–16, this translated into 7175 out of 8675 parent places.) If the Coalition government had got its way, the non-contributory parent visa would have disappeared altogether. It tried to abolish the category in 2014, but was again stymied by the Senate.

Predictably, the cost of the contributory visa has also increased sharply over time, from $26,200 when it was introduced in 2003 to $47,295 today (and this doesn’t include the cost of migration advice or outlays for such things as medical checks and police reports). Despite the high charges, the federal government has no trouble filling its annual quota, and there are almost 30,000 applications in the pipeline. Applications are usually finalised within two years of being lodged, although as the right-hand graph in this chart from the Productivity Commission shows, processing times have been lengthening.

In the parental queue: places and waiting times

Source: Productivity Commission, Migrant Intake into Australia, figure 13.3.

As the graph shows, however, the waiting time for a non-contributory visa (which carries a base visa application charge of $3870) is much longer; currently it is a ludicrous thirty years, so only relatively young parents would have much hope of living to see their visa issued. Despite the wait, there is nevertheless a backlog of more than 50,000 applications. Clearly there is huge pent-up demand for parent migration, especially when you consider that applicants for the two parent visas must also satisfy the balance-of-family test: at least half the parents’ children must be living permanently in Australia, or they must have more children living permanently in Australia than in any other country. Tens of thousands of potential parent migrants no doubt fail to meet these criteria.

This unsatisfied desire to bring parents to Australia has fuelled what might seem like a paradoxical campaign for a new, temporary visa category for families that don’t meet the balance-of-family test, or can’t afford the expensive option of permanent migration under a contributory visa and don’t want to suffer the indefinite wait for a non-contributory visa.

It’s important to be aware that migrant families are already bringing parents to Australia on temporary visas. For now, however, their options are limited to a maximum twelve-month stay on a subclass 600 tourist visa. When that visa expires, the foreign parent must leave Australia and remain outside the country for at least six months before applying for another visa.

Frustration with this arrangement coalesced into a concerted campaign for a temporary “long-stay visa for parents.” Adelaide bus driver Arvind Duggal, who was instrumental in getting this campaign off the ground, told SBS that the visa restrictions prevented him from fulfilling his responsibilities as a son and that he was tired of answering his children’s repeated questions about why grandma was leaving again. Duggal’s appeal struck a chord: two years ago he started an online petition to immigration minister Peter Dutton that has now attracted almost 30,000 signatures. Migrant communities saw an opportunity in the lead-up to the 2016 election. They lobbied Labor and the Coalition on the issue, including in marginal electorates, and both parties responded with apparently hasty campaign promises that passed largely under the radar of the media. Labor pledged a temporary visa that would allow parents to remain in Australia for three years and would only require them to leave for four weeks before qualifying for a renewal. A few days later, the Coalition upped the bidding, promising a five-year parent visa.

The final factor in the mix that may have influenced the government’s thinking on a temporary parent visa was the Productivity Commission’s report into Australia’s migration intake. The report suggested a new “provisional visa” that “would permit parents to stay for a longer period of (say) five years” and could, “after a given period of absence from Australia, be renewed multiple times.” While the commission’s report was not made public until well after the election, it had been presented to government in April 2016, about a month before the campaign kicked off. So the idea of a new temporary parent visa may well have been knocking around already in the heads of immigration department officials and ministerial advisers.

Returned to office, the Turnbull government moved relatively quickly to make good on its election commitment. On 23 September, assistant immigration minister Alex Hawke announced a series of community consultations on the design of the new visa. The immigration department also published a discussion paper and called for public submissions to be lodged by 31 October.

Supporters of Arvind Duggal’s push for a long-stay parent visa were elated. “My heart is in celebration by the chance of having my mum close to me for longer than six months sporadically,” wrote Viviana Aroujo on the campaign’s Facebook page. “I cannot express how happy I am for reading this media release… having my mum for at least three years near her only grandchild is a dream… Gosh, I am in tears!!!!!!!”

The Productivity Commission looked at the issue with much drier eyes. Its support for a temporary parent visa was motivated less by any emotional and physical well-being that results from bringing families together than by the huge future costs of the system of permanent parent visas, whether contributory or non-contributory.

The commission’s argument goes like this. Compared to other immigrants, parent migrants are likely to have weaker English-language capabilities, fewer skills, lower personal incomes and lower volunteering rates, thus reducing their chances of forming “deep and broad community connections.” True, “immigrant parents can make valuable social contributions to their families,” but these “mainly benefit the family members themselves.” Even when unpaid childcare is provided, for example, this essentially amounts to a private benefit – in the form of family savings on childcare costs – rather than a public good. Indeed,the “need for childcare is greatest for infants, and so often not enduring,” whereas “the responsibilities of taxpayers for supporting the parent visa stream apply throughout the rest of their lives.”

The long-term costs of supporting parent migrants were the commission’s main concern – and according to its calculations, those costs are considerable. It estimated the “cumulative lifetime fiscal costs” of a migrant parent on a permanent visa in 2015 to be “between around $335,000 and $410,000 per person (with the ‘best’ estimate being just over $370,000).” As the report concluded, “the current contributory visa charge of $47,295 meets only a small fraction of the fiscal costs for the 7175 contributory parent visa holders in 2015” (while the 1500 non-contributory parent migrants make an even less significant contribution).

The commission calculated that the net liability for providing assistance to the 8675 parent visa holders who arrived in 2015 was, over their lifetimes, “around $2.9 billion.” Even if there were no increase in the number of parent visas issued each year, it estimated, the costs to the Australian community of permanent parental migration would still be between $68 billion and $85 billion from now to 2050. (The commission noted in passing that this cost might rise even further due to “the effect of decreased mortality rates for successive cohorts” – in other words, if migrant parents inconveniently start living longer.)

In short, the commission thinks permanent parent visas are a thoroughly bad idea. To reduce the future burden of supporting more old migrants, it suggested the government dramatically increase the application charge for the contributory parent visa – “by roughly double in the first instance” – and simultaneously cut the annual intake. It suggested scrapping the non-contributory visa altogether, and instead introducing a strictly limited “compassionate parent visa.” This visa would only be available in a few compelling circumstances – if both parents of Australian citizen children were killed in a car crash, for instance, and the foreign grandparents were the most appropriate alternative carers.

Alone, such recommendations were not going to be politically palatable; they would enrage migrant communities lobbying to bring their parents to Australia. But the commission also sought to resolve the “tension between… the significant fiscal costs of this visa category and the desire to allow some parent and child reunion” by proposing a temporary but “longer-term” visa class, periodically renewable, which would allow parents to stay for longer than the maximum twelve months permitted under a visitor visa.

That’s the outline of the new visa now under discussion. In theory, it enables the government to reconcile the competing pressures identified by the Productivity Commission: the growing demand by migrant communities to bring parents to Australia, versus the associated public costs. As the discussion paper on the proposed visa puts it:

The Australian Government believes that parents should have the opportunity to visit children and grandchildren who live in Australia as long as parents and their sponsors can satisfy community expectations and that their stay in Australia does not have an undue cost impact on the Australian community.

This will be achieved by attempting to privatise all the costs of parent migrants under the guiding principle of “user pays.” In other words, temporary migrant parents will be required to have private health insurance and cover all their own medical bills, housing costs and living expenses. Sponsors – their Australian children – will be responsible “for ensuring that their parent does not become a burden on the Australian community.”

Sponsors’ capacity to meet this responsibility will be subject to threshold tests: an income assessment to show that they can support their parents, and a minimum number of years “living in and contributing to Australia” to ensure that they “have had sufficient time to become engaged with the Australian community and to contribute to Australia financially.” The longer a sponsor has been resident in Australia, the higher his or her priority for getting a visa for a parent living overseas. Sponsors will also be required to post a “significant” financial bond (immigration minister Peter Dutton has suggested between $5000 and $15,000), which government can use to recoup some costs in cases “where sponsorship obligations have not been honoured.”

But while drawing a boundary between temporary and permanent migration might appear bureaucratically neat, it won’t resolve all potential problems. As some of the questions posed in the immigration department’s discussion paper make apparent, things could get messy:

What (if any) limits should be placed on the total liability of sponsors where their parent incurs significant health or aged care costs not covered by their private health insurance?

In the event that the holder of a parent visa is unable to depart Australia due to illness or accident:

• what responsibility should be borne by the sponsor and their immediate family, and
• to what (if any) extent would it be reasonable for these costs to be borne by the Australian community?

If a sponsor dies:

• in what circumstances, and what timeframe, should their parent be required to leave Australia
• what liability should remain with their immediate family, and
• in what circumstances should their immediate family be able to take over the sponsorship to enable the parent to remain in Australia?

It’s not hard to imagine difficult scenarios:

• A son-in-law sponsors his wife’s widowed mother to Australia but a few years later the marriage ends. The estranged husband withdraws his sponsorship and demands his bond back and the wife can’t step in because she has no independent income. The mother’s visa will be withdrawn, yet the distressed wife is in a vulnerable psychological condition, possibly suicidal, and she and her children need the support of her temporary migrant mother more than ever.

• After living in Australia for more than ten years on a temporary visa, an elderly parent develops Alzheimer’s. He claims he is being subject to elder abuse by his sponsor child. The relationship deteriorates to the point where the child withdraws sponsorship so the parent must leave Australia. But there is no one in the homeland to care for him. Does the father get sent back anyway? If not, who intervenes and who pays for the parent’s high-needs care?

These are not far-fetched possibilities. Human lives are messy and complicated and tend to explode administrative systems and rules, no matter how detailed and thoughtful. Cases like this will end up in the media and as lengthy, resource-intensive and tortuous appeals to immigration ministers to use their discretionary powers. The more people who use the visa, the more unforeseen circumstances and unintended consequences are likely to emerge. Such problems may be many years down the track, and so will land in the laps of future governments, but that’s no reason not to take them seriously today.

At this stage, though, the immigration department appears unable to offer even such basic information as an estimate of the expected demand for a new visa. We know from the length of the existing queues that there are at least 80,000 potential applicants, but the numbers are likely to be significantly higher once we factor in people who are put off by the current cost or the length of the wait, or who fail to meet the balance-of-family test. The discussion paper makes no mention of the potential number of future temporary migrant parents, and when I asked the department for data on how many people currently use work-arounds like the twelve-month subclass 600 tourist visa, I was told that the information was not “readily available.”

For those of us old enough to remember the non-alcoholic beverage Claytons – “the drink you have when you’re not having a drink” – the new temporary parent visa seems a lot like Claytons immigration. We allow people to live in Australia long-term – for five, ten, perhaps even fifteen or twenty years – but we never permit them to become Australian because of the costs they might impose on us. The requirement to leave for a month or two every five years is just a fig leaf to enable the deception: it means government can call migration temporary even when it is essentially permanent settlement, as with New Zealanders on special category visas, or refugees on temporary protection visas. The government can maintain the pretence that parents are just visiting, when in reality they are making their homes here.

The question of parent migration is undoubtedly difficult. All of us can understand the strong desire to keep fathers and mothers close by as they age, to have grandparents pass on cultural and familial knowledge to Australian-born kids, and to express our love for our parents in tangible, practical, intimate ways. Yet the Productivity Commission’s dry-eyed data is also compelling. As the commission argues, public funds spent supporting ageing migrant parents are funds that will be diverted from other areas of social policy. “Ultimately, every dollar spent on one social program must require either additional taxes (reduced private consumption) or forgone government expenditure in other areas … such as mental health, homelessness or, in the context of immigration, the support of immigrants through the Humanitarian Programme.”

A temporary parent visa might seem to offer a way out of this dilemma, but it risks creating a new cohort of people who are not quite Australian – who live in the nation for an extended period but have no say in the decisions that are made, no representation and no access to public support in times of need, and have restricted rights. To exclude long-term Australian residents from full membership of the political community in this way is inequitable and undemocratic, and age should make no difference to those fundamental principles. •

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Social impact bonds, or social benefit bonds as they are called in New South Wales, are generating enough excitement to make Malcolm Turnbull proud. Not only that, they fit right into his innovation agenda, holding out the promise of a new way to tackle some of our most intractable social problems. They also tap into a growing market for investments aimed at doing good as well as earning a return.

The idea is to harness the resources of private investors to fund social programs at a time when governments feel increasingly constrained. The investors get a return only if the programs are successful, meaning some of the risk is transferred from taxpayers to private individuals and payments are based on outcomes rather than what the program happens to cost.

Pioneered in Britain six years ago, social impact bonds have spread rapidly, with sixty launched in fifteen countries. In Australia, Barry O’Farrell’s Coalition government in New South Wales was the first to announce a trial of the bonds in 2011, when Mike Baird, as treasurer, acted on a report commissioned by the former Labor government. Now Baird’s government is running two bonds aimed at reducing the rate of foster and institutional care for children. In July, it announced a third designed to reduce reoffending rates among ex-prisoners.

Baird wants to introduce two new social impact investments each year. He has outlined three priority areas: increasing access to early childhood education, encouraging more permanent foster care (including through adoptions), and using a new Aboriginal Centre for Excellence to help Indigenous children in western Sydney make the post-school transition. And as a sign of how far it is prepared to go down this path, the government is exploring four other areas – homelessness among veterans, waste management, the road toll and domestic violence. The new projects won’t all necessarily involve bonds: the government is also looking at potentially less complex alternatives such as government or private grants paid on the basis of outcomes.

Labor governments may not be quite as gung-ho about the idea, but Victoria, Queensland and South Australia have all announced pilot programs, or have plans to do so, in areas including drug and alcohol treatment programs, homelessness, prisoner reoffending and out-of-home care for Indigenous children.

As a concept, social impact bonds require a leap of thinking. Since governments took over providing mainstream social services from churches and charities during the first half of the twentieth century, it’s been assumed that the best way to ensure people are not left behind is to maintain nationwide programs funded by taxpayers.

Beyond routine social security payments, though, governments have a generally poor record in delivering services. Take, for example, shortcomings in child fostering and adoption, prisoner rehabilitation, and dealing with homelessness and long-term unemployment. There are arguments for trying something different.

At the same time, governments, particularly conservative ones, are looking to spend less in these and other welfare areas. As social services minister, Morrison was unequivocal about what he saw as the trend. Governments, he said, would get smaller in proportion to the size of the social challenges of the future:

But the non-government sector, the community, the private sector, will have to get bigger when it comes to addressing these challenges. This must extend to… private capital investment in addressing social needs – not charity… What I am basically saying is that welfare must become a good deal for investors – for private investors. We have to make it a good deal – for the returns to be there, to attract the level of capital that will be necessary in addition to the significant injection of capital and resources that is already provided by the states and the Commonwealth.

In the same speech, he said he was “very keen” to explore social impact bonds because “they have great potential for helping improve people’s lives while increasing public sector accountability.” When I submitted questions about the government’s plans to Morrison’s successor in the portfolio, Christian Porter, a spokesperson told me that the Coalition is exploring ways to develop a social impact investment market in Australia. “The government is open to looking at where social impact bonds might be a good fit in delivering outcomes for Australian communities,” she added.

Federal Labor is on board, too, at least in principle. “I am really interested in how to encourage and support the not-for-profit sector as they try to think of new ways of doing things,” shadow families and social services minister Jenny Macklin told me. “The good thing about social impact bonds is that people are trying out a new idea. At the moment I think there is still a lot of work to be done to see whether or not they will be effective. We need proper evaluation and a strong evidence base.”

In a speech last year, Porter also sounded a note of caution. Referring to various initiatives to increase housing affordability, including the South Australian trials of social impact bonds directed at homelessness, he observed that success had been “mixed” and “few projects have been able to scale up to the level of supply needed to make a real difference…”

Last year’s McClure report on welfare reform recommended expanding outcomes-based social investment models, including social impact bonds, or SIBs:

To date, evaluations of SIBs trialled overseas and in Australia have been promising. The vested interests of the parties in ensuring success has led to innovation and performance. A key benefit of SIBs is the opportunity they provide to “test and try” a multitude of different approaches. Where these solutions prove effective they could be scaled on a larger level.

This year’s federal budget included $96 million for a Try, Test and Learn Fund, which will invite bids from inside and outside government for innovative solutions to the problem of long-term welfare dependency among working-age people. Under its “investment” approach to social security, based on the New Zealand model, the government has commissioned an actuarial analysis, similar to that used by the insurance industry, to identify groups of people at risk of long-term dependency. As a result, young carers, young parents and young students will be the initial priorities for funding. The idea is to focus on policies or programs that, through prevention or early intervention, make a return on their investment – that is, that they save more money than they cost.

The first social benefit bond in Australia, launched in New South Wales in 2013, was Newpin (the new parent and infant network), which aims to help fostered children aged five years or younger return home and also to prevent the removal of those at risk of entering out-of-home care. Families go to Newpin centres, where staff help them work through problems such as the legacy of abuse they experienced as children, drug or alcohol addiction, and domestic violence. Caseworkers, typically trained in social work and early childhood development, and sometimes in psychology, focus on building respectful relationships with participants, in turn helping them to build better relationships with their children. Families are expected to attend two to four times a week for an eighteen-month period.

The program is run by Uniting, the services and advocacy arm of the Uniting Church in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, and is partly funded by $7 million raised from fifty-nine investors, including wealthy individuals, family foundations, superannuation funds and Uniting itself. Payments to investors are based on the number of children successfully restored to the care of their families for at least a year.

According to the NSW government, “the bond targets a financial return of 10–12 per cent per annum for investors over its seven-year term.” In the first year, on the basis of a “restoration” rate of 60 per cent, the return was 7.5 per cent. In the second year, the return rose to 8.9 per cent and in the third year to 12.2 per cent, with a restoration rate of 65.2 per cent. This compares with a base restoration rate of 25 per cent, which the NSW Department of Family and Community Services considers to be the business-as-usual level. The maximum annual return is 15 per cent if a restoration rate of 70 per cent or better is achieved.

These are handsome returns that would be envied by most commercial investors in the current financial environment. Newpin investors do face risks: if the restoration rate falls below 55 per cent, they can lose up to half their funds. But they also have protections. Investors are assured of a minimum 5 per cent return, regardless of the restoration rate. And the proportion of restorations that fail because children are returned to out-of-home care within twelve months is assumed to be a maximum of 10 per cent, although the actual figure to date is 12 per cent.

The pilot: Britain’s then justice secretary Kenneth Clarke talks to prisoners at Peterborough Jail at the launch of the first social impact bonds scheme in September 2010. Chris Radburn/PA Wire

The families chosen for the programs are those considered most likely to benefit. “If the state child protection service thought there was definitely no chance of reunification, they would not refer to us,” says Liz Sanders, the head of Newpin. As a government official confirmed, “the aim is to identify people for whom the service can make the most impact and achieve the best outcomes.” This means that most of the 43,399 children in out-of-home care in Australia in mid 2015 – a 15 per cent increase over four years – are unlikely to be reunited with their families, even where this might be the best outcome. That figure includes 16,843 in New South Wales, which is disproportionally high in terms of share of population.

Compared to the scale of the problem, the numbers helped by Newpin have been small: after three years it had returned 148 children to their families, with eighteen going back to out-of-home care within twelve months, making a net restoration of 130 children. Another forty-seven were prevented from going into care. But sixty-six children left the program.

Nor does this kind of intensive social work come cheap. Contrary to the impression created by the Baird government, the $7 million provided by investors covers less than 20 per cent of the estimated $41 million the program costs over seven years. Another $9 million is allocated to the expected return to investors, the expected performance payment to Uniting, and a set payment to Social Ventures Australia – $50,000 in the first year, rising by 3 per cent in subsequent years – for managing the bond. To help meet Uniting’s commitments, the NSW government helps with an estimated cash flow of $50 million, which is supposed to be more than covered by the savings to the government ultimately generated by reduced out-of-home placements.

KPMG modelling for NSW Treasury before the launch of Newpin suggested that the program could save the state about $80 million by 2030. In 2014, the NSW government was reported to be planning to retain half these savings and use the other half to pay Uniting and bond investors.

But the government is not prepared to endorse this figure or commit to a current one. When I pressed the office of the NSW treasurer, Gladys Berejiklian, for current estimates of savings, the best government officials could offer was that further data was needed before a full analysis of gross and net savings was conducted.

Also aiming to reunite families, though structured differently from Newpin, is the second NSW program, Resilient Families, run by the Benevolent Society. Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank raised $10 million from investors for a five-year program to which the Department of Family and Community Services refers families with at least one child under six (including unborn children) assessed as being at risk of significant harm.

Under the program, caseworkers aim to visit families in their homes at least twice a week during an initial period of intensive support that also includes a twenty-four-hour call line. Families receive help dealing with substance abuse, domestic violence and other problems, and staff act as advocates on issues such as inadequate housing and welfare benefits.

“The funding has a lot of flexibility and we also can adapt very quickly,” says Claudia Lennon, the program’s manager. She cites as an example “Baby Ray,” an infant simulator doll used to help teach expectant parents how to care for a child. Imported from the United States, the doll is programmed to cry in certain circumstances – when its nappy hasn’t been changed, for instance – and to collect data on routines such as feeding, burping and nappy changes, as well as whether it has been shaken or had its head bumped. “It is a fabulous practical learning tool for parents expecting their first baby,” says Lennon. “It brings up things that parents would not have thought about, such as babies crying and not stopping.”

Two groups have invested in Benevolent Society bonds: a capital-protected class, which provided $7.5 million and receives a maximum return of 10 per cent a year; and a capital-exposed class, which put in the remaining $2.5 million and risks losing its money, but can achieve annual returns as high as 30 per cent. The minimum investment is $50,000. For each of the first two years, the return to the investor classes was 5 per cent and 8 per cent respectively in each year.

The NSW government provided $5.75 million up front to help establish the program and reduce the risk to investors. Assuming the scheme’s continued success, that amount will be deducted from the government’s payments at the end of the five-year bond. Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank did not charge for their services as financial intermediaries.

As with Newpin, payments are based on outcomes, but in this case there are three different measures rather than one. Two of them – the number of safety and risk assessments conducted on participating families, and the number of reports to helplines – showed a deterioration in each of the two years, which the Benevolent Society attributes at least in part to the “increased visibility” of family interactions under the program.

Despite this, Resilient Families was still able to report positive outcomes because two-thirds of the weighting is given to a reduction in children going into out-of-home care. The latest investor report puts this reduction at 27 per cent in 2014–15. What it doesn’t make clear is that the 27 per cent represents three children – a fall from eighteen to fifteen.

These figures drive home the point that social benefit bonds are not only in their early stages but are also operating on a very small scale. The NSW government is still developing principles to guide exactly how risk will be shared between government and investors and to determine actual, as opposed to assumed, benchmark costs – that is, what it currently costs the government to deliver services.

Innovation is one of the political selling points of social impact bonds. New South Wales is now leading the nation “in the innovative area of social impact investment,” Berejiklian declared in August last year.

But while the method of financing the program may be new, at least in the case of Newpin, the program’s approach is not. It originated in Britain as long ago as the early 1980s and was run by non-government organisations and funded by local government, which traditionally delivers social services in Britain. It was an expensive program, though, and fell victim to funding cuts.

Sanders, Newpin’s head in Australia, worked on the program in Britain before Uniting recruited her in 2005 to run it here. “Governments have been trying to find short-term solutions to these problems, so they love ten-week parenting programs,” she says. “That works for some families but it doesn’t work for the families we see because of entrenched intergenerational issues that need to be addressed.” These often include abuse suffered by parents when they were children, and recent or current drug and alcohol addiction. It was when Uniting was looking to expand the program from four to ten centres that it successfully tendered for one of the first two social benefit bonds in NSW.

Underlying that history is the potential conflict between innovation and the need to draw on a solid base of evidence. As government officers told KPMG during an evaluation of the trials, “if there is good data and a solid evidence base then it is likely that there are already effective programs in an area and there may be little in the way of service innovation.” Investors are also more likely to be attracted to a proven program.

Nevertheless, those involved in Newpin and Resilient Families praise their flexibility compared to sometimes lumbering bureaucracies with hard-and-fast rules. Parents who leave Resilient Families can rejoin the scheme, for instance, without needing to go through another government referral process. But there is no inherent reason why this should not be the case for any program delivered by non-government organisations, whether or not it’s funded by outside investors.

Supporters are keen to scale up the programs, confident that there is sufficient investor appetite to fund expansion. But they agree that the inhibiting factor is a shortage of personnel and other resources. This is not just a government funding issue: social workers and others in the field are mostly poorly paid, meaning that non-government organisations have trouble recruiting them.

It’s also the case that creating the bonds has been complex and extraordinarily time-consuming. KPMG calculated that the average number of staff hours spent on planning and developing each of the two NSW bonds was 11,712. It’s true that this was the first time the bonds had been introduced in Australia, and further experience is likely to reduce this figure. You’d certainly hope so.

Adding to the complexity is the involvement of a third party – namely, investors – and financial intermediaries. A 2011 report by the University of NSW Centre for Social Impact, headed at the time by former prime minister’s department head Peter Shergold, argued that social investors wanted a simple structure for the bonds and recommended against the use of a financial intermediary for a NSW pilot. But officials now say that this kind of financial expertise has been essential in establishing the structure.

As a result of these and other factors, some proposed schemes – here and overseas – have failed to make it beyond the conceptual stage. Back in 2012, the NSW government announced plans for three bonds: the third, designed to reduce prisoner reoffending rates and to be run by Mission Australia, didn’t proceed. Mission Australia is coy about the reasons. According to the government’s Office of Social Impact Investment, the decision not to go ahead was based on risks and challenges that included “performance targets, funding required, reputational risks to the parties involved, investor profile and legal,” as well as ongoing changes in prison policy and administration.

Negotiations for New Zealand’s first social impact bond, to help people with mental illness find employment, collapsed in July this year after a year of talks and $1.6 million in government spending on four proposals. The reported reason was that investors were unable to obtain guarantees about the security of their investment.

And sometimes the bond is issued, and fails. In the United States, a bond targeted at juvenile prisoners in New York was scrapped when it failed to reduce reoffending rates. The main investor, Goldman Sachs, lost a notional US$7.2 million as a result, but the blow was cushioned by a Bloomberg Philanthropies guarantee over most of the capital, resulting in its paying Goldman Sachs US$6 million.

While the savings to government from social impact bonds have the potential to significantly outweigh the costs of investor returns, administrative complexity and failed programs, the evidence to date is unclear. For each child who avoids going into out-of-home care, the NSW government saves between $30,000 and $45,000 a year, according to one official calculation. And that amount doesn’t include the indirect costs of potential future welfare benefits, health costs and crime. But the calculations are difficult to make: restoring a child to a family doesn’t guarantee he or she will have better life outcomes.

The jury is still out: the OECD’s Antonella Noya. Agence Française de Développement

Overseas experience suggests that savings are not always as large as anticipated. The UK National Audit Office reported in 2015 that a £3 billion Work Programme contract cost just 2 per cent less than would otherwise be expected. While that program isn’t financed through a social impact bond, it operates on the same principle: the government contracts with service providers to pay on the basis of the results achieved in finding work for long-term unemployed or those in danger of entering their ranks.

An OECD working paper warns of the risk of manipulating programs focused on outcomes. “It may be possible to game the results by selecting clients that are easiest to reach,” it says, “…while leaving those that would be most expensive without service.” Indeed, this was the experience in Australia with the Job Network, created when the Howard government privatised the Commonwealth Employment Service.

As a result, some in the welfare sector are wary of social impact bonds. As one policy adviser put it to me, an organisation committed to assisting the most disadvantaged, though not necessarily in the cheapest way, could be driven out by operators who promise quick, cheap results. “In the early days of the Job Network people made a lot of money, both for-profits and not-for-profits,” says this adviser. “They funded huge expansions in their charitable services by creaming funds from the Job Network. Then the government got wise and cut back. Who lost out? It was the unemployed.” In this race to the bottom, “it is very hard to see what the countervailing forces are, especially in a market environment where you set people up as competitors.”

Perhaps it will be different with social impact bonds. Many investors are motivated not just by the prospect of a financial return but also by a desire to improve people’s lives. But in its enthusiasm, the NSW government in particular has a political stake in the success of the bonds, creating a potential bias towards unnecessarily attractive investment returns.

In Britain, which has gone furthest down the social investment path, only philanthropists have put money into social impact bonds, according to one of their architects. That raises the question of whether the same goals can be achieved without the considerable cost and complexity involved in incorporating an investment return.

The OECD working paper, though not endorsed by the organisation as a whole, is cautiously supportive of social impact bonds but concludes that it is too early to make a definitive judgement. It argues, for example, that “few public authorities currently have the skills required to draw up complex results based contracts that are required for SIBs.” And on the other side, “few investors have detailed understanding of the types of social outcomes that are needed to address complex social challenges or of the barriers that need to be overcome to achieve better results. People who look at the world through a financial lens may think that everything can be fixed through incentive structures.”

In a second OECD working paper released this year, researchers Antonella Noya and Stellina Galitopoulou are also cautious:

SIBs have been costly instruments so far. They have entailed significant transaction costs that stakeholders should consider before embarking on them. Policy makers should evaluate carefully what is the value added for implementing a SIB for a policy intervention compared to a more traditional approach. However, transaction costs are expected to drop as more SIBs develop and there is a streamlined process for establishing them… Overall, while SIBs have achieved interesting results in some policy areas and triggered debates that can help reflect on how social services are being financed and delivered, additional knowledge and sound evidence need to be generated in order to reduce controversies around SIBs. The jury is still out.

The world’s first bond, designed to reduce reoffending rates among prisoners on short-term sentences at Peterborough Jail in Britain, operated for two years before the British government replaced it with a national rehabilitation scheme. While still based on payment by results, the new scheme will be implemented through a direct contract with the government.

This is despite the fact that the bond was judged by the government to have been a success, achieving an 11 per cent reduction in reoffending rates at a time when the national figure went up by 10 per cent. As with the Benevolent Society’s bond, the actual numbers don’t look as impressive: a reduction from 159 reconviction events for every 100 people released from prison to 141 – that is, from slightly more than one-and-a-half new offences per person to slightly less. Participation in the program was voluntary, presumably making it more likely to succeed, while the new program will be compulsory.

Victorian green bonds, issued by the state government in July at a coupon rate of 1.75 per cent, are an example of a less complex way of attracting private investment without a financial intermediary. Seventeen investors, including insurance and funds-management companies, contributed $300 million in a little over a day to finance LED traffic lights, mini-hydroelectric power stations, low-carbon buildings, a large-scale renewable energy power station and other projects.

All of this means that the question of whether social impact bonds can change the world, as Mike Baird believes, is still very much open. They may have a role in testing new approaches, but until there is much clearer evidence of net savings to taxpayers, it would be a courageous government that used them to run large programs. •

This article was jointly funded by Inside Story and Australian Policy Online.

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This week, the airwaves were dominated by Hitting Home, Sarah Ferguson’s two-part documentary for the ABC, which was followed by a Q&A special on domestic violence. The broadcast coincided with White Ribbon Day on 25 November, and politicians fronted up to take the opportunity to say the right thing at the right moment. Sarah Ferguson’s growing reputation as a leading current affairs journalist is part of the media story surrounding her program. Hitting Home follows the extraordinary critical success and political impact of The Killing Season, shown on ABC in June this year, and her appointment as Kerry O’Brien’s replacement on Four Corners was announced this week.

Hitting Home is in many ways state-of-the-art documentary-making and I wouldn’t dissent from the chorus of admiration that has greeted it. I do, though, have some strong reservations about the phenomenon of the media bandwagon and the way it serves to galvanise public outrage on critical issues.

Aly’s “ISIL is weak” message was a rhetorically driven fallacy – no one with any real knowledge of its operations is saying any such thing – but it caught on as an expression of feel-good communal superiority. The moral dramaturgy of “us” and “them” has a powerful appeal in situations where there is a threat to some deeply shared tradition of cultural values. The Islamic State is not our system: it is in every sense a foreign body, and our greatest fear is that it may become the enemy within.

Domestic violence presents more complex moral challenges because it is indeed the enemy within. On the one hand, there is a need for condemnation, and for a change in cultural attitudes so that it is overtly criminalised rather than covertly tolerated. On the other, the perpetrators are not aliens or monsters, but men in our midst. The conventions of moral dramaturgy are of no help at all here.

A documentary treatment risks tapping into these conventions. In a talk given back in 1996, Dennis O’Rourke, director of such landmark Australian documentaries as Cunnamulla and The Good Woman of Bangkok, described how he set out to disturb the moral orientations of his audiences in a bid to “resist and repudiate the lure of self-gratification which comes from making earnest statements to the converted.” The investigative documentary has a tendency, he said, to make the viewer feel part of an enlightened elite. “And it follows that those who watch-to-feel-good will identify with their omniscient heroes – the film-makers, who thus become heroic protagonists in their own films.”

Ferguson is in no way catering to such tendencies, and her presence in the scenes of Hitting Home serves to ground it as an exploration of human experience rather than an exercise in moral judgement. Nevertheless, she is now invested with a high level of authority as a crusader penetrating the moral fog of our political culture. Like Waleed Aly, she has a kind of cult status as a media figure, and although she shows no signs of wanting to exploit it, the status of Hitting Home as a television event is due more to her involvement than to its subject matter, critically important as that may be.

Call Me Dad, a second documentary on domestic violence aired on the ABC this week, acquired underdog status, with little promotion and, so far, a rather low-profile critical reception. It deserves more attention. The project of independent film-maker Sophie Wiesner, it was funded with public contributions through the Documentary Australia Foundation. Its budget and production values don’t bear comparison with those of Hitting Home, whose production team is headed by Nial Fulton and Ivan O’Mahoney of In Films. Their track record includes work for HBO, CNN, Discovery, Channel 4 and the BBC.

This asymmetry in the status of the two programs is unfortunate. Hitting Home focuses primarily on victim impact and police procedure. “Why do men do it?” Ferguson asks, but the question remains unanswered. It is in Call Me Dad that we get to see the other side of the picture: the men who are struggling to manage their own violent impulses. Taken together, the two documentaries deal with grim realities while providing an encouraging picture of just how effective some of the best response programs are. They also reflect upon each other in ways that expose a troubling rift in perspective.

In Hitting Home we see specialist police officers, counsellors and doctors issuing the same warning to women living with violent male partners: they cannot afford to continue under the illusion that “he’ll change.” Some of these women express a sense of shame that this hope kept them in a situation so damaging to their children. The advice from the professionals seems to be unanimous – there is only one way with a domestic violence situation, and that is out.

Call Me Dad follows a group of men engaged in a sixteen-week program designed to help them achieve behavioural change. While it remains to be seen how this will work out in the long term, several of them were evidently experiencing a real process of transformation. At the end of the film, the wife of one of the participants faces the camera. She has been interviewed several times before, stressed and tearful, telling of her ordeals. Now she is composed, confident. “They say a leopard never changes its spots,” she says. “I don’t believe that. I don’t think anyone should ever write off anyone. Ever.”

Given the limited appeal of investigative documentary to television audiences, producers are usually keen to accentuate the more sensational aspects of a topic, promising to show the viewer scenes of danger, hidden worlds, locations that are normally off limits. There’s the crusading element that O’Rourke fulminates against: something will be exposed to view; people will be brought to account.

In Hitting Home, Ferguson takes us inside a women’s refuge, rides with police responding to emergency calls, eavesdrops on a men’s therapy session in prison, and films from inside the victim’s safe room at a local court. There are close-ups of serious injuries and recordings of emergency calls from victims under attack. The stories are harrowing and confronting in their detail.

But it is the less sensational aspects of the picture that capture and hold the attention. Rather than just focusing on the horrors, Ferguson seeks out the professionals who have developed a range of life-saving response programs. We watch Genelle Warne, domestic violence liaison officer with Blacktown Police, as she assembles the documents from some forty cases to present at the weekly court hearings, and later as she and an assistant respond to a new call. The victim is taken immediately to Blacktown hospital, where a forensic doctor records the injuries.

The dialogue in these situations is calm and practical. “They’ll ask you specific questions. Just answer those questions. Take your time… Today is your day to take control back.” At the refuge several members of staff are shown working the phones as they try to organise an emergency admission. “She’s so scared she just left the house,” one reports. “He tried to run her over with the car.” “All right,” says the case manager, matter-of-factly. “Is she safe? Where is she now?” Where crisis is core business and people are escaping from chaos, this refusal to be stirred by alarm helps to create a centre of gravity.

In the refuge, women who have fled a private hell go about the daily routines of life, and Ferguson simply joins in, loading the washing machine, making coffee, and talking to the children, with whom she seems to have an easy rapport. In one scene, she is shown carrying a toddler who is looking up at the night sky, pointing at stars. The children’s faces are blurred to conceal identities, but they are a vivid presence, always playing in the background. Play itself seems a marvellous gift after what they have been through. There’s no need for any speech to camera to make the point that the restoration of childhood is a small miracle in these circumstances; skilful editing and structure do the work of communication much more effectively.

The second part of Hitting Home starts with a visit to the South Coast Correctional Centre in Nowra, where a ten-week program for domestic violence offenders is commencing. From Ferguson’s cursory exchanges with these men, it seems clear that most of them have difficulty in acknowledging what they have done. Annie Grenfell, the program facilitator, has an uphill struggle but insists on the value of “chip, chip, chipping away.” The participants are taken through a program of “offence mapping,” documenting the events leading up to an outburst. But we don’t really get any follow through on this. How effective is it? What are the factors that led these particular men into a pattern of behaviour that is destroying their own lives as well as those of the women and children who are their victims?

This is where Call Me Dad provides a vital part of the picture. As the men assemble for their first meeting, their anger is palpable. It’s as if they see themselves as the oppressed, needing to fight back at a world that is unfair, illogical and overwhelming in its demands. One speaks directly to the camera: “Happy family? Real happy family? Doesn’t exist. It’s a fucking myth.” The bitterness of the outburst, though, expresses something these men have in common. While they are forced to recognise themselves as its destroyers, family is what they most want and need in their lives.

The discussion in the sessions, facilitated by reformed offender David Nugent, can easily go off the rails, but the volatility also produces moments of insight. Surprisingly, these are men who break easily. One of them arrives in a stressed state because his boss screamed at him “full on.” Nugent puts the obvious question: how did that make him feel? “Helpless,” says the guy, “fearful, embarrassed, lost, confused, belittled. It was a phenomenal amount of feelings. The power and control’s all in his court.”

“Sounds like the universe is giving you a taste of your own medicine,” says the man sitting next to him.

Not all domestic violence offenders would respond to such a program, or be willing to follow it. They are as various as any other category of offenders. The importance of seeing them as individuals, each with a different set of problems and formative influences, is perhaps the biggest challenge facing us as a society if we want to get beyond the moral dramaturgy and take some collective responsibility. •

The post The enemy within appeared first on Inside Story.

Porter developed his theme on Sky News. “In every single category of the very large spend in social services,” he said earlier this month, “the growth is, in any rational observation, unsustainable if it were to go on the way it’s gone on over the last ten years. In all areas, things like the disability support pension and a range of other payments – and there are many of them in the portfolio – they are growing at a rate greater than the ability of the tax base to sustain them.”

If these remarks sound familiar, it’s because they bear a strong resemblance to statements by Porter’s predecessor, Scott Morrison, who argued that “the social services budget could swamp the federal budget” and that “eight out of ten taxpayers work every day to pay our $150 billion welfare bill.” And last year Morrison’s predecessor as social services minister, Kevin Andrews, described welfare spending as “unsustainable” and “relentless.”

The disparity between spending and taxing that worries the Daily Telegraph is essentially meaningless, of course, because it compares spending in eleven years’ time with tax levels today. And, just like the argument that eight out of ten taxpayers work every day to fund the welfare system, the calculation appears to include only personal income taxes, not overall tax revenue (from where social security spending is financed).

Setting the context

To understand changes in welfare spending we need to factor in changes in the context in which welfare dollars are spent – population growth and the impact of an ageing population, for example, and changes in government policies and welfare categories.

One approach draws on the fact that in any year, by definition, the total amount of money spent on a social security program is equal to the number of people receiving the payment multiplied by the average amount of money they are paid. Using this simple arithmetic, it’s possible to look at the factors that determine the number of people receiving benefits and identify what influences the amounts they are paid. (This method has been used in Australia by Peter Saunders of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, and more recently by researchers in Ireland.)

The number of people receiving payments reflects interactions between Australia’s growing population, changes in the age composition of the population, trends in the job market and in family structure, and the impact of government decisions about who is eligible for payments, as well as changes in other parts of the welfare system. The way individuals respond to changing incentives within the welfare system also affects patterns of payment.

The average level of payments will mainly reflect government decisions about benefit levels and income tests. (It’s important to remember that Australia’s income testing of benefits means that the average level of payments will nearly always be lower than the basic rate of entitlements.)

One of the more important decisions governments make is which indexing approach they will use to ensure that payments reflect changes in community living standards. A number of major payments – the age pension, the disability support pension, or DSP, and the carer payment – are currently indexed to wages, while most other income-support payments and family payments are indexed to prices.

As long as real wages are rising, payments indexed to earnings will rise in real terms – as will the overall cost of those payments, but even if payments are indexed to prices, the overall cost will rise, assuming the population isn’t falling. In these circumstances, the only ways to avoid the payment’s overall cost rising faster than inflation is either to cut the proportion of the population receiving the payment or to cut average benefits in real terms.

We also need to look at the system as a whole, and not just its parts. This is particularly important because Australia has a categorical system of income-support payments. To be eligible for a payment an individual needs to fall into a defined group – by being over the age of sixty-five, for example, or having a disability, or caring for someone with disability, or being unemployed or sick, or studying, or caring for children. We even have a payment – the special benefit – for low-income people who don’t satisfy the criteria for any of the other categories.

For any one person, these categories are mutually exclusive. An individual can simultaneously be over the age of sixty-five and have a disability that prevents him or her from taking paid work, for example, and a lone parent can also be looking for full-time work or caring for someone with disability. But these individuals can only receive one of the categorical income-support payments, even if they are potentially eligible for more than one.

This may make it possible to “game” the system by claiming the payment with the most favourable conditions. But it also means that when government policy changes and a payment is either abolished or phased out, or eligibility conditions are tightened, individuals may be entitled to claim a different payment. This also applies to groups of people at different times: following a change of policy, a class of people who might previously have been able to claim one type of payment might be eligible for another payment.

In fact, some policy reforms are designed to move groups very quickly from one payment to another. If we only analyse one payment at a time we overlook this potential substitution and gain a very limited view of what is actually going on in the welfare system.

The final context for analysing welfare spending is historical. In my earlier assessment I used Department of Social Services, or DSS, statistical reports going back to 1991 and data collected by its predecessor departments since the 1960s. Because the population has not only grown significantly but also changed its age composition, the following charts divide the population into people aged between sixteen and sixty-four (the working-age population) and people aged sixty-five or more.

Picking the trends

Chart 1 shows trends in the percentage of people aged sixty-five and over who received income support of different forms between 1995 and 2014. As it makes clear, the proportion of older people receiving an age pension either from the DSS or the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, or DVA, has increased from around 64 per cent of the population in 1995 to close to 70 per cent in 2014. The proportion receiving a DVA service pension in combination with an income-support supplement, however, has fallen from around 19 per cent to 6 per cent, while the proportion receiving other payments – mainly the DSP, the carer payment or the special benefit – has increased from 1.7 to 2.6 per cent.

The total number of people receiving one of these payments has gone up by close to 700,000, but this is simply because the number of people over sixty-five has increased by 1.36 million. The proportion receiving one or other of these payments has fallen from around 85 to 78 per cent.

Chart 1: Trends in the percentage of the older population receiving income-support payments, Australia, 1995–2014

Source: Calculated from Department of Social Services, Income Support Customers, A Statistical Overview, various years; Department of Social Services, DSS Payment Demographic Data, June 2014; ABS, Australian Demographic Statistics, 2014.

The decline in the share of the older population receiving a service pension plus an income-support supplement largely reflects the movement of the people who were in service during the second world war into this payment between the 1970s and 1980s and then out again, through death, and the subsequent lack of any large-scale war experience.

Age pensions (either from DSS or DVA) are alternatives to service pensions. But the fact that the increase in the share receiving age pensions was only about half the size of the decline in the share receiving service pensions suggests that potential new entrants are better off than previous groups of people turning sixty-five. And, as compulsory superannuation increases retirement resources in future years, the share of older people receiving an income-tested payment is likely to decline further – although the full effect will not be seen until after 2030 when retirees will have had the opportunity to contribute over their full working lives.

Trends among people of working age differ significantly from those among people over the age of sixty-five. Chart 2 shows the proportion of people aged sixteen to sixty-four receiving income-support payments between 1995 and 2014. After a small jump in 1996 there was a long, steady decline, with a more modest rise and fall since 2008.

Chart 2: Trends in the percentage of the working-age population receiving income-support payments, Australia, 1995–2014

Note: Working age is defined as the population aged sixteen to sixty-four years. Source: Calculated from Department of Social Services, Income Support Customers, A Statistical Overview, various years; Department of Social Services, DSS Payment Demographic Data, June 2014; ABS, Australian Demographic Statistics, 2014.

The rate in the chart has been calculated to show the impact of one of the most important policy changes in social security over the past twenty years. In 1995, the Keating government began lifting the eligibility age for women to receive the age pension from sixty to sixty-five years. This was phased in between 1995 and 2013, with the number of women aged sixty to sixty-four years receiving an age pension falling from 211,000 in 1995 to zero in 2014.

In order to be consistent over time, female age pensioners between sixty and sixty-four years are included in the working-age group over the whole time period. This figure also excludes a smaller – but growing – group of people who are receiving working-age payments but who are actually over sixty-five years of age.

Chart 2 shows that at the peak in 1996, nearly 25 per cent of the working-age population was receiving basic social security payments. By 2014 the figure was 16.8 per cent, a decline of around eight percentage points, or close to a third.

While numbers on payments are available for 2015, Australian Bureau of Statistics, or ABS, data on the age composition of the population are not. But we do know that the number of working-age people on payments rose by around 1.9 per cent in the year to June 2015 and the total Australian population rose by 1.4 per cent in the year to March 2015. Given that the population under sixteen years of age has been rising at a slower rate than any other group, it seems unlikely that the rate of receipt of payments has changed to any large extent, although it is possible that it has gone up slightly.

What explains these fluctuations? The number of working-age people receiving welfare payments at any one time is strongly related to the state of the labour market. Not surprisingly, it increases significantly in periods of recession. During the last major recession, in the early 1990s, unemployment peaked at 11 per cent, but by February 2008 it had fallen to 4 per cent, the lowest level since 1974. So part of the explanation for the long-term decline is Australia’s very strong employment performance, particularly before the global financial crisis.

But other factors are at work as well, including the dynamics of different categories of payments. Changes in the number of lone parents receiving benefits partly reflect shifts in family formation, for example. People who are unemployed for lengthy periods and experience a disability may drop out of the labour market and end up on the DSP. Unemployment can lead to family breakdown and growing lone parenthood.

Policy changes are also a major cause of trends in the number of welfare recipients. In periods when benefits are more generous or easier to access, the number of recipients naturally tends to grow, while tighter or less generous conditions have the opposite impact.

Reflecting these and other factors, as was shown in Chart 2, the proportion of people receiving welfare payments peaked at nearly one in four of the working-age population in 1996, before falling to roughly one in six in 2008, just before the global financial crisis. After the GFC, the proportion of working-age people receiving benefits rose to 17.5 per cent in 2010, then started to fall again, reaching 16.7 per cent in 2014 – not quite back to the 2008 level, but the second-lowest level in the past two decades.

Chart 3 breaks down trends since 1995, showing what has happened to the share of the working-age population receiving the DSP, the share receiving unemployment-related payments, the share receiving the carer payment, and the percentage receiving any other form of working-age income support, including parents, the sick, wives, widows, partners and recipients of student assistance.

Chart 3: Trends in the percentage of the working-age population receiving selected income-support payments, Australia, 1995–2014

Note: Working age is defined as the population aged sixteen to sixty-four years. These figures are adjusted to include women aged sixty to sixty-four years on age pensions in the working-age payment population and to include people sixty-five years and over and not on age pensions in the retirement age payment population. Source: Calculated from Department of Social Services, Income Support Customers, A Statistical Overview, various years; Department of Social Services, DSS Payment Demographic Data, June 2014; ABS, Australian Demographic Statistics, 2014.

What is apparent is a fairly steady rise in the share of people on the DSP, from 3.9 per cent of the working-age population in 1995 to a peak of 5.4 per cent in 2011, falling slightly to about 5.2 per cent in 2014. The number of people of working age on this payment fell further from 790,000 in 2014 to 778,000 in 2015. Interestingly, the number of people aged sixty-five and over who receive the DSP rose from around 4000 in 1995 to nearly 40,000 in 2014, presumably because they have not lived in Australia long enough to receive an age pension, but acquired a disability after they settled here.

The long decline in the share of the working-age population receiving unemployment payments before the GFC is also apparent, with an increase in 2008–09 and a sharper increase between 2012 and 2013. The proportion of people on the carer payment rose from a negligible 0.2 per cent of the working-age population in 1995 to 1.4 per cent in 2014.

What is most striking, however, is the trend in the number receiving “other” payments, which peaked at 13.6 per cent of the population in 1996 but had fallen to 5.1 per cent by 2014. In numerical terms, the number of people receiving these benefits has fallen from 1.6 million in 1996 to 781,000 in 2014 (and further to 758,000 in 2015). The improvement in labour-market conditions between 1996 and 2008 is likely to have contributed to the decline in the share of working-age people on these other payments, but policy changes appear to be the most important factor.

What these figures show is that if we only look at the programs in which numbers have been going up – the DSP, the carer payment and, more recently, unemployment payments – then we will have a very partial view of overall trends and miss the contribution of policy changes in other parts of the system.

Looking at the system as a whole

Why has the percentage of the working-age population receiving DSP and the carer payment been rising since 1995, and the share receiving unemployment payments rising since 2008, while the share receiving other payments has declined significantly? The state of the labour market is part of the answer, and so are two other factors that have had a major impact among people of working age: the ageing of the baby boom generation and the major social security policy reforms introduced by successive Australian governments over the past two decades.

Chart 4 shows the age profile of the main social security payments for people of working age in 2014 (the most recent year for which ABS data on the age structure of the population are available), including the Newstart unemployment benefit as well as payments already mentioned. The figure excludes student payments, which primarily go to people under twenty-five, and age pensions, which go to people over sixty-five. (Around 9 per cent of people under twenty-five receive student assistance and 72 per cent of people over sixty-five receive an age pension or another DSS payment.)

Chart 4: Percentage of age group receiving income-support payments by payment type, Australia, 2014

Source: Calculated from Department of Social Services, DSS Payment Demographic Data, June 2014; ABS, Australian Demographic Statistics, 2014.

The proportion of people receiving social security benefits clearly increases with age – doubling from 10.5 per cent of those aged under twenty-five to 21 per cent of those aged fifty-five to sixty-four, although for those between these two age groups rates of receipt only range between 14 and 15 per cent.

Not all payments are higher among older age groups: employment-related payments are received by around 5 per cent of each age group, and the parenting payments peak at around 5 per cent of those aged twenty-five to thirty-four years and then decline. But in the other major categories, payment rates rise significantly with age – particularly for people receiving DSP, who make up around 2 per cent of those under thirty-five, 4 per cent of those aged thirty-five to forty-four, 7 per cent of those aged forty-five to fifty-four and close to 12 per cent of those aged fifty-five to sixty-four.The proportion of people receiving the carer payment also rises from less than 1 per cent of those aged twenty-five to thirty-four to 2.6 per cent of those aged fifty-five to sixty-four. People receiving wives, widows or partner payments are predominantly aged between fifty-five and sixty-four years.

Why? The obvious answer is that the likelihood of acquiring a disability increases with age as a result of lifestyle-related diseases and natural wear and tear, particularly for those with manual jobs. The US Social Security Administration estimates that more than 25 per cent of current twenty-year-olds will acquire a disability before the age of sixty-five. It is also obvious that the number of people who need to care for relatives with disability will rise as the structure of the population shifts.

For these reasons, the number of people receiving social security is influenced not only by changes in the population but also by changes in its demographic profile, particularly by the share of the population in the age groups over fifty years of age.

Chart 5 shows changes in the size of the population in different age groups in Australia between 1995 and 2014, separating out the changes since 2005 from those over the longer period.

Chart 5: Percentage changes in the size of the population by age group, Australia, 1995–2014

Source: Calculated from ABS, Australian Demographic Statistics, 2014.

Between 1995 and 2014 the total Australian population increased by close to 31 per cent and the population over sixteen years of age increased by just over 35 per cent. It is important to understand the implications of this: if all income-support payments were simply indexed to prices and if the share of the population over sixteen and the percentage of the population receiving benefits remained constant, then we would expect real social security spending still to have increased by 35 per cent since 1995.

Different age groups have also grown at very different rates. The number of children in the population has increased by only 14 per cent since 1995, or less than half the rate of the increase in the total Australian population, while the proportion of the population between sixteen and forty-nine has grown by around 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the proportion of the population aged sixty-five and over increased at more than twice the rate of the total population. Even more strikingly, the population aged between fifty and sixty-four – those working-age groups whose receipt of social security is highest – increased by nearly 72 per cent.

But trends in the second half of this period differ in subtle but significant ways. The total Australian population increased at about the same rate as in the whole period, but the share of children rose at a faster rate. The rate of increase in the population aged fifty to sixty-four years fell by close to 70 per cent, but the number of people aged sixty-five years and over grew marginally faster in the second period than it did over the whole period.

These trends reflect divergent demographic movements, primarily the ageing of the baby boom generation and to a lesser extent the increase in total fertility rates after 2000. Baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1964 and started to turn fifty in 1996 and sixty-five in 2011. The ageing of this generation initially increased the percentage of the population in the age groups likely to receive DSP and the carer payment, and more recently has boosted numbers in the age range potentially entitled to the age pension. Up until 1996, as demographer Natalie Jackson has shown, changes in the age structure of the Australian population acted to slow the growth of the DSP. But when people born in 1946 started to turn fifty in 1996, that slowdown was reversed.

The effect of the ageing of the baby boom generation is illustrated in Chart 6, which shows the change in the number of people by years of age between 1996 and 2014 (after taking account of deaths and migration). The largest population increase is among fifty- to sixty-seven-year-olds, with each year group being around 100,000 larger than the comparable group in 1996. Cumulatively, there were 1.9 million more people aged fifty to sixty-four – the age at which rates of receipt of the DSP start to rise significantly – in 2014 than in 1996.

Chart 6: Change in number of people sixteen and over by age, Australia, 1996–2014

Source: Calculated from ABS,Australian Demographic Statistics, 2014.

Between 1996 and 2012 the proportion of people of working age receiving the DSP rose from 4.3 per cent to 5.6 per cent. If the age structure of the population had held constant at 1996 shares, then the figure would have been 5.0 per cent – in other words, roughly half of the total increase can be said to be unrelated to changes in the labour market, the incidence of disability or individual behaviour, but simply reflects changes in the age structure of the population.

The chart also shows that, beginning in 2015, the increase in the size of each year cohort will decline significantly, and then increase again, before declining again. For example, while there were 93,000 more fifty-year-olds in 2014 than in 1996, there were only 42,000 more forty-nine-year olds (and 15,000 more each of thirty-five- and thirty-six-year-olds). These shifting patterns suggest shifts in the number of potential inflows into the DSP and other payments predominantly claimed by people over fifty.

More importantly, a series of policy changes from the late 1980s and mid 1990s also had a major impact on the number of people receiving the DSP and other payments.

One of the most important of these was the increase in the age pension qualifying age for women from sixty to sixty-five, as already mentioned. Before 1995, women receiving the DSP were required to shift to the age pension once they turned sixty, and women who became disabled after turning sixty weren’t able to claim the DSP unless they had lived in Australia for less than the ten years needed to qualify for an age pension.

As the cut-off age started to increase, women with disabilities in this age group increasingly claimed the DSP. As Chart 7 shows, the proportion rose from close to zero to 13.3 per cent by 2013. (Age breakdowns by gender are not available for subsequent years.) But as the number of women receiving the DSP went up, the number receiving the age pension went down – and, as Chart 8 shows, it went down by much more.

Chart 7: Change in percentage of women aged sixty to sixty-four years receiving the DSP, Australia, 1995–2013

Source: Calculated from Department of Social Services, Income Support Customers, A Statistical Overview, various years; Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Demographic Statistics, June 2013.

In 1995, only about 650 women aged sixty to sixty-four received the DSP and 212,000 received the age pension. By 2013, 86,000 women in that age group received the DSP, and only 27,000 were age pensioners. (And since 2014 none have received the age pension.) The number of female carers has risen from 132 in 1995 to more than 24,000 in 2013. Where once 67 per cent of women of that age received a pension or other payment, now the figure is 31 per cent. Overall, close to a quarter of the growth in the number of DSP recipients over the past twenty years can be accounted for by the growth in the number of women aged sixty to sixty-four receiving the DSP rather than the age pension. And close to 10 per cent in the growth in numbers of recipients on the carer payment is accounted for by this age group.

Chart 8: Percentage of women aged sixty to sixty-four years receiving the DSP, age pension or other income support, Australia, 1995–2013

Source: Calculated from Department of Social Services, Income Support Customers, A Statistical Overview, various years; ABS, Australian Demographic Statistics, June 2013.

In future, these two major pressures on the DSP numbers – the ageing of the baby boomers and the increase in women’s pension age – won’t operate to the same extent. Because the last of the baby boom generation turned fifty in 2013, the pressure on the DSP numbers should have started to lessen. The younger part of the baby boom generation won’t turn sixty-five until 2028, but the rate of increase will slow because that age group is not growing as rapidly. In the United States, for similar reasons, both the Social Security Administration’s actuaries and the Congressional Budget Office project that spending on the US disability insurance program will fall as a share of GDP in the coming decade as baby boomers convert from disability to retirement benefits and are replaced in the peak disability-receiving ages by smaller cohorts. If anything, the effect is likely to be even stronger in Australia because the increase in the pension age for women was also fully phased in by 2014 and this pressure will also decline.

It is worth remembering, however, that the Rudd government announced an increase in the pension age for both men and women from sixty-five to sixty-seven years, to phase in between 2017 and 2023. Some of the people affected by this change will probably be entitled to the DSP, leading to an increase in numbers on the DSP after 2017, but past experience suggests that the overall number of people in this age group receiving payments will reduce.

In addition, the 2010–11 budget included revised access procedures for some DSP claimants, to commence on 1 January 2012, and new participation requirements from 1 July 2012, affecting current and new DSP recipients under the age of thirty-five who are assessed as having a work capacity of eight hours or more a week. As shown in Chart 9, these changes appear to be associated with a very large slowdown in the rate of increase in the number of people being paid the DSP, albeit after a relatively large spike in numbers following the GFC (after a lag).

Chart 9: Annual average percentage change in the number of people receiving the disability support pension, Australia, 1995–2015

Perhaps as a result, the most recent figures for numbers on the DSP show a fall from around 827,000 in 2012 to 814,000 in 2015; excluding people over sixty-five who receive the DSP this is a fall to around 5.2 per cent of the working-age population, about the level it has been since 2002.

“Dependency” payments

What explains the reduction in the number of people receiving payments other than DSP, the carer payment or Newstart?

Starting in the 1980s and continuing for more than twenty years, the federal government began phasing out a number of other payments or limiting access to new claimants. Access to Widow B pension, for example, was limited in 1987, and then closed to new entrants in 1997. In 1994, the government introduced the partner allowance to provide support to the partners of beneficiaries who had previously received a “married rate” of payment; then, in 1995, it restricted this to older women without recent workforce experience while introducing Parenting Payment Partnered for partners with dependent children. As well as phasing out these payments, the government changed the income test for unemployment payments in 1995 to require both individuals in a couple to claim the benefit in their own right, and part of their individual earnings did not affect their partner’s benefit entitlements.

The wife pension was closed to new entrants in 1995; the partner allowance and the mature age allowance were closed to new claimants in 2003; and by 2008 there were no longer any recipients of the mature age allowance. Since 2005, new grants of the widow allowance have been limited to women born on or before 1 July 1955.

Most of these payments had effectively been based on the assumption that women were “dependents” of men, or in the case of widows that they had been dependent and should not be expected to look for work. Even the lower age for women to receive the pension had been partly based on the assumption that women would want to leave the workforce at roughly the same time as their assumed older husbands. Economist Bob Gregory has also argued that these changes affected the likelihood of partnered men claiming payments, because their behaviour could be influenced by their partner’s failure to qualify for a payment.

These changes had a profound impact not only on the total number of people receiving welfare payments but also on which payments they received. In the mid 1990s, the “closed payments” – mainly for women – were received by around 4 per cent of the working-age population; now, only 1 per cent of the population receive their successor payments.

About 1.3 per cent of the working-age population are receiving the carer payment. As with the age pension/DSP trade-off for older women, the rise in the number of people on the carer payment is more than offset by the decline in the number of people on these “dependency” payments.

A further change to parenting payments by the Howard government in 2006 required new lone parents with a youngest child aged eight or over to claim Newstart rather than parenting payment single and for partnered parents with a youngest child aged sox years and over to claim Newstart rather than parenting payment partnered. Parents already receiving the benefits, however, were “grandfathered” and continued to receive these higher levels of benefit.

What about the unemployed?

Two main factors have driven the growth in Newstart numbers. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits tracks broader labour-market trends fairly closely, and so the increase in the unemployment rate from around 5 per cent to closer to 6 per cent since June 2012 could be expected to result in roughly 100,000 additional people on benefits.

Changes to the DSP under the previous government, which appear to have slowed its growth, may have increased numbers on Newstart, while policies designed to shift people from parenting payments to the lower Newstart payments since 2006 (and particularly since the beginning of 2013) have also added to the total.

The Gillard government forecast that around 10,000 people would lose all entitlement to benefits in 2013 as a result of the decision to move the “saved” lone parents from parenting payment single to Newstart, and that around 75,000 would transfer onto Newstart. (This effect is the same as the substitution between the age pension and the DSP, carer payment and other closed benefits, as described above.)

The monthly statistics on labour force payments show that between December 2012 and February 2013 the number of people on unemployment payments jumped from around 700,000 to 796,000, an increase around four times as great as the corresponding periods for the previous two years. Moreover, around 83 per cent of the increase was made up of women, reinforcing the impression that this very large jump is mainly explained by parents transferring from parenting payments.

The table below shows trends in the number of lone parents receiving either the parenting payment single or Newstart between 2006 and 2014. From a negligible number of lone parents receiving Newstart in 2006, the number has grown to around 120,000 in 2014. Data on the number of lone parents receiving other payments such as the carer payment or the DSP are not publicly available, and it is possible that a sizeable number of people who would otherwise have received the parenting payment single would now be receiving one or other of these payments, if they were eligible. Nevertheless, Table 1 shows that while Newstart numbers have grown significantly, the total number of lone parents receiving one or other of these payments has fallen.

Number of lone parents receiving either parenting payment single or Newstart, Australia, 2006–2014

Source: Data provided by ACOSS from answers to Parliamentary Questions on Notice

Chart 3 showed that the share of the working-age population receiving Newstart has risen since 2008, with about 300,000 more people on Newstart in 2014 than just before the GFC. In 2014, as Table 1 shows, there were about 100,000 more lone parents on Newstart and 100,000 fewer on parenting payment single than in 2008, and as suggested earlier a rise in the general unemployment rate by 2 percentage points could have been expected to add around 200,000 more people to Newstart.

While the situation is complicated by other changes in the population – including a fall in the number of lone parent families since around 2003 – these figures suggest that a very significant component of the rise in numbers on Newstart can be explained either by labour-market change or deliberate policy change.

What has happened to spending?

Not surprisingly, governments interested in balancing the federal budget are most concerned with program spending, even if the number of recipients is one of the main drivers of aggregate spending. Governments also tend to focus on nominal spending over the forward estimate period.

Just as it is preferable analytically to focus on recipients of benefits as a percentage of the population, it is also preferable to treat spending as a percentage of GDP as the best measure of the affordability of the system. This is because, as we’ve seen, real spending will grow simply as a result of population growth, even if all other parameters are held constant.

The most consistent and comprehensive time series on social spending as a percentage of GDP can be found in the OECD Social Expenditure database, which provides overall levels of public social spending up to 2014, though details of spending disaggregated by program are available only to 2012. (The social spending figures for Australia aggregate federal and state government spending, but virtually all spending on cash benefits is undertaken at the federal level.)

Chart 10 shows trends in spending on age and related pensions (mainly DVA payments) from 1995 to 2012. With the exception of the year 2000, spending on age and related pensions has remained between 3 and 3.4 per cent of GDP. (The spike in spending in 2000 is the result of the compensation package for the introduction of the GST in that year.) These pensions are indexed to wages, so the stability of spending as a per cent of GDP is likely to reflect the declining coverage of the service pension, as discussed earlier.

Chart 10: Spending on age and related pensions, Australia, 1995–2012

Source: OECD Social Expenditure database.

Chart 11: Spending on working-age cash benefits, Australia, 1995 to 2012

Source: OECD Social Expenditure database.

Chart 11 shows trends in spending on the other major cash transfers from 1995 to 2012. Overall, spending has fallen from 5.5 to 4.9 per cent of GDP over this period. Spending on working-age payments spiked in 2008, at the time of the stimulus payments made during the GFC. Excluding “other incapacity” (mainly state government workers’ compensation payments) overall spending fell from 4.7 to 4.3 per cent of GDP.

Spending on the unemployed – which includes spending on parenting payments in the OECD’s definition – fell from 1.2 to 0.6 per cent of GDP. The only component to rise as a percentage of GDP was disability payments (which include the carer payment), from 1.1 to 1.5 per cent of GDP.

Spending on family cash benefits rose substantially from 2.1 to 2.6 per cent of GDP between 1995 and 2003, but has since fallen back to 1.9 per cent of GDP (although with a spike at the time of the GFC).

Overall, the spending trends in the OECD data are consistent with the picture derived from considering trends in the number of recipients. Spending has gone up in some categories, notably the DSP and carer payment, but spending in other social security areas has fallen to more than offset these rises.

Where to from here?

The data show a prolonged fall in the number of welfare recipients since the mid 1990s, reflecting a long period of economic growth, a strong labour market, and the positive impact of policy changes since the early 1990s. While trends have not been as positive since 2008, they have been mild by the standards of earlier economic downturns in Australia. Trends in spending as a per cent of GDP show broadly similar patterns, with no evidence of major increases after 2008.

This analysis also shows that past trends are not necessarily a reliable guide to the future. The two main pressures on DSP numbers – the ageing of the baby boomers and the increase in women’s pension age – are unlikely to continue to have such a significant impact, suggesting that numbers of recipients and levels of spending relative to GDP are unlikely to grow in the near future unless there is some form of economic shock.

While concerns about relentless growth are difficult to substantiate – particularly when the total number of welfare recipients is close to its lowest level in the past twenty years – we should not be complacent.

Our main concern should be to avoid any significant blow-out in unemployment. Previous increases in unemployment in the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s had very long-term consequences, particularly for jobless families with children. Nor should we be complacent because welfare numbers are at their second-lowest level in the past two decades. Successive governments have argued that the “best form of welfare is work” and it is clear that the economic wellbeing of individuals and families is much greater in paid work than outside it.

The problems that some people on welfare face in moving into work require a comprehensive analysis, however. Not all these problems are caused by the welfare system: other barriers to work include labour-market programs that are not equally effective for all, a lack of job opportunities in the regions where people live, poor public transport, inadequate and expensive child care, mismatched skills, and negative employer attitudes to people disadvantaged in the labour market. Changing incentives in the welfare system through reform of eligibility for specific payments is only part of an effective response to these challenges.

In addition, the growth in the size of the population aged sixty-five and over will put upward pressure on spending over coming decades. Preparing for the continued ageing of the population, however, does not necessarily imply that the solution is to seek to further cut spending on working-age payments. •

The post Is welfare sustainable? appeared first on Inside Story.

It was Slaughter’s 2012 article for the Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” that inspired a book she loathed the idea of writing. She is, after all, a foreign policy expert, and in 2009 she landed her dream job as the first female director of policy planning under secretary of state Hillary Clinton. In fact, Slaughter boasts an eye-watering CV: foreign policy analyst, legal and international relations scholar, former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She’s now president and CEO of New America, a think tank “dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age.”

But about that dream job. She left it. The once-in-a-lifetime-chance-to-do-something-for-your-country job; the are-you-sure-you-want-to-pass-this-up kind of gig. Partly, she left because she had completed her agreed two years and if she stayed any longer she’d lose her tenure at Princeton. But more importantly, she left because she just couldn’t commit to continued commuting from Washington to Princeton to see her sons, then twelve and fourteen, merely on weekends. Her eldest had begun to act up, skipping school and getting acquainted with the local police station. And although her partner Andy (also a dean at Princeton) was committed to their care full-time, he needed help.

The resulting Atlantic article about her decision is one of the most-read stories in the 150-year history of the publication. And there’s one line (and, it turns out, the one that Slaughter found most difficult to write) that stands out: “I wanted to go home.” It’s an almost-dirty admission that prompted a flood of mail, feedback and support, but also an air of disappointment from her peers.

It was that disappointed reaction – the passive-aggressive “It’s such a pity you had to leave Washington” – that prompted this book and allowed Slaughter to “break free from an entire set of deeply internalised assumptions about what is valuable, what is important, what is right, and what is natural.” As one of Slaughter’s “Twitter correspondents” wrote to her in the wake of the article, “There has to be something better than Lean In or Get Out.”

Lean In is, of course, a reference to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s arresting 2010 TED talk, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” and her subsequent book. Corporate women embraced it, but it was speaking to a small slice of them: after all, it boasted the tag line “3 powerful pieces of advice to women aiming for the C-suite.”

Sure, that might be how to muscle in on what is still predominantly a man’s world, but many women (and men, for that matter) asked: but what if we don’t want that world? When she writes that Sandberg’s advice, while not without merit, “incorporates a traditional male world of corporate hierarchies,” Slaughter echoes the misgivings of many feminists concerned about the neoliberal narrative that has woven its way into modern feminism.

That system, Slaughter says, is antiquated and broken: “[M]uch broader social, political, and cultural change is also necessary… This kind of change goes far beyond feminism. If we can adopt policies and practices that support and advance women at every level of our society, we will make things better for everybody.”

Slaughter writes about a country in which, apart from a privileged few, it is very easy to fall through the cracks. The United States is the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave. It is the only advanced economy that doesn’t require employers to provide paid vacation time. “More than 70 per cent of low-wage workers in the United States do not get paid sick days, which means they risk losing their jobs when a childcare or health issue arises… [N]early one quarter of adults in the United States have been fired or threatened with job loss for taking time off to recover from illness or care for a loved one.” Tips for cracking the C-suite aren’t going to cut it.

Slaughter clearly believes in the dignity and value of work. But a simple question underpins this book and sets it fundamentally apart from other attempts to deal with this subject: why don’t we believe in the equal dignity and value of caring for others?

The “care” factor that Slaughter focuses on is an attempt to shift to a much more inclusive conversation – one that involves women, men, the fair whack of American workers who live in poverty, and those wealthy enough to have the luxury of contemplating how to achieve a work–life balance.

“It means rethinking everything from workplace design to life stages to leadership styles,” writes Slaughter. “Not valuing caregiving is the taproot, the deeper problem that gives rise to distortion and discrimination in multiple areas of American society.” Our emphasis on “competition” over “care” vastly underserves our true needs:

If we succeed in freeing ourselves from the competitive mystique, understanding that competition is a valuable human drive but no more valuable than care, we will no longer see the liberation of women as freedom only to compete. On the flip side, if we truly believe that care is just as valuable as competition, then we will realise that men who are only breadwinners are missing out on something deeply satisfying and self-improving.

A background in public policy and academia helps to lend perspective to Slaughter’s viewpoint, but it’s her contention about the value of care that really refutes one accusation levelled at her original article – that she was “perpetuating ‘plutocrat’ feminism – that I’m only concerned with the high-class problems of powerful women like myself.”

Much of the conversation about feminism these days is framed around the construct of intersectionality, but this has the potential to paralyse debate (just ask Germaine Greer…). Slaughter’s care contention goes some way towards diffusing the criticism that many women – including the likes of Annabel Crabb, author of The Wife Drought – cop for lending their white, privileged voice to the debate around equality.

Yes, there is a yawning gap between a 1 per center struggling to keep her career trajectory on track while having babies and a woman living on the poverty line and attempting to keep her family afloat. But, as Slaughter points out, “without minimising the differences in these women’s lives, they all pay a price for having loved ones who need care.”

Slaughter argues that valuing caregiving – not just in our own roles as carers for children, aged parents or sick friends, but also in the work of teachers, childcare workers, health workers and aged carers – should transform the economy and the way we work. We will have to value caregiving, in fact, if we are to cope with an ageing population and increasingly dual-income households. “As a society,” she writes, “the ways in which we value breadwinning over caregiving have made us blind to these costs: we miss the ways in which more money cannot actually substitute for care.”

There’s a practical edge to this, explains Slaughter. In communities around the United States, manufacturing jobs for men have disappeared and “the decent jobs that have remained are overwhelmingly in ‘eds and meds’: education and healthcare.” These are care jobs. Women’s jobs. Low-paid jobs.

Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex document the economic shift from manufacturing towards service and information. Valuing care – and paying for it – could make care jobs more attractive to men and help bolster the middle class, argues Slaughter, and so the next phase of the women’s movement must be a men’s movement. (Cue groans.) But Slaughter again bypasses predictable arguments against this line by examining the concept through the prism of care:

The biggest unconquered world open to men is the world of caring for others. If we tell boys that they can break down centuries-old barriers and be pioneers of social change, suddenly they have a mission, an inspiration, and a new kind of role model to emulate – a new definition of a good man.

Slaughter is adept at straddling the micro and the macro. She’s a policy wonk at heart, as is clear from her vision of what she dubs an “infrastructure of care” – sinking funds into childcare and eldercare, paid family and medical leave for women and men, a right to request part-time or flexible work, investment in early education, higher wages and better training for paid caregivers, and community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer.

She also offers handy Sandberg-like hints. (Think of your career as an interval training exercise, not a sprint; build a “portfolio career”; plan to “lean back.”) But the book could do with a little more of the personal – after all, sharing her own vulnerability is what drew people to that article. She writes of the satisfaction of watching her kids wolf down the breakfast she made each weekday after her return home, but her own experience of care, and what she’s learnt from it, remains enigmatic.

Despite that gap, Slaughter’s work resonates because she’s refreshingly good at acknowledging that even the best of plans get waylaid by messy, nonlinear, frustrating, unpredictable life. By that unplanned-for yearning to just go home.

“Suppose the twists and turns of your life include late marriage, no marriage, divorce, or infertility,” she writes. “A miserable economy, a boss who just doesn’t recognise your merits no matter how confidently you assert them, a job and a spouse that are not in the same place, a child who needs you more than you expected or whom you want to be with more than you expected, parents who need care. Illness, unemployment, debt, disasters both natural and man-made.” What then? Perhaps that question is something Sheryl Sandberg can relate to after the tragic and sudden death of her beloved husband last year.

Slaughter’s contention: “A resilient system is one that can handle the unexpected and bounce back, that anticipates the possibility of many paths to the same destination.” The system may not change overnight but changing our expectations of ourselves would be a start. •

The post Leaning back appeared first on Inside Story.

Modelling for the Labor Party by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, or NATSEM, found low-income families could lose up to $3700 per year in 2015–16, and an increasing amount in subsequent years, under new measures in the budget and cuts still pending from last year. Using its “microsimulation” model, which both the Howard and Rudd–Gillard governments used as a policy tool, NATSEM estimated that by 2018–19 the lowest “quintile” (or 20 per cent) of couples would be 7 per cent worse off and the lowest quintile of lone parents would be 8 per cent worse off.

Within quintiles of couples with children, reports NATSEM, only 11 per cent of the poorest quintile and 22 per cent of the second-poorest quintile would be better off. Yet a little over 90 per cent of the richest quintile would gain from the package. Couples without children would be less well off to a smaller degree, while most single person households would be slightly better off.

The government counter-argues that the NATSEM calculations don’t include any “second-round” effects of the budget changes. Asked about NATSEM’s modelling during question time, the prime minister said that this omission meant it was “a fraudulent misrepresentation” of the budget. Returning people to work, he said, was “the whole point of the policy measures.”

But the government hasn’t released any of its own modelling of the budget’s impacts. Last year it also chose not to include tables showing the impact of the budget on different family types, despite the fact that these tables have appeared in all budget papers since 2005. Our attempt last year to reproduce that table showed why: the budget burden fell most heavily on low-income households.

This year the household table has returned. But rather than show the impact of budget changes, it reports how many single full-time average wage earners it takes to raise the tax revenue required to fund the benefits paid to other household types, particularly families with children and age pensioners. So, for example, a “welfare rich” sole parent with two children under six who earns $30,000 a year is said to have a higher disposable income than a single person earning $80,000 a year. The final column of the table shows that it takes 1.9 average workers to pay for the benefits received by the low-paid lone parent.

This variation on the “lifters” and “leaners” theme is at odds with what we know about the “piggy bank” function of the welfare system. Over the period 2001–09 nearly two-thirds of working-age Australian households included somebody who received an income support payment – and this does not include people receiving family payments or age pensions. There’s no mystery about the reason: over time, the majority of Australian households experience periods of unemployment, illness or disability, or family break-up. As the latest ABS Labour Force Experience Survey shows, during 2011, when the average number of people unemployed was around 600,000, nearly 1.7 million people – or 10 per cent of the adult population – had at least one spell of unemployment.

Put another way, the individuals implicitly labelled “lifters” in the budget table might have appeared in a different column last year, if they had needed welfare support, or might appear there next year, courtesy of Australia’s flexible labour market and the life risks that everyone faces.

As Eva Cox and Greg Jericho have pointed out, the table also adds childcare payments to disposable income without deducting the cost of childcare. On the basis of that misleading presentatation of the figures, the Daily Telegraph asserted, under the headline “Joe Blasts ‘Welfare Rich,’” that these families “have more money to spend than workers” but didn’t acknowledge that after childcare costs are deducted these families have less money to spend than workers without children (and are also workers themselves).

It’s important to remember that families only receive childcare assistance because they have already paid childcare fees, and they can still have large out-of-pocket expenses. One of the aims of the government’s childcare package is to reduce those expenses. Its decision to include childcare benefits in the calculation of disposable income is all the more surprising given that the new arrangements would see this assistance paid directly to childcare centres.

New spending versus last year’s savings

For families with children, the package of childcare reforms, expected to cost $4.4 billion over four years, is the budget’s centrepiece. Looked at purely in money terms, the proposed changes appear progressive: they increase assistance for low- and middle-income families more than for high-income families. As family incomes rise, the subsidy for childcare costs reduces from 85 to 50 per cent. But parents will have to work at least eight hours a fortnight to qualify for up to thirty-six hours of childcare subsidy every two weeks, and they will have to work at least forty-nine hours over the same period to get the full hundred hours per fortnight subsidy. These changes will have distributional effects that are not easy to capture in money values.

The government proposes to finance the package by pushing ahead with some of the 2014 budget measures still blocked in the Senate. These include the plan to freeze the rates of family tax benefit, or FTB, for two years, reduce the value of FTB supplements, and freeze eligibility thresholds so that more people lose payments as their income increases. A fourth measure would see families no longer receive FTB Part B when their youngest child turns six. At present, FTB-B is paid to eligible households until the child leaves high school. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, these 2014 budget initiatives would save around $9.4 billion between 2015–16 and 2018–19.

The government also expects to recoup spending over the forward estimates through a number of initiatives targeting family payments. Savings of $177 million are expected to flow from the complete abolition of the large-family supplement, $500 million from ceasing payments to families that refuse to immunise their children, and $967 million from ending paid parental leave “double dipping” (a characterisation that has been strongly criticised).

Last year’s unpassed savings and the new savings proposal add up to much more than the cost of the proposed childcare package. In other words, the total volume of assistance for families is decreasing, which means either more losers than winners, or that the losers on average will go backwards by more than the winners gain.

To assess the overall impact of the budget on households, then, we need to look in more detail at who wins from the childcare assistance proposals and who loses from last year’s cuts and the new savings proposals.

Winners and losers

Who wins? The Department of Social Services, or DSS, reports that in 2013 around 930,000 families with 1.4 million children benefited from childcare assistance. These families will be the main winners from the government’s childcare reforms – together with those who enter the workforce as a result of second-round effects. It should also be noted that among the families that do benefit, not all will move off welfare. In many instances the father will already have a job, and the mother will move into paid employment or will increase hours of paid work.

Who loses? Many families receiving childcare assistance also receive FTB Part A. For these families, any gains from childcare reforms will be reduced by FTB-A changes. They may still come out as “winners” overall, but their gains will be lower. The DSS data also reveal that in 2013 there were 570,000 families with close to 1.1 million children receiving the maximum rate of FTB-A, and these will be the largest proportionate losers from the proposed freezing of FTB-A for two years. A further 328,000 families with incomes above the first threshold face the double effect of a freeze on rates and on thresholds.

There are also 722,000 families receiving FTB-B whose youngest child is aged five years or over, most of whom would lose from the lowering of the eligibility age for FTB-B. According to the Parliamentary Library’s analysis of the 2014 budget, around 85,000 single parents with children aged six and over who receive Newstart Allowance will find their benefits cut by up to $2,300 per year. The subset of these who successfully move into paid work may be overall winners. But it seems clear that the number of losers will be much larger than the number of winners, which is what we would expect when the savings are significantly more than the new spending.

Figure 1: Distribution of spending on family tax benefits and childcare assistance by quintiles of equivalised disposable income, Australia, 2009–10
Share (per cent) of spending received by income quintile

Source: Calculated from Table 5, datacubes, ABS, Government Benefits, Taxes and Household Income, Australia, 2009–10.

It is no surprise that the government’s childcare reforms will favour middle- and higher-income families over lower-income families. Most families receiving childcare assistance have higher average incomes than the lone parent families or single earner couples who will be the biggest losers from the cuts to family payments. For example, the ABS Income Distribution Survey for 2009–10 reports that the poorest 40 per cent of households receive around 73 per cent of FTB funds but only 35 per cent of childcare assistance. Correspondingly, the richest 40 per cent of households receive around 40 per cent of current childcare spending but only 6 per cent of family tax benefits.

The fact that the published DSS and ABS data suggest that the government’s overall package is regressive, but can’t definitively establish it, is precisely why NATSEM’s microsimulation modelling is so valuable. By applying the policy changes to around 45,000 real families from two years of the ABS Survey of Income and Housing, the model provides a more comprehensive analysis of the overall impact of budget changes.

Second-round effects: will they make a difference?

As noted earlier, the government has emphasised that NATSEM’s calculations don’t include any second-round effects of the budget changes, and that returning people to work was “the whole point of the policy measures.” In essence, they are arguing that the policy package makes work more attractive both by reducing the cost of childcare and by cutting benefits to families.

On one level this sounds reasonable. But, as Ross Gittins has pointed out, the government doesn’t appear to have taken behavioural changes into account in estimating the savings flowing from its “no jab, no pay” policy. And treasurer Joe Hockey has conceded that “as a rule” – in any federal budget, that is – “second-round effects are not taken into account.” This is largely because the size of any behavioural response is unclear, regardless of the likelihood that there will be one. A 2007 Treasury working paper points out that estimates of how many people will move back into the labour force as a result of tax and benefit changes can vary widely, while the Productivity Commission opts for a range of estimates of the effect of increases in childcare costs on hours of work.

In its report on childcare, which fed into the government’s package, the Productivity Commission was cautious about the impact of its recommendations on the labour market. It estimated that the supply of potential employees might increase by roughly 165,000 on a full-time equivalent basis if childcare shortages and affordability could be dealt with. But it also estimated that increases in workforce participation would be “small” – that its recommended approach would increase the number of working mothers (primarily in low- and middle-income families) by 1.2 per cent (an additional 16,400 mothers), about 10 per cent of the total potential gains if childcare affordability and accessibility were no barrier at all.

The Guardian reported that the government had calculated 240,000 families could increase the hours they worked because of the proposed changes to childcare assistance. This figure – derived from an online survey said to be representative of the population – seems similar to the Productivity Commission’s estimate of the total potential gains given no barriers to childcare, although this is not entirely clear. Clearly, there is a very large difference between 16,400 and 240,000.

It is worth emphasising that this estimate appears to combine the effect of increased hours among families already in paid work and the effect of people moving into work for the first time. In terms of offsetting the regressive impact of changes to family payments, it is the impact of people moving from welfare into work that is most relevant. Increases in hours of work among those who already participate in the labour market will help offset any loss of family tax benefits, but will tend not to be as progressive as moving families from welfare to work.

It is also worth mentioning that the budget’s economic parameters suggest that the impact on employment is not likely to be substantial. Although the labour force participation rate is projected to rise marginally from 64.6 to around 64.75 per cent over the forward estimates, the unemployment rate is projected to increase from 5.9 per cent to between 6.25 and 6.5 per cent, which implies a small fall in the proportion of the adult population who are employed.

Other effects of the overall package also need to be considered. Deborah Brennan and Elizabeth Adamson of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW conclude that the new scheme will benefit low- and middle-income families who have secure, predictable employment and use services that charge the benchmark fee (or lower). It will disadvantage Indigenous children, they say, as well as children in the poorest families and children whose parents have casual work, variable hours or insecure jobs. This reflects the increase in the number of hours that must be worked in order to receive the maximum subsidy. Other criticisms of the childcare package focus on the fact that it neglects care for the most disadvantaged children and plays down the important child-development aspects of early childhood education.

Our colleague in the Crawford School, Bob Breunig, agrees that “positive labour supply effects should ensue from tilting subsidies towards those who are less well off,” but goes on to point out that failing to index benchmark childcare fees, or indexing them only to a broad measure of inflation, could result in substantial real decreases in support to families over time.

Towards a social investment strategy?

It is possible to present other arguments in favour of the government’s approach to shifting spending towards childcare and away from cash benefits to families.

For some time the European Commission has been interested in a social investment strategy, which is defined by the Policy Network as “the set of policy measures and instruments that promote investments in human capital and enhancement of people’s capacity to participate in social and economic life as well as in the labour market.” Shifting social spending away from “passive” social policies such as family tax benefits towards “active” spending such as childcare and active labour market programs could be seen as a means of ensuring the sustainability of social programs and promoting economic growth.

What is the balance between “active” and “passive” spending on families in Australia? Figure 2 shows that public spending on families in 2011 was the fourteenth-highest in the OECD, at 2.79 per cent of GDP, just above the OECD average of 2.55 per cent of GDP. Spending on cash benefits, at 1.89 per cent of GDP, was the eighth highest, but Australia ranked sixteenth for spending on services, at 0.86 per cent of GDP, below the OECD average of 0.99 per cent. The Nordic countries, where the social investment approach is regarded as most developed, spend two to three times as much as Australia as a percentage of GDP on services for families. Around a third of children under three years are enrolled in formal childcare services in Australia – just above the OECD average – but enrolment is over 50 per cent in Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands and approaches two-thirds in Denmark.

Figure 2: Public spending on family benefits in cash, services and tax measures, OECD countries, per cent of GDP, 2011

Source: OECD, 2015, Family database.

Figure 3 shows trends in family assistance expenditure in Australia from 1980 to 2012. Spending grew from 0.9 per cent of GDP in 1980 to 2.7 per cent of GDP in 2012, initially peaking at 3.1 per cent of GDP in 2003 and peaking again at 3.2 per cent of GDP at the time of the stimulus package in 2008.

Figure 3: Public spending on family assistance, Australia, per cent of GDP, 1980 to 2012

Source: OECD, 2015, Social Expenditure database. ECEC refers to early childhood education and care.

Over the long run, the rise in spending is mainly accounted for by increased spending on family allowances (FTB Parts A and B). Most of this increase occurred in the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s following the Hawke government’s child poverty pledge, rather than as a result of the assumed increase in “middle-class welfare” during the Howard government. Since the mid 1990s, the increase has largely reflected higher spending on early childhood education and care, which grew from 0.2 to 0.6 per cent of GDP and from less than 10 per cent of total family spending to over 20 per cent.

In this sense, Australia has already started on a shift from cash benefits to spending on childcare services, a shift partly explained by the increase in female labour force participation during the period.

While there is an extensive body of literature arguing for the social investment approach, it is not without its critics. Chiara Saraceno has argued that the “ideal adult worker model” that underlies this approach

hides, and to some degree even takes for granted, gender inequalities in both the household and the labour market. [It] also undervalues the subjective and relational meaning of caring within households, while attributing to families a mainly functional role regarding societies and labour markets.

In addition, the Policy Network has highlighted possible tensions between the principles of social investment and social protection. Doubts have also been raised about whether this approach has the capacity to support those most at risk of poverty or social exclusion, a point particularly relevant to the government’s proposed shift from cash benefits favouring the poorest households to childcare support favouring those already in the labour market.

While the government’s childcare package, in combination with cuts in family payments, could be defended as a shift towards a social investment approach, it would be a stretch in current circumstances to see it as such. Neither the government nor the opposition has articulated a clear vision for moving towards this goal. Australia is a long way from the levels of social investment in childcare and labour market support that are characteristic of such a strategy. The fact that the expenditure savings from the proposed changes in assistance for families are more than double the extra outlays for childcare suggests that this package is motivated more by budgetary than social outcomes.

Calculating who wins and who loses from the budget, or from other policy changes, is an essential component of sensible analysis of public policies. It is normal practice of governments throughout the world to identify winners and losers from this kind of change. Since its 2010 Spending Review, for instance, the UK Treasury has published analyses of the impact of the budget on households, with the most recent analysis being for 2015.

Governments should welcome the type of evidence-based policy analysis exemplified by NATSEM’s analysis, and ideally provide it themselves. In a period where politicians complain about the poor quality of the conversation, analysis like this focuses the debate on how real people will be affected. •

The post Budget 2015: the winners and losers appeared first on Inside Story.

This is Mintz’s third book about the life course. As he tells us in his preface, he wrote the first of the three, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (1989), in response to his own experience as a young baby boomer establishing a family. The second, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004), came out of his experiences of parenthood. The Prime of Life focuses on adulthood – not, as the subtitle implies, in Europe, Africa or globally, but as it has been experienced in the United States since colonial times. Although Mintz makes occasional references to developments in other countries, he largely ignores the rest of the Americas, as well as Europe and the great continental mass stretching from Beirut to Shanghai. This is very much a book about white, Anglo-American families, marriages and work.

Starting with teenage years – the “tangled” transition to adulthood – Mintz’s chapters lead the reader from singledom to pair relationships and marriage, mainly of the heterosexual variety, then on to a seemingly inevitable period of parenthood and the accompanying world of work, and finally to experiences of loss in various vaguely spelt-out guises. As his title insists, his interest is in socially constructed Western adulthood and the life course transitions that precede it and accompany it. He is much less interested in old age.

Mintz’s chapter on “The Trials of Parenting” is the most successful. More than any other “post-industrial society,” he argues, the United States has a vexed relationship with the job of child rearing. “Every facet elicits bitter debate,” he writes, which makes sense when one considers how heavily the state relies on the private labour of mostly women to rear children. Anxiety, he assures us, “is the hallmark of contemporary American parenting.” No doubt relying on his own experience, Mintz attempts to explode some myths about the “golden” era of childhood, the 1940s and 1950s, when baby boomers were toddlers turning into little people. In fact, he tells us, the postwar decades were a time of parental over-regulation and of judgemental views and practices:

Affectionate memories also obscure the racial, class, and gender inequalities of the era, the mistreatment of children with disabilities, the fistfights that were considered a normal part of boyhood, and the way boys teased and tormented girls and sometimes openly abused animals.

After briefly sketching the features of twenty-first-century parenting and highlighting the overbearing concern exhibited by “helicopter parents,” Mintz takes the reader through the evolution of childhood and parenting in the United States of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One criticism of this chapter, and of the book as a whole, is that very little space is devoted to the practices of non-whites. Occasionally, Mintz makes very brief mention of the lived experience of African or Hispanic Americans, but on the whole this book is about white America and seems written for that audience. Class is barely mentioned either. There is token mention of the children and families of the rural poor, the urban working class and immigrants, but a great deal more space is devoted to the parental anxieties of the 1960s when, again mainly white, American parents fretted over how to bring up John and Betty.

The second half of “The Trials of Parenting” includes a well-argued discussion of motherhood, corporal punishment, child abuse and working mothers. “No other Western society has a greater range of institutions, products, or services devoted to children,” writes Mintz, “or spends as much on children’s education, health care, child care, or toys or juvenile justice and children’s protective services.” What he seems to overlook is that the United States has been so much better at commodifying childhood than any other post-industrial society and that this might explain the malaise he believes is affecting its families.

It may be that Mintz’s concern with life as constantly “becoming” allows him to avoid the nasty reality of death. When he discusses what he calls the “angst of adulthood” in the penultimate chapter I expected to read about adults arriving at old age and confronting the inevitable. Instead, he looks at midlife crises, grief, loss and mourning, and offers such observations as this: “In actuality, mourners, across time periods, tend to retain bonds with the deceased… [and] must find a language to speak of the loss and construct a narrative that gives meaning to the now severed relationship.”

No mention here of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963) or Evelyn Waugh’s crueller The Loved One (1948). Instead, there is a short paragraph about how Hispanic and African Americans “do” mourning before he delves into the way it was “done” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial America, where “responses to loss signalled a long-term transition from a culture of chance to a culture of control.” Without too strongly signalling his debt to Philippe Ariès or Norbert Elias, Mintz writes with some conviction about the fairly universal Western fear of death, or “denial of death,” which commentators as varied as Umberto Eco and Martin Amis have observed is particularly acute in the great republic.

This is a well-written and well-structured book. It will appeal to the reader who enjoys social history painted in broad brushstrokes. It will not appeal to the feminist, gay or ethnically diverse reader because she will not find her story here. But for anyone wishing to find out how white America understands and sees itself, this will be an enjoyable read. The sections on colonial America are particularly well written, conveying an appropriately romantic picture of that era and how the life course was understood at the time. •

The post Bringing up John and Betty appeared first on Inside Story.

Family history is also a splendid excuse for travel in search of distant relatives or to sites connected with family origins. It provides an absorbing puzzle, or quest, for those so minded, superior to and more rewarding in many ways than the endless consumption of mystery or detective stories. The research has never been easier, nor the records more accessible, and you can join a family history society to share knowledge and enthusiasm. The past few decades have seen fantastic developments, not only in the state’s ability to keep track of the lives of individual citizens but also in the technology that now enables us to access and correlate multiple sets of records. Another of its attractions, as Tanya Evans points out in Fractured Families, is that research can be done at home and disturbing discoveries assimilated in private.

Australia is richly endowed with historical records of the kind compiled by the modern bureaucracy. Before the notion of privacy became a matter for general concern, early bureaucratic record-keeping could be wonderfully revealing about hundreds of thousands of individuals who would otherwise have left no trace on history. You need only think of the huge body of records left by the convict system, both of the convicts as individuals with details of their physical appearance, distinguishing marks, levels of literacy and employment records, and how, when, and why they were transported, and of the massive archive of their progress through the legal and employment systems in the colonies. It is now more than sixty years since historians like Lloyd Robson began to realise what could be done by statistically analysing these records using what were then primitive computers.

Two generations of historians have since made careers and reputations out of manipulating those records using the latest developments in digital technology, some of them cross-matching data on an international scale. By the late twentieth century it was not uncommon to receive an offer from a company that produced family histories to order, based mainly on one’s surname. Mostly they were a waste of money. The day may come, however, when the would-be family historian can type a name into a keyboard and instantly retrieve every known reference from archives all over the world. Those currently concerned about the possible future uses of preserved metadata might well ponder this history of official record-keeping and the unintended uses to which it has already been put.

When the Australian colonies mandated the collection of birth, death, and marriage records in the 1860s, the reach and value of the convict records were greatly extended, though as Tanya Evans shows, people didn’t always necessarily know the truth, or reveal it, when they were asked for information. Australian historians have long bemoaned the compulsory destruction of our census records, instituted by the new Commonwealth partially in the hope that we would be more inclined to be honest if we knew the census forms would not be preserved. But the great bonanza of first world war records has partly compensated for that gap, at least for the male population. As the current commemorations of those grim events show, today’s Australians in their thousands have been discovering or rediscovering their ancestors through both the records of that war and the subsequent business of repatriation.

For Fractured Families, the core collection of records is the archive of the Benevolent Society of New South Wales. Founded in 1813, part of the organisation’s function was to deal with problems created by the special nature of the society evolving in the colony. Because Sydney was only twenty-five years old, there were not a great many families with more than one generation, nor were there many extended families able to take responsibility for their old, feeble or frail members. And because of the shortage of women in the population, increasing numbers of ageing men lived alone, many of them becoming the poor and the homeless of that time.

Over time these structural imbalances resolved themselves, and the Benevolent Society increasingly began to care for the women and children who were now the main victims of what was coming to be known as the “working man’s paradise.” A steady demand for male labour did not necessarily flow through to women, and life could be extremely difficult for pregnant women and women with small children who had no male protector. And so, from the later part of the nineteenth century, the records of the Benevolent Society are increasingly the records of the poorest and most disadvantaged members of the female population. It is largely this group of records that has been singled out for special consideration here.

As a collection of family histories illustrating various kinds of families in nineteenth-century New South Wales, Fractured Families is a mixed bag. Some are little more than fleshed out genealogies, others so intricate that one wishes for a family tree. It is not clear what purpose the book is meant to serve – to promote family history, to encourage more informed thinking about the use of sources or the ways of interpreting them? The family historians and genealogists whose work is discussed and admired are not likely to be interested in the kinds of comparative lives it reviews or the generalisations in which it deals; they are probably still in pursuit of an annoyingly elusive ancestor. No more likely to be impressed are the often-unnamed or disparaged “historians” and “scholars,” who are said to have studied various troublesome questions of meaning or interpretation only to disagree about their significance.

The book’s approach to chronology is carefree. It has texts not published until the late nineteenth century described as influential fifty years earlier, and it moves back and forth between British and Australian conditions in ways that are bewildering. So it must be read with care and cannot be regarded as authoritative on the changing economic and social conditions in nineteenth-century New South Wales or the legal and administrative framework in which ideas of family functioned during this period.

It is informative, however, in unexpected ways. The motives and approaches of some of the family historians are described in detail. Jeff White, for example, a business analyst in Sydney, is one of the numerous descendants of Weeks White, a Baptist baker who migrated to New South Wales in 1874. He has worked extensively on the life of William, one of Weeks’s sons who took over and developed the bakery. Evans writes:

Jeff takes pride in the tracing of sources and the organisation of data; I can attest to the efficiency of his system. He uses Ancestry.com to construct his family tree and Google Cloud Storage to store his family history data. He undertakes more research now than he did in the past, because his work commitments have lessened as his career has become more established and because the internet has made his work much easier than it once was.

Jeff White eventually made contact with Anne Coote, another family historian, who had been pursuing William White’s youngest sister Sarah through the records of the Benevolent Society. Sarah was the baby of the family. Her mother had died when she was about three, and she was sixteen when the whole family migrated to Australia. During the next eight years she gave birth three times in the Benevolent Asylum. Maybe she just fled the strict atmosphere of her Baptist family; no one knows. Her brother became a significant supporter of the Benevolent Society, but it is not known what his relations with his sister were or how the Whites really functioned as a family. Like many of the stories in this book, without other kinds of evidence, the family history is skeletal.

Fractured Families concludes with a discussion of family history as shown on two television programs, SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are?, on which the author has worked as a consultant, and Call the Midwife, which she describes as “a feminist political project,” asserting that this is how most people now become interested in history. Unfortunately, this may be true, and as the most recent preoccupation with the first world war shows, subtlety has generally been the loser. •

The post Who do we think we are? appeared first on Inside Story.

This is one source of the savings intended to fund an overhaul of childcare payments and the introduction of a new and simpler Child Care Subsidy. Other funds would come from changes to family tax benefits, or FTB. Labor expects the government to tie its Jobs for Families package, of which childcare reforms represent an important component, to benefit cuts introduced last year but blocked by the Senate. Those measures would have reset the value of end-of-year supplements for all FTB families and paused the indexation of rates and thresholds for two years.

As the fairness of these and other FTB changes come under scrutiny in the coming weeks, it’s worth remembering that the Rudd government’s 2009 pension reforms saved money by limiting indexation of FTB Part A maximum rates to CPI. Prior to this, FTB-A maximum rates had, like pensions, increased in line with prices or wages growth, whichever was higher.

Last year the government proposed to index pension rates by CPI only. This measure proved one of the most controversial of the budget, and to illustrate its compound effect Inside Story published an analysis showing that if the Rudd government had abolished wage indexation when it introduced its pension reforms in 2009, single pensioners – including age and disability support pensioners and people receiving the carer payment – would have forgone an increase of $64.20 per fortnight. The figure for pensioner couples was $96.80 per fortnight. Social services minister Scott Morrison has now confirmed that the government no longer plans to change pension indexation.

That hypothetical scenario for pensioners corresponds to what has actually occurred for families who receive FTB-A maximum rates of payment. The figures mirror those for pensions. If the pre-2009 indexation arrangements were still in force, families on FTB-A maximum rates would today be receiving $20.50 per fortnight more for each child aged twelve or younger and $26.67 more for each child thirteen or older.

Many FTB-A families are nonetheless better off despite less generous FTB-A indexation. Changes introduced by the Gillard government to lift secondary school completion rates mean that families with children aged sixteen or older who are still at school receive the more generous “thirteen or older” maximum rate. This puts them up to $86.90 per fortnight ahead of the current FTB-A base rate.

With so many moving parts, the fairness of this budget will only be clear after detailed analysis of how real families will be affected by all of the proposed changes, not just by comparing the basic rates. None of the post-budget analysis will take into account losses due to FTB indexation, however, because those measures are now considered part of the status quo. Since 2009, families most in need of government support have been doing some heavy lifting to help the budget bottom line as a result of an indexation change which, when it came to pensions, proved too controversial. •

The post The budget’s not-so-simple impact on families appeared first on Inside Story.

The singular, private, interior world that nurtures us also connects us, the aphorism suggests. The English may be divided by class and politics – Bennett’s forceful views on both appear regularly in the London Review of Books – but family life, with its very eccentricities and embarrassments, is a human canvas and shared route to civic belonging.

It’s a seductive pitch, and one with a growing social and even political charge. Family memoirs and sagas, on TV and in the bookshops, are all the rage. The Guardian devotes a weekend supplement to nothing else. The BBC’s hit series Who Do You Think You Are?, where actors and comedians track down an elusive ancestor and emote at a key moment of discovery, has many imitators. Much of the Great War centenary is built around the same template. Families and their secrets are, more than ever, a big thing.

Every powerful cultural trend comes to seem a good match for the times, and this one is no exception. Many resist the accompanying mawkishness, tracing its origin to “Dianafication,” the outpouring of sentiment in 1997 following the princess’s death. But for a country increasingly networked, self-referential, emotionally open and sexually frank, lifting the covers – especially on the past – more often than not feels like progress.

In the background, however, another note, both discordant and disturbing, has been growing louder in recent years, in the wake of cumulative revelations of sexual abuse of children in diverse areas of British society since the 1970s. Discordant, because it exercises the broader cultural shift towards transparency on behalf of hitherto unheard people whose own secrets are exceptionally painful and hard to communicate. Disturbing, because prominent among those charged have been BBC notables and pop chart regulars familiar to (if not always popular with) millions of Britons.

The BBC’s defensive response was to bury the tainted past deep underground: broadcasts wiped, schedules cleansed, repeats banned, names erased. The people quietly made their own psychic readjustment. Editorial skills having done their job, all the abuse scandals that had emerged around the same time – social, institutional, elite, celebrity – were woven into the rolling 24/7 agenda.

Along the way, though, a new awareness of child sexual abuse had hit home. The monstrous predator Jimmy Savile, long-term host of a classic Saturday tea-time “family” show, was at the heart of it. A retrospective shadow had been cast over the formative years of a generation, and would not easily fade. This time, after all, the family secrets of Britain itself were being revealed.

But once these covers were taken off, what exactly could be done? The problem was accentuated by the vastness of the abuse that had evidently occurred, and its disparate nature. It seemed impractical, even arbitrary, to link such cases as the abuse of young people by their guardians and teachers, establishment figures, prominent entertainers, and men working in the marginal economy of English towns – even more, when the timeframe spans four decades. Justice is always particular, after all. Surely each crime, and each individual’s experience, had to be treated on its own merits?

A mixture of contingency and public horror found answers. In 2012–13, the arrest of a handful of former celebrities and the mushrooming reports about the recently deceased Savile encouraged hundreds of women to come forward with testimony of past abuse. Dormant allegations against former high politicians resurfaced, and gained new traction. So did detailed reports by the feminist writer Julie Bindel, and the Times’s Andrew Norfolk, from Rotherham and other English towns. These had exposed long-term exploitation of white girls, some from troubled families or formally supervised by welfare agencies, by networks of men, many of Pakistani descent, the incidence on a scale of thousands. A child protection expert told Bindel in 2010 that perpetrators “are aware that the police do not want to be accused of racism in today’s climate.”

By 2014, as legal cases unfolded, accusations swirled, and the sheer extent of Savile’s and the urban gangs’ crimes was glimpsed, a shocked public moved towards something-must-be-done mode. Clearly, a one-by-one procedural investigation of every incident had to continue. But the past itself was on trial. Numerous reviews – by parliamentary committees, health bodies, regional police forces, and the BBC – were already under way. But something inclusive was required. In Britain, that can only mean a full-scale public inquiry.

Last July, the home secretary Theresa May announced a wide-ranging “independent panel inquiry into child sexual abuse.” Its terms of reference, beginning with “the extent to which State and non-State institutions have failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation,” cover England and Wales, and liaise with parallel inquiries in Scotland (whose details will be announced by the end of April) and Northern Ireland.

The process, however, proved messy. In part this reflected Britain’s disaffected political atmosphere. Leading institutions – parliament, police, local councils, and now the BBC – were already held in widespread distrust on account of derelictions and bloated rewards, a sentiment channelled and amplified by hostile press coverage. Backbench MPs saw a chance, as over phone-hacking, to grandstand on an electric issue. Social media was accentuating the routinely febrile tone of public debate. And over child sexual abuse, as with other systemic failures, spokespersons for victims and survivors claimed an active role both in any formal proceedings and in the media.

Almost instantly, these factors kicked in to besiege the inquiry plan. May – who had won rare respect in handling a tough portfolio that includes security, immigration and justice – initially appointed a retired senior judge, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, as chair. The decision was immediately contested on the grounds that her late brother, Michael Havers, had served as attorney-general in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet in the 1980s, a period associated with lurid rumours of abuse of children around Westminster, by judges, civil servants, senior military and churchmen as well as politicians.

Butler-Sloss lasted six days. It took seven weeks to choose her replacement: Fiona Woolf, a lawyer who was nearing the end of a year’s term as lord mayor of London (the historic core and financial hub known as “the City,” that is, quite separate from Boris Johnson’s fiefdom). She came under fire after admitting a neighbourly acquaintance with Leon Brittan, also a cabinet minister in the 1980s and himself the target of hearsay. After eight weeks, Woolf too was out.

Suspicion of a close-knit elite with a penchant for cover-ups or stitch-ups was now extended to the inquiry’s top-down format. Pressure to rethink led, by February 2015, to a makeover. The inquiry was made statutory, enabling it to access classified documents and examine witnesses under oath, and given a new set of expert advisers. The profile of the chair, Lowell Goddard – a judge on New Zealand’s High Court and former head of the national body monitoring police conduct – also met any “insiderish” concerns.

Goddard’s declaration of intent for a “long, challenging and complex” inquiry is encouraging:

The many, many survivors of child sexual abuse, committed over decades, deserve a robust and thorough investigation of the appalling crimes perpetrated upon them. It is vitally important that their voices are now being heard.

I am committed to leading a robust and independent inquiry that will act on these matters without fear or favour and will hold those responsible to account.

A trusted chair, informed expertise, buy-in from survivors, rigorous power to call to account – all these are crucial if the inquiry is to be effective. Above all, this will mean having a real impact on the society that has allowed child sexual abuse to occur at all levels of society for many years. In its procedures, in the information it brings to light, and in its eventual findings – an interim report is scheduled for the end of 2018 – the inquiry promises to be a landmark event.

In this respect the far-reaching scope of the statutory inquiry is both opportunity and danger. An ability to map institutional failure and wrongdoing over these decades – insofar as its referrals to police and “findings of fact” begin to measure these – will prove vital. So will public education about sexual abuse of children, incorporating comparative national experience and evolving global awareness of the phenomenon. And finding appropriate ways to offer recognition, apology and reparation to survivors is pivotal.

But there are many landmines, all the trickier to navigate as they are strewn across the same terrain that has allowed abuse to go on in the shadows for so long. Some are technical: vaporised computer files and paper trails, for instance. Several are to do with the worst aspects of Britain’s organisational culture: a pass-the-parcel attitude to accountability, mediocre leadership, instincts of collusion and self-protection. To back its formal powers, the inquiry will need strong political backing to bear down on these. Will it be available, especially after the astringent Theresa May leaves the scene?

Other obstacles are to do with social power. A harrowing report on the Rotherham scandal by Alexis Jay, a leading childcare and social work professor, highlights the indifference of officials and police to the prolonged, vicious abuse inflicted on the south Yorkshire town’s lost girls (they numbered at least 1400 between 1997 and 2013). In most cases vulnerable and with few resources before the abuse, those who sought help were fobbed off after it. Many earlier low-status victims seeking justice for violation in penal or care institutions run by local authorities have been similarly disregarded.

At the same time, the suffering of those of middle-class background – abused in, for example, boarding schools, music colleges or religious institutions – can impose its own type of voiceless agony, and lead to lifelong shame or suicide. Class prejudice, or just the vagaries of public concern, can act as a silencer in different directions. Catherine Deveney’s investigations of abuse within the Catholic church and the musicologist Ian Pace’s blog are among efforts to draw attention to this aspect.

Political and conspiracist agendas, now rampant, will also complicate the inquiry’s work. Most media attention so far is on elite and celebrity abuse: properly so in the case of Savile, whose status as TV benefactor and court jester, the guest of royals and of Thatcher, allowed him unfettered access to hospitals and children, an odyssey tracked by Dan Davies’s chilling In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile. A few lesser stars from the same era are now in prison. But how and why they and he got away with it for decades will, when the story is fully told, reveal much about post-1960s Britain.

The new big hunt is for grandee perpetrators of sexual crime in the 1980s. There is strong evidence against a few dead or aged men, and grounds for suspicion against others. But hacking a path to the truth through growing conspiracist thickets will be hard. Each new headline naming a politically convenient target from the Thatcher era as a likely abuser plants murmurs of a witchhunt and seeds of wider doubt.

Culture wars are a final trap for the inquiry. In 2003, Ann Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley, northwest of Bradford and Rotherham, tried to engage police and welfare agencies in dealing with “grooming” by “young Asian lads” of underage white girls, and hit a wall. When she went public there was more evasion and scorn than support, though the campaign helped tighten the law on sexual offences. Today’s responses are often equally reductive and in bad faith (Islam is to blame; most abusers are white men), and greatly inflated by sectarian media.

There may also, however, be extra willingness to look at what has actually happened, not least in light of Julie Bindel and Andrew Norfolk’s in-depth research. The latter found the Rotherham pattern replicated in a dozen locations: of girls primed, transported, tortured and traded with impunity over lengthy periods by networks of men of mainly Pakistani origin. Years and lives have been lost, and big gaps in society’s knowledge remain. But this exceptional journalism – in Norfolk’s case resourced initially by the Times’s editor, who gave him six months’ leave to follow the trail – has set a long overdue challenge: to tackle child sexual abuse and related crimes without prejudice or fear of offence, and free of conformist pieties from any quarter.

Just clearing the landmines will be a huge job for the inquiry. It also has to think laterally. Relevant data come from economic and social contexts. For example, the sociologist Dick Hobbs, now at the University of Western Sydney, has studied the “night-time economy” of England’s urban centres, a floating world where street kids mingle among low-qualified immigrants operating around fast-food outlets and alcohol joints, taxi ranks and drug deals. Such encounters, and the forces that shape them, belong to the deeper backstory of modern child sexual abuse in one of its dimensions.

So does a wider British history of exporting, using or disciplining its young. The Victorian era’s sexual underworld, with its many thousands of child prostitutes, is one point of reference. Another is the mass removal of children to Australia, Canada and elsewhere that lasted until the 1960s, for which prime minister Gordon Brown apologised in 2010 (following Kevin Rudd’s example). The historian Lucy Delap and colleagues, studying official responses to child sexual abuse, note rising concern in the early 1920s, which led in 1925 to a departmental committee on sexual offences against young people. Its report “challenged institutions to respond to child sexual abuse with something better than ‘ignorance, carelessness and indifference.’” But, the scholars warn:

“Ignorance, carelessness and indifference” remained characteristic of twentieth-century attitudes towards child sex abuse. This was not for lack of concern – earlier generations did condemn child sexual abuse, and periodically, tried to strengthen safeguards. However, history shows that for change to happen, firm leadership and transparent management across government and the voluntary sector is vital. A robust investigative press is also essential. Without these, potentially pivotal moments, like 1925 and 2015, may become missed opportunities.

A formidable task, then, even more when responsibility is so widely shared. Yet that might also prove an asset. Child sexual abuse is modern Britain’s heart of darkness, but the country is now emotionally readier than ever to face it – and to reach out to victims and survivors. Every possible protection in place, a “never again” moment, and a catharsis whose outward form is some blend of national recognition, apology, substantial payment and “sorry day”? Any such outcome is a long way off. But the new family secrets are out there and are not going away. For everyone’s sake, this inquiry has to deliver. •

The post Dirty big secrets appeared first on Inside Story.

It might come as a surprise that the mother of two children, both of whom are Australian citizens by birth, doesn’t also have an automatic right to live in Australia. At the very least, given the federal government’s professed focus on families, close parental relationships and the best interests of the child, it would seem safe to assume that Teua, in the absence of serious health or security concerns, would be able to traverse a fairly short and straightforward path to a permanent visa.

The opposite is the case. Her only viable route runs via the minister’s office, and the way across the bureaucratic-legal terrain is tortuous and protracted. The nature of the journey is apparent from its very first step: Teua’s only option was to apply for a refugee visa she knew she was probably not entitled to and was almost certain to be refused.

Applying for protection in the full knowledge that your claim lacks merit under the Refugee Convention might sound like an abuse of the system, but it is Australian migration law that forced Teua to make such a manoeuvre. And she is not alone; in an increasing number of cases, the foreign parents of Australian-citizen children have to engage in perverse legal contortions to win the attention of the minister and gain permission to remain in this country with their children.

“I would like to stay in Australia for the sake of my kids,” Teua tells me by phone from her home in Brisbane. I can hear Alexandra chattering away happily in the background. (“She’s trying to catch a butterfly,” says Teua.)

Teua’s story is a complicated one, and some of the details can’t be reported for legal reasons. It isn’t even possible to reveal why certain facts can’t be discussed, except to say that Australia’s system of family law deems that this is in the best interests of the child.

Let’s begin the story with Teua’s son Kamoa, who was born in Solomon Islands to an Australian father. After that relationship ended, Kamoa’s father returned to Queensland. He missed his son, though, and asked Teua to bring him to Australia to visit, which she did, in 2008, travelling on a tourist visa.

A dispute over custody ensued; and since it is illegal for a parent to take a child out of Australia without the approval of the other parent, Teua was in an impossible position. She only had permission to stay in Australia temporarily, but if she went home she would have to leave her son behind. She stayed with relatives and managed to extend her tourist visa several times, but when the visa finally expired after about a year she had no choice but to go back to Solomon Islands alone, leaving Kamoa in the care of his father.

Determined not to lose her son entirely, Teua managed to return to Australia not long after, and since April 2010 she has been trying to secure the right to stay here long-term. She was advised that the best chance she had was to apply for a visa that she was highly unlikely to get, namely a refugee visa.

As Angus Francis, principal solicitor with the Brisbane Refugee and Immigration Legal Service, explains, there is nothing in the law that allows Teua to apply for a visa on the basis that her son Kamoa is an Australian citizen. Things would be different if Teua had been engaged or married to Kamoa’s father or if she had originally come to Australia on a spousal visa. “In such circumstances,” says Francis, “there are provisions in the Migration Act for a person to have a visa application considered, even if the relationship breaks down.”

A woman in Teua’s situation can only gain the right to stay in Australia if she can persuade the immigration minister to exercise ministerial discretion. And the minister can only exercise that discretion after every other possible avenue of application and appeal has been exhausted.

“It’s a huge waste of everyone’s resources and time,” says Francis. “Departmental officers have to consider the case and make a decision. A tribunal hearing has to be held and the tribunal member must be present.” All this must be done before the minister can be asked to consider the case, despite the fact that a negative outcome is entirely predictable at every stage along the way.

(One alternative to this circuitous process can bring a swifter resolution, but it involves an even more perverse legal workaround. Section 195A of the Migration Act allows the minister to issue any kind of visa to a person being held in immigration detention. Francis says he is aware of instances of the immigration department deliberately detaining a person for a brief time simply in order to create the legal foundation for the minister to intervene.)

All this meant that Teua had to try to clear a series of administrative and legal hurdles that were manifestly set too high. She applied for a protection visa knowing that her case was weak, and was rejected by the immigration department. She requested a departmental review of the decision and was knocked back. She appealed to the Refugee Review Tribunal and lost.

Only after she had jumped through all these hoops – a process that took years – was she able to ask the minister to intervene and replace the review tribunal’s decision with one “more favourable to the applicant.”

It is a convoluted, slow and expensive process, but at least the outcome in such cases has generally been positive – until recently, that is. “Under the Labor government, under the Howard government and under governments before that, ministers would usually intervene on behalf of an Australian-citizen child whose parent does not have a visa to remain in Australia,” says Francis. But since the Coalition took office things have been less predictable. Francesca Teua has appealed twice for ministerial intervention and has been knocked back both times. The most recent rejection, in October, came via the assistant immigration minister, Michaelia Cash.

The decision not to intervene is all the more surprising because Teua now has a second child, Alexandra, who, like Kamoa, is an Australian citizen because she has an Australian father. Teua’s relationship with Alexandra’s father ended and he now lives in another state, leaving Teua with full-time care of their daughter. Alexandra’s paternal grandparents live near Brisbane, though, and she often spends time with them at the weekend.

As if the case were not difficult enough, there is yet another dimension to Francesca Teua’s story. She also has four children in Solomon Islands.

The eldest, twenty-one-year-old Maria Rosa, is married to an Australian and has been able to visit her mother in Queensland. Jennifer, now sixteen, has also been able to visit and expects to move to Australia to study as an international student in the near future. The twins, Liam and Liza, are just over a year older than their Australian-citizen brother Kamoa.

So Teua’s return to Australia in 2010 to pursue her right to maintain a relationship with Kamoa involved a gut-wrenching decision, even though she did not know at the time how long the process would take. The result has been a separation of almost five years from Liam and Liza, who live with Teua’s sister. They have not been able to visit their mother in Australia, and nor has Teua been able to go back to Solomon Islands to visit them, because this would almost certainly result in the cancellation of her bridging visa.

“If Francesca were to leave Australia at any time before the minister had finally considered her case, it would be extremely unlikely that she would ever be allowed to return,” explains her lawyer at the Brisbane Refugee and Immigration Legal Service, Bruce Wells. “She therefore had to choose between temporary separation from her family in the Solomons, or possible permanent separation from her children in Australia.”

“I miss the twins, I really miss them,” Teua tells me, “and when I talk to them they are always asking to come and see me here.” Kamoa is also keen to be reunited with his older brother and sister. “Kamoa is always saying to me, ‘When are you going to bring Liam and Liza over to be with us?’”

If she could secure Australian residency, then she would bring the twins to Australia. “They are still young,” Teua says. “I want to raise them and be a good parent for them.”

But she is not asking for charity or handouts. She describes herself as “a hardworking person.” She has no access to welfare benefits, and not only supports herself and Alexandra by working behind a bar but also manages to send money home to her other children. If she were granted a visa, she would have to wait a further two years, like other permanent migrants, before becoming eligible for Centrelink payments.

Francesca Teua’s case is unique and uniquely complicated. But human lives are like that. People end up in situations they didn’t plan or anticipate, and they don’t always fit neatly into the categories that divide up our system for selecting migrants.

This is why the Migration Act provides for ministerial discretion. These “public interest powers,” as the immigration department calls them, are based on an understanding that the “structured and transparent statutory framework for the implementation and management of Australia’s migration and humanitarian program… cannot address every situation where there may be compelling reasons for a person to enter or remain in Australia.”

But these public interest powers are non-delegable, non-compellable and non-reviewable. In other words, the minister alone can make such decisions, he or she can’t be forced to consider any particular case, and no decision made in this way can be challenged in any court or tribunal. Questions of natural justice don’t arise. “Ministerial intervention is not an extension of the visa application or review process,” the immigration department points out; it is intended as “a safety net.”

In order to apply this safety net in a consistent manner, immigration ministers issue guidelines to advise officials about the types of cases – those involving “unique and exceptional circumstances” – that can be brought to their attention. Two of the examples cited on the immigration department website are particularly relevant to Teua and her children. The first involves “circumstances that may bring Australia’s obligations as a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child into consideration.” In such cases, the best interests of a child will be “a primary consideration” in reaching a decision. The second set of circumstances are those that “would result in irreparable harm and continuing hardship to an Australian citizen or permanent resident.” Severing the bonds between a mother and her child would appear to fit squarely into both categories.

The sole requirement for the ministerial discretion to be exercised is that “the minister thinks it is in the public interest to do so.” When the powers are exercised, the minister must table a statement of reasons in parliament. But if the minister decides not to exercise discretion, then no reasons need be given. (Labor’s immigration minister, Chris Bowen, initiated a twice-yearly statistical bulletin on the use of the public interest powers, but this seems to have lapsed since the change of government.)

Francesca Teua’s file shows that the immigration department advised the (Labor) minister back in May 2012 that she had “met health requirements and does not have any character concerns that would preclude a visa grant.” So all we know for certain is that it was concluded at the highest level, on two occasions, that it was not “in the public interest” for Teua to be granted a visa to remain in Australia with her children. “The best interests of her children were clearly not considered sufficient to override other considerations,” says Bruce Wells.

We can only speculate as to what those other considerations might be, but one possibility is that the government is keen to send out the message that getting pregnant is not an automatic route to permanent residency. “The popular narrative in these cases is that the woman has deliberately entered into the relationship and got herself pregnant in order to secure a visa to stay in Australia,” says Angus Francis. “But there is no evidence whatsoever, that I’ve seen, that people are manipulating the system – that is, that they are having a child to get a visa.”

Francis thinks that his legal service and similar organisations are seeing an increasing number of cases involving foreign parents with Australian-citizen children because of the increasing number of temporary migrants living long-term in Australia. “Think about how many international students we now have in Australia,” he says. “Yet we get surprised when people enter into relationships here and end up falling pregnant?

“Not only is there a dramatic increase in student numbers,” he goes on, “but also more and more Australian men are bringing partners here on tourist visas rather than traditional spousal visas, and some of those women end up having children.” If the relationship breaks down and no partner visa application has been lodged, the woman has no right to remain and there is no visa she can apply for on the basis that her child is an Australian citizen.

Francis says such cases put an incredible strain on resources and tend to drag on longer when the minister chooses not to intervene. “We’re only a community legal centre,” he says. “To have a case open for five years is a long time. And these cases are very intensive. Mounting a request to the minister involves marshalling a whole lot of support from family friends and community. It is an incredible drain on our services that would be better spent on other cases if there was an easier avenue for these types of cases to be resolved.”

It is not just women who are affected, of course. Melbourne immigration lawyer Carina Ford has been representing an overseas student who fathered a child with his Australian girlfriend. The child, who is automatically a citizen, is now three years old. “As a student, the father had a legitimate visa to stay in Australia, and so the couple did not get around to putting in a partner visa,” says Ford. “There did not seem to be any rush and visa applications cost thousands of dollars. But now the father has finished his studies, the relationship has fallen apart, and he no longer has any legal right to remain in the country and maintain a relationship with his child.”

Ford thinks offering an alternate visa pathway for the father to remain in Australia is in the best interests of the child, the mother and the Australian taxpayer. “If the father was given a permanent visa to remain in Australia then he would also be required to contribute financially to the child’s upbringing,” she says. “It’s unlikely that he’s going to pay maintenance for a three-year-old child he can’t see when he’s back in his home country where wages are significantly lower.”

All three lawyers agree that Scott Morrison seemed less inclined than his predecessors as minister to intervene in cases brought to his attention by the Migration and Refugee Review Tribunals, even when the interests of an Australian child may have been affected.

“The ministerial guidelines on how to deal with unique circumstances and exceptional circumstances didn’t change with change of government,” says Wells. “The key criteria applicable in these cases are still Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the risk of doing harm to an Australian citizen or permanent resident, particularly a child. It is the application of policy that seems to have changed, rather than policy itself.”

According to Wells, “Australian-citizen children ought to enjoy the same rights to be with both their parents as any other Australian-citizen child. They should not be held responsible for things that happened prior to their birth and over which they had no control.”

Since her request for ministerial intervention was rejected in October, Teua has readied herself psychologically to return to Solomon Islands, expecting that she will take Alexandra with her but leave Kamoa behind. She is deeply concerned about the pain this will involve.

“Alexandra’s grandparents would be very sad and upset if I had to move back to Solomon Islands with her,” she says. She tells me that Alexandra’s father, who lives in Tasmania, has also been hoping to move back to Queensland to be closer to his daughter.

When she discussed the impending separation with a distraught Kamoa, she told him that he was a big boy and would have to accept that she must leave him behind in order to look after his little sister. “I told him we would keep in touch by Skype,” she says forlornly.

There is another twist in Teua’s tale, though, and some further glimmers of hope.

In September, former minister Scott Morrison used his discretionary powers to grant a visa to thirty-two-year-old South Korean woman Eunsil Park, enabling her to stay in Australia with her five-year-old Australian daughter Ari.

Park originally came to Australia on a working holiday visa, and met Ari’s father eleven months later. But the relationship ended and Ari’s father is now living and working overseas. As was the case for Francesca Teua, there was no visa that Park could apply for that would enable her to stay in Australia even though her daughter is an Australian citizen.

In March 2014, Morrison formally rejected an application to intervene in Park’s case even though his predecessor, Chris Bowen, was reportedly on the verge of intervening in the case before Labor lost office. But Morrison changed his mind after intense media coverage, passionate appeals by Ari’s paternal grandfather, and lobbying by federal Liberal National MP Bert van Manen.

Teua’s removal from Australia is still pending, and she has not initiated any further legal action to seek to prevent it. Recently, though, she received correspondence indicating the immigration department is considering referring her case to the minister for a third time.

It appears that there are at least some government officials who believe that it is in the public interest for this Solomon Islands mother to remain in the same country as her Australian children. Francesca Teua must now wait to see whether the new minister, Peter Dutton, sees things the same way. •

The post Australian children, foreign parents and the right to stay appeared first on Inside Story.

Every day at the depot began with a reckoning for children who wet their beds. Staff draped the urine-soaked sheets around bed wetters’ heads and made them parade around the dormitory. The food was often rotten, and when Meyer threw up after eating weevil-ridden porridge, he was forced to eat his own vomit. Punishments included floggings and scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush, but the most feared was the small cupboard under the stairs. Boys were locked in with no food or water, and they soiled themselves until they were released. They never spoke, Meyer said. “We held hands.”

When prospective foster parents visited, the boys were lined up along the front veranda to be inspected. Meyer was fostered out eight times, and in his final placement he was sent to an old woman at Wentworthville, New South Wales. Meyer didn’t know who his parents were, why he was a ward, or if he had any family members at all, and – like every other adult in his life – his new foster parent wouldn’t tell him anything.

On 10 May 1954, his eighteenth birthday, Meyer simply fled, never to return. He had twenty-four pounds and eighteen shillings, the clothes he was wearing, a tennis racket, a cricket bat, and no friends, acquaintances or family that he knew of. He had no idea how to find a job or a place to stay.

In Australia, at least half a million children were placed in institutional care in the last century. For a long time these children were ignored, but over the last twenty years many stories about their mistreatment in homes and its long, damaging aftermath have emerged.

When the children reached a certain age and were ejected from their “homes,” they entered their own country like refugees, knowing nothing about “councils or libraries or voting.” Many died from drug- and alcohol-related causes, and some built careers in institutions, like the navy, or in the religious orders that ran their homes. Some became successful, but many struggled. Figures suggest that one-in-three attempted suicide, many experienced homelessness, and as a group they had a high incidence of mental illness and physical injuries.

As well as being places of mental and physical torture, the institutions systematically controlled children’s access to information while they were institutionalised as well as once they left. In many homes the staff had authority over every connection children had with the outside world, not sharing news and even confiscating letters from family. Some children were even schooled at the institution and did not leave the grounds for years. Many were not taught to read or write or do basic mathematics. Their names were arbitrarily changed, and it was common for them to be addressed only by a number. Some children were told that their parents were dead when they weren’t or that they never wanted to see them again when they did.

Even though it has been decades since group homes closed, vital information about their residents is still being withheld. For the children it’s as if someone pushed them through the looking glass, and decades later they still can’t find their way back.

##

What gets passed down? Records, of course, are by definition one key source of personal data. It may be a banal observation, but sometimes you don’t notice what gets passed down until it doesn’t. Birth certificates, school records, the names of family members, and all the other bits of information that we take for granted only become disturbingly obvious in their absence. The ordinary records that chart the passage of a life matter a great deal – not just to governments and corporations and librarians but to ordinary people too.

It’s almost impossible for most of us to imagine not knowing such facts about ourselves, and yet this information was effectively erased from the lives of the children of twentieth-century orphanages.

One “ex‑orphan” told me that these former group-home children want, like any other citizen, to have information about themselves and their family – or its proxy – and all the power that such knowledge brings. Yet there are enormous obstacles to obtaining it. In Australia, records are scattered throughout each state, held by government records offices and by the religious institutions that housed children. Government departments may take years to respond to a single request. Many records were destroyed, but there’s little clarity about what was lost and what was never kept in the first place. Many files are undated, sloppy or incorrect, and there is no consistency in how files are searched for or delivered. There’s no central organising body, and most people need professional-grade archivist skills to find and understand the documents.

Generally the ex‑orphans distrust bureaucracy, and while it is intimidating enough for them to enter a neutral institution like a public records office, many must return to the actual organisation that mistreated them. The overzealous application of privacy laws also means that when many care leavers do manage to receive files, their missing siblings’ names are redacted. One ex‑ward received a photo of a children’s party with all the little faces at the table whited out except for his own.

Naturally, when information can be retrieved, even the most banal detail of a stolen life can be traumatic. “People get rotten drunk in order to read their files,” one activist told me. In a government report one woman described opening her files at home alone and being committed to a psychiatric ward a week later. Others put the files away and never look at them.

##

I met Geoff Meyer in 2012. With his Fair Isle sweater and slicked-down hair, he looked like anyone’s seventy-six-year-old grandfather. He was courtly and jokey, and he called me “mate.” He said that not long after he had run away to Sydney, “I started to get it into my brain to find out if I had any family.” He guessed that the best place to look was the Department of Child Welfare. “I’m a state ward,” he told a young man at the local office. “I’m looking to see if I’ve got a mother and father.” The young man went into another room and after five minutes returned and said, “I think you might have a sister.” He disappeared again to check further, and then an older man came out and said to Meyer, “I think you had better leave.” Meyer thought he had misunderstood. “I think you had better leave,” the man repeated. “No,” said Meyer. They argued back and forth, the man continuing to try to dismiss Meyer with no explanation and Meyer refusing to budge. Then the man told him, “Get out, or I’ll call the fucking police.” Meyer was frightened of being sent back to his foster mother, so he left.

He got a job, married and had four children and, as the years passed, eleven grandchildren. Meyer never told any of them that he had been a state ward. But when he retired, he started to go to the state records offices to see what he could find. Even then he didn’t tell his wife about his past. “It felt very, very private,” he explained. He eventually tracked down his birth certificate and discovered that his mother was Maisie Aileen Meyer, a Sydney local, and his father was Leo Joseph Meyer, an American sailor. There was no information about why he had been made a state ward and no record of contact from his parents.

As he continued his search for records about his life and family, Meyer was told different things by different departments. Some officials were kind to him; others were perfunctory. One said his information had been lost in a flood; another claimed it had been destroyed in a fire. At the records offices Meyer had to insist that he was legally entitled to a copy of his files. When he did receive them, they had taken months to reach him and were often missing documents from the original sets he had seen.

When he was sixty-eight, Meyer saw a newspaper notice seeking former state wards. He responded and shortly after found himself at the head office of the Care Leavers Australia Network in Sydney, speaking with one of its founders, Leonie Sheedy. “All that time, I thought it was only happening to me, but it was happening all over the place.” When he got home that day and told his wife about his experience, she asked, “What really went on in your life?” So he began to tell her too.

Over a cup of tea Meyer showed me the files he had recovered. The first item was his intermediate school certificate. He found other records about his education and his foster parents, but he could locate only one from before he was ten. He spends a lot of time now searching for the missing records of his first decade; they are proof of an otherwise invisible life, but he also wants them so he can sue the government for compensation.

The likelihood of Meyer’s finding his files is remote. All over the world the funds devoted to preserving records and archives are being cut. Of course, the fewer funds that are available, the more endangered are the records that do remain.

In 2012 an Australian state ombudsman revealed that the government had committed hundreds of breaches of records-management legislation. He discovered that a single department was in possession of eighty linear kilometres of children’s home files, most of them uncatalogued. Some were stored in basements with dripping water and rat infestations; others were illegally marked for destruction.

While freedom‑of‑information acts in most Western English-speaking countries may grant people like Geoff Meyer access to their records, information that has not been indexed can never truly be free. The care leavers suspect the governments are suppressing files to avoid being sued. Perhaps, but bureaucratic apathy achieves the same ends.

The last time I saw Meyer, he told me that he had discovered a distant cousin on his father’s side in the United States through Ancestry.com. His new cousin told him that his father had returned to the United States and died young. Later Meyer’s mother and another man also set sail for America. Their ship berthed in California, but there the trail went cold.

Meyer wondered for a long time whether he actually had a sister but never found a trace of her. What he wanted to know most of all was whether he’d been surrendered or taken. If he’d been surrendered, he reasoned, maybe the person who’d turned him in was a relative. Maybe it was a sister of his mother, maybe she had children too, and maybe he had more family. Still, he said, “I’m seventy-six. How long do I have to find out?” •

This is an edited extract from The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures by (Black Inc.), $29.99.

The post Silence appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the initial support of the children’s mother and most of Winchelsea, the father, Robert Farquharson, was convicted of murder at his first trial. Even after a second trial and failed appeals, people were still arguing about his guilt or innocence. In 2011 the ABC’s Australian Story presented the view of Farquharson’s family and friends that an innocent man had been imprisoned. Last year, Megan Norris published the mother’s version of events with a title that leaves no doubt about its contrary perspective, On Father’s Day: Cindy Gambino’s Shattering Account of Her Children’s Revenge Murders.

Helen Garner followed the case from the first committal hearing, when Farquharson politely held the door of the courtroom open for her. Two years later, she attended the seven weeks of tedious technical evidence and the heart-stopping statements at the first trial; three years on, she was at the appeal retrial; and she stuck it out through a Supreme Court appeal eighteen months later, and then for the thirty minutes it took the High Court to reject an application for a final appeal in 2013. She forced herself to observe and record every detail of these trials over the years – a commitment that raises the question, what is to be gained from this intent raking over of the horror? This House of Grief answers that question with a vivid inquiry into the operations of our justice system, an acute study of human psychology and the language that can become self-mythology, and an account, almost in passing, of the way communal ethics are shared across classes in Australia.

Garner treats the courtroom as the arena where justice is performed in our society, and she watches with the attention of a perceptive theatre critic, noting every gesture, every shift of voice or wandering gaze, every evasive phrase. She has done this before – in Joe Cinque’s Consolation – but there her interest was in the spiritual dimension of justice, in the gap between legal and moral rights, and in the failure of public justice to provide any psychological restitution for the loss of life. In this case, she positions herself in the courtroom from the start, trying to see what jurors learn and to understand their responses. She takes us into the “beautiful” Supreme Court of Victoria with its “soaring ceiling, pale plaster walls, and fittings of dark, ponderous timber,” she gives us brief character studies of the barristers and judge, and she turns the evidence into a narrative stripped of the tedium of the court experience.

For days, Farquharson’s barrister batters away at the technical evidence and the police failures in marking out the tyre tracks. Experts dispute the probability of “cough syncope,” a condition that can lead to a loss of consciousness after coughing. There are arguments about the camber of the road. With their learning and experience of the system, the judge and the barristers orchestrate events, drawing the admiration and trust of the newcomers to Australian state justice. An artificial process makes order from the messy, disordered human lives that come to its attention.

Of course, Garner adds another layer of order – her own sensitivity to language and gesture, and her recognition of the individual humanity of the gowned barristers, the judge and the jurors locked up with their responsibility. She imagines the life of the defendant, turned out of his home by his wife to spend his nights with his father after days working at a dreary cleaning job. As the wife takes up with her new partner, a concreter, she speculates about the glamour to a housebound mother of a concrete pour on the new house, and she watches the terrible grief of the family as the technical experts speculate on the nature of the children’s last minutes.

The evidence is so harrowing that the reader may wish to join Garner in the restorative martini or gin that she drinks with friends at the end of the worst days. From time to time, she dreams a redemptive fantasy in which the little boys come back to life. “Was there a form of madness called court fatigue?” she wonders, revealing “the crazy magical thinking that filled my waking mind, and, at night, my dreams: if only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead.” The children’s parents and most people in the courtroom seem to think the same way.

A criminal court is one of the rare places in Australia where an educated class of professionals engages with poorer people in a struggle to find a shared ethics and morality. The judges and barristers here are acknowledged as clever, even brilliant, while many of the rural people who give evidence are inarticulate and financially burdened. The unknowable jurors strike Garner as ordinary people, struggling to pay attention in their casual clothes. She shows an acute sensitivity to class, enjoying the “democratic counter” at the coffee cart outside the court, where even the occasional judge stops by for a takeaway.

Inside the court the eminent professor who has never seen a “cough syncope” case suffers by comparison with the doctor from Geelong steadily compiling a list of cases. The police expert who appears with a giant protractor and calculator draws a wry “I hate a bloke who thinks he knows his job” from the children’s grandfather. Garner gently mocks the absurdity of expert jargon as a counsellor talks about the “the parental dyad” and “suicidal ideation” but, more significantly, she picks up the phrases that the participants cling to as explanations for their lives. Cindy Gambino repeats the mantra that she “loved” her husband but was not “in love” with him; Farquharson clutches at stock phrases: “I loved them more than life itself,” “I was a very loving father.” Garner shrewdly notes the recurrence of “the sentimental fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our destructive urges.”

Garner watches the jurors flag under the weight of detail, then notes how they come to attention when a witness invites their sympathy or appeals to their sense of humour. A rattled policeman comments on the excellence of his colleague’s photographs and the court laughs, partly in sympathy for the pasting he is suffering from the defence barrister. Our knowledge of events must always be incomplete, but Garner concludes that we are more likely to rely on our understanding of human behaviour than trust in science. She quotes Janet Malcolm: “Jurors sit there presumably weighing evidence but in actuality they are studying character.”

In this account, Farquharson becomes responsible for his own conviction. He claims his right to silence in the first trial, but the recorded statements he made to the police in the days after the deaths, with their anxious grasping at excuses and lack of concern for the boys, prove devastating. When he takes the stand in the second trial he can add no details about the events of the night, and claims his bereavement as an unassailable excuse for his lack of recall. As Garner puts it, “the final fortnight of evidence was like watching, in ghastly slow motion, a man slither down the face of a cliff. Sometimes his shirt would snag on a protruding branch, or his fall would be arrested by a tiny ledge, a fragile outcrop; but the fabric would stretch and snap, the narrow shelf would crumble, and down he would go again, feet first, eyes wide open, arms outstretched into the void.”

Farquharson seems to lack any imagination or powers of empathy, let alone any language skill. These are the very qualities Garner brings to the matter, enriching his miserable actions and failures with an understanding that encompasses not only the horrors of this case but also its effect on the psyche of all of us who know about it. It is as if she is trying to fill the terrible absence there. Yet she writes with restraint and tact, managing to avoid what she calls “the tabloid language that can reduce the purest human anguish to a pulp.” There are no photographs in her book, though the newspapers have been publishing one of the three boys sitting on a couch that shows them to be as appealing as anyone’s young children.

Occasionally I meet women who refuse to read Helen Garner’s books since The First Stone, or who read all her subsequent work through its prism – as if, once they’ve categorised her as a traitor to feminism, she can have nothing worth hearing to say. In the context of recent prominent sexual harassment and offence trials, The First Stone deserves rereading for its concern about the incompetent way our institutions handle such matters, and the difficulty of finding just penalties for the perpetrators. Joe Cinque’s Consolation looked more closely at the spiritual damage of crime, and the failure of the legal system to provide any emotional or psychological restitution, but it also noted the effects of the defendant’s silence in court and the absence of a jury.

Here, Garner offers a more positive view of the courts. Lex Lasry, the defending barrister who delivered the most devastating line in the Cinque book (“Duty of care and duty to act are not the same thing”), appears as the scrupulous and sensitive judge in the appeal trial. The barristers battle on through every detail to the point of tedium. The police hold the line against determined attack. The witnesses struggle with the awful burden of their knowledge, and the jury reveals itself capable of making decisions independently of the opinions of the public and journalists in the courtroom.

In the closing pages, Garner insists that the fate of the Farquharson children is a legitimate concern for all of us. The court has been the place where that concern springs into action, and This House of Grief leaves us with the slight hope that our justice system can maintain some of our shared sense of humanity. •

The post Character studies appeared first on Inside Story.

When Sister Brigid Arthur first encountered “Ana” she was “sparky,” despite being in detention. She appeared physically and mentally well, and was as excited as “the brightest young mother-to-be” about the imminent birth of her first child. The second time they met, the baby was one week old and Ana appeared sad and confused. Sister Brigid recalls her saying tearfully, “I shouldn’t have had this baby here,” and “I shouldn’t have had a baby at all under these circumstances.”

On each subsequent visit the situation was worse. “Her eyes got duller and duller,” says Arthur. “Eventually she became hugely depressed and ended up in hospital in neonatal psychiatric care.”

Ana is one of several new mothers among the asylum seekers held at MITA, the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation facility in the Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows. Described as “alternative accommodation in a low security setting,” MITA is nevertheless a “place of immigration detention.” At the end of April, 306 people were held at MITA – 122 men, seventy-five women and 109 children.

Ana was transferred to the facility from Nauru late in her pregnancy. Her husband was brought to Melbourne later, in time for the birth of their baby. Other mothers have been transferred to MITA from Christmas Island, which also lacks adequate obstetric facilities. Among this group, a slide into mental illness has become increasingly common.

Brigid Arthur says Ana’s illness is different from the postnatal depression that affects some new mothers in the general community. She is convinced that it is linked to the experience of being held in detention with her newborn baby, not least because of the number of mothers she has visited at MITA who have ended up in hospital in a similar condition, usually after attempting an act of self-harm. “This is the total pattern now,” she says. “There is only one thing causing it and that is detention.”

Arthur has been working with asylum seekers since 2001, when she and other nuns from her order founded the Brigidine Asylum Seekers Project. A regular visitor to MITA, she witnesses the torment of fathers as well as of mothers. Mizam, for instance, whose wife has been hospitalised twice since giving birth to their second child, feels deeply his responsibility for their decision to seek refuge in Australia, which landed them in Nauru. He is also acutely concerned about the combined effect of prolonged detention and his wife’s illness on their first child, who is only three years old.

The best that mental health professionals can do is patch these mothers up temporarily before they are sent back to the same conditions that made them sick in the first place – this time with the added stress of being kept under constant surveillance. “The guards can’t win,” acknowledges Arthur. “They need to keep a close watch on these mothers to check they are okay and prevent any repeat attempt at self-harm. But the surveillance itself exacerbates the women’s problems.”

Louise Newman, director of the Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology at Monash University, says that the vast majority of medical health professionals would agree that a detention centre is not a suitable environment for a new mother and her baby. “In the context of the terrible uncertainty of their situation,” she says, “mothers often feel stressed and guilty about bringing a new child into the world. Their partners often share that sense of hopelessness and despair.”

Newman says that there is “a steady stream” of pregnant women being brought to the mainland to get access to medical services that aren’t available in Nauru or Christmas Island. (There are currently no women or children held at Manus.) “There are very limited services available at detention centres like MITA,” says Newman, who practises at a psychiatric clinic that has admitted mothers and babies from the facility. “Services like ours are trying to help where we can, but there is no formal arrangement with the immigration department.”

Until it was disbanded in December last year, Newman was a member of the federal government’s Immigration Health Advisory Group. Without the input of the professionals on that body, there is little external scrutiny of what is going on in immigration detention. Newman has observed one baby in MITA who is “badly losing weight” because the mother is incapable of feeding. The young, inexperienced father is doing his best to cope but is also showing signs of depressive illness. Some mothers are suicidal; others threaten harm to themselves or their babies.

Both Arthur and Newman believe that it is impossible for the mothers to get better in detention, not least because recovery could result in their being sent to Nauru. “They are all told on arrival that they will be sent back six weeks after their babies are born,” says Arthur. “They dread the heat, the boredom, the frustration, the constant fear of an eruption of relationships between detainees and staff that will result in violence.”

Whether Ana is ultimately returned to Nauru may depend on the courts. Her baby is one of seventy-two children born in detention in Australia who are challenging their status as “unauthorised maritime arrivals” in a case due to be heard in the Federal Circuit Court in mid October. Brigid Arthur has agreed to be the babies’ litigation guardian, which means that the parents have given her permission to instruct solicitors on the babies’ behalf. “The parents are not in a position to provide instructions on a day-to-day basis because they are in detention in different parts of the country,” says Katie Robertson from Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, who have taken on the case pro bono.

If it succeeds, the litigation will challenge the hardline arrangements introduced on 19 July 2013, when prime minister Kevin Rudd declared that “asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia.” Anyone who arrived after that date can be transferred to Nauru or Manus for detention and processing.

The court case was prompted by Baby Ferouz, who was born in Brisbane’s Mater Hospital in November last year after his mother Latifer was brought to Australia from detention in Nauru. Suffering respiratory problems, Baby Ferouz made headlines when it was reported that he had been separated from his mother for up to eighteen hours a day while she was locked up in immigration detention.

To prevent Latifer and Ferouz, and other parents and newborns from being shipped to Nauru, the legal team must convince the courts that Ferouz and his fellow infant litigants are not “unauthorised maritime arrivals.”

Section 5AA of the Migration Act defines an unauthorised maritime arrival as “a person who entered Australia by sea.” It goes on to say that entering Australia by sea means entering “the migration zone except on an aircraft.” This is a remarkably vague, catch-all provision. Maurice Blackburn’s Jacob Varghese says it means the question before the court is whether babies born in Australian hospitals can be deemed to have entered the country by sea because they did not come on a plane.

It will be a highly technical argument, says Varghese. “It’s possible sometimes for legislation to say that black is white and white is black, but in such cases the law must usually be expressed extremely clearly to satisfy a court,” he says. In this instance, it appears that neither the drafters of the definition, nor the parliamentarians who passed it into law ever stopped to consider how it might apply to the status of the Australian-born children of asylum seekers.

“We will be arguing that in this situation the normal English-language meaning of ‘enter by sea’ should apply,” says Varghese, “in which case it is clear that a baby born in an Australian hospital did not arrive here on a boat.”

Whether a baby born in Australia is entitled to apply for a protection visa is one issue, but there’s also the question of whether any of these babies will be entitled to apply for Australian citizenship. Baby Ferouz is a special case because he is the child of Rohingyan asylum seekers. “The Burmese government does not recognise members of the Rohingyan minority as citizens, which makes Baby Ferouz stateless,” says Varghese. “On this basis we think this Australian-born baby should be granted Australian citizenship.”

Most of the other babies aren’t stateless, but if the court finds that they are not unauthorised maritime arrivals then they can lodge an onshore application for a protection visa, a right that they are currently denied. The babies and their parents could remain in Australia while their cases are processed, and stay here if they are recognised as refugees. In other words, Ana and other parents of newborns would potentially be spared the fate of being sent to offshore detention.

Varghese acknowledges that a win in the courts could have unintended consequences. The Australian government might respond by ensuring that all pregnant women give birth in Nauru, despite the rudimentary medical facilities available there. But he thinks this is unlikely. “At some point you hope there are limits even to this government’s cruelty.”

A leaked report prepared for the government by medical professionals who visited Nauru in February notes that “the Nauruan maternal mortality ratio is thirty-five times higher than the comparative value for Australia.” The report describes “substantial ongoing risk factors for physical and mental health problems in people held in detention on Nauru” and identifies gaps in child health screening, and child health expertise and services in particular. It also raises concerns about adequate protection for children from physical and sexual abuse.

At Senate estimates in February, however, the government indicated that it is upgrading antenatal, postnatal and maternity services in Nauru. Assistant immigration minister Michaelia Cash said the Nauru hospital delivers around 360 babies each year and she made clear that the government expects asylum seekers to have their babies there too. “The hospital has two delivery beds, six postnatal beds and a special-care baby unit with a neonatal incubator, infant warmer, oxygen, standard neonatal resuscitation equipment and nasogastric feeding capability,” she said. “The hospital has the capacity to perform caesarean sections and other surgical interventions and has pain-relief options.”

According to information provided at Senate estimates, there were thirteen pregnant women detained on Nauru in February, fifty-three on Christmas Island and forty-three in mainland detention centres. A spokesperson for the immigration minister, Scott Morrison, says these women “are provided care in line with Australian community standards, including access to antenatal classes and medical check-ups” and that given its duty of care, the department ensures that women give birth “under appropriate and safe arrangements.”

But the immigration minister’s office failed to answer questions about how many babies have been born to women in detention in the past year and how many women have been transferred from Christmas Island or Nauru to give birth on the mainland.

If the action in the Federal Circuit Court is successful then the government might also seek to broaden the Migration Act’s definition of unauthorised maritime arrivals to include their Australian-born children. Again, Varghese thinks this unlikely. Noting that the government doesn’t have a majority in the Senate, he says, “a debate in federal parliament about whether or not newborn babies should be packed off to Nauru could be a welcome thing.”

While the legal action offers asylum seekers with newborns some longer-term hope of staying in Australia, for now the experience of detention continues to erode their well-being. Katie Robertson holds grave fears for the welfare of many of her clients, particularly those she visited recently on Christmas Island.

Robertson says asylum-seeker children there have few toys, limited activities, little stimulation and few places to play. The ground is so hard and stony that babies cannot be put down to crawl. It is a place where asylum seekers, including babies, are routinely referred to by their identification numbers rather than their names. The lawyers who travelled to Christmas Island were so upset by what they witnessed that they have started a drive among colleagues and friends to collect children’s toys and personal effects to send to families there.

As the federal government winds up mainland detention centres in Darwin and Inverbrackie, in the Adelaide Hills, the number of young children on Christmas Island is growing. In a pre-dawn operation in mid June, five families were moved there from Inverbrackie at very short notice. Jacob Varghese says some of Maurice Blackburn’s clients with babies just two months old have been transferred in this way. “The parents are just told to pack up and leave, they have no practical opportunity to call their lawyers or others to tell them,” he says.

Varghese says the Christmas Island centre is not a suitable place for babies and children, a view shared by a child psychiatrist and a paediatrician, who spent a week on Christmas Island in March for the Human Rights Commission’s inquiry into children in immigration detention. The pair reported finding “an impoverished and harsh environment with little opportunity for safe play and exploration, education, physical exercise or for nurturing family time.”

At the time, the 1700 detainees on Christmas Island included 356 children and about twenty-five babies who had been born in detention. Parents were forced to line up for nappies, which would be dispensed three at a time. Baby wipes and scoops of formula were also rationed.

Officers with torches interrupted sleep twice each night when they knocked on the door to conduct a roll call. There is the constant fear that one of those interruptions in the early hours of the morning could be an “extraction,” when detainees, including families with children, are transferred without warning to Nauru. As Robertson observes, “To wake up and find their neighbours have been taken away in the night reawakens the trauma these people have already experienced.”

There is another option. It is entirely within the government’s power to move children out of formal detention facilities and to accommodate them in the community. In fact, such a move would appear to be consistent with existing legislation.

Section 4AA of the Migration Act states that “Parliament affirms as a principle that a minor shall only be detained as a measure of last resort.” According to the immigration department’s procedural advice manual (effectively a compendium of the minister’s instructions to departmental officers), when minors are detained, this should be done “when and wherever possible” in a community setting “rather than under traditional detention arrangements.”

Under Section 197AB of the Act, the minister has the power to move people out of formal detention and into such a community setting by making what is called a “residence determination.” This provision was introduced by the Howard government in 2005 and enabled health professionals like Louise Newman to make representations on behalf of asylum seekers who were suffering severe mental illness or other health problems as a result of their detention. Departmental officers would bring such cases to the minister’s attention, and in many instances asylum seekers were transferred to a community setting. A dramatic improvement in health generally followed.

In theory this can still happen. If it did, then families like Ana’s would be the beneficiaries. “These babies and their parents need to be in the community if their health is to improve,” says Newman. But the minister can’t be compelled to use this power, or even to consider cases that are brought to his attention. Newman says departmental staff and medical professionals have been pressured not to make such requests in the first place, and where requests have been made, they have not received a response.

Immigration minister Scott Morrison’s office did not respond to questions about how many times he has used his power to move asylum seekers into community detention, but he has explicitly discouraged his department from asking him even to consider the cases of any asylum seekers who arrived after the deadline Kevin Rudd imposed last year.

In a 22 March update to the procedural advice manual, Morrison states that unless he requests it, or there are exceptional reasons, he “would not expect” the department to refer to him any person who “arrived after 19 July 2013.”

Both the government and the Labor opposition remain committed to offshore processing, arguing that it is necessary to save lives at sea by deterring asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia by boat.

“It’s a seductive argument,” says Sister Brigid, “in the sense that you’d have to be a monster to say that it’s acceptable that nearly 2000 people have drowned at sea trying to get to Australia. The question is whether we have really tried to find another solution.” Have we really tried to work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, she asks, to set up a regional processing system that might offer people an alternative to getting on boats? “Of course we can’t just let people drown. But what we are doing now is calculated cruelty.”

Jacob Varghese says the only way deterrence can work is if we create conditions “that are as bad as the situation in the places these people have fled from.” He compares it to “creating a totalitarian regime within our own country.” Louise Newman is even blunter. “If we send these young families back to Nauru,” she says, “we will be condemning some babies to death.” •

The post Unlawful deliveries appeared first on Inside Story.

Almost everyone knows someone in at least one corner of the “adoption triangle” – adoptee, birth mother or adoptive parent. Regardless of personal links, though, the permanent transfer of babies or young children from the women who bore them to those prepared to raise them as their own is a compelling narrative. In this fresh look at the subject, three scholars in the fields of welfare history, the history of the family, and public policy, offer a lucid, clearly written account, compact in length but not in scope, of adoption in Australia. Their timeline runs from the early years of white settlement to the entirely different conditions in the early twenty-first century, intertwining expert knowledge, first-person experiences, and key documents and legislation. Well-chosen photos of past practice add to the vividness of the narrative.

The authors view the basic transaction – the transfer of the adoptee from one setting to another, often very different one – through the prism of the market within which it occurs. This approach illuminates much about each stage and stakeholder; particularly revealing is how this latter group came to include governments, social workers, hospitals, churches, charities, and self-help and advocacy organisations. (In recent years, some of these parties have publicly apologised for their earlier assumptions and actions.)

The authors examine attitudes towards “illegitimacy,” as well as notions of “a desire for a child,” “a right to a child” and “the best interests of the child,” and the effects on adoption rates of contraception, abortion and reproductive technology. The provision of state support for single mothers, the influence of the media, the speaking out by previously unheard voices, the rise and eventual decline of the inter-country adoption program – each of these unpredictable factors plays a role in the history that unfolds in The Market in Babies.

FORTY or so years ago, when availability outstripped demand and a buyers’ market prevailed, the situation today would have been hard to envisage. In that period of abundance, adoption was administered “as a service to childless couples,” as the authors put it – a service that increasingly privileged them over birth families and adoptees, whose rights were disregarded. Birth records were sealed and a new birth certificate, designed to expunge the past, was issued.

Further back, the first waves of European settlers had made their own informal and fluid arrangements, handing over children they were unable or unwilling to parent to relatives or other families they knew who were prepared to do so. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the growth of population centres led to the real beginnings of the market: newspaper advertisements placed by parents seeking adoption, by persons unknown, of children surplus to their requirements or capacity; and other advertisements placed by those wishing to adopt, for a range of motives, not always unmixed. The relinquishing party would often offer financial inducement to the adopting party.

These private arrangements, with their attendant risks for all concerned, ceased in the 1920s when all states except Western Australia (which had already done so in 1896) passed regulating legislation requiring adoptions to be registered and no money to change hands. By guaranteeing the new parents security of possession and protection from the birth family, these new laws were intended to encourage adoption, regarded as the perfect solution to a double problem: the stain on a child of being born outside wedlock, on the one hand, and the pain of infertility experienced by “respectable” childless couples, on the other. Yet the public response to these moves was far from enthusiastic. Demand for babies did take off during and after the second world war, however, and it remained high – and easily met – for the next thirty years or so. In the ten years from 1968, for instance, some 68,000 children were adopted in Australia.

With more children on the market than approved couples to take them in, a peak was reached for the year 1971–72, when just under 10,000 children were placed with new families. In light of the surplus, adoptive parents could afford to be picky; the child they hoped to make their own may have been a precious commodity but it had to be suitable. Highly valued were blond hair, blue eyes, and an acceptable background or heredity… or at least one that a different and better environment could overcome.

Many would-be adoptive couples could view prospective infants on parade at public events (one organisation “reported great success” as a result of displaying the children in its care at its “regular stall” at the Royal Melbourne Show) or make their choice after looking through albums produced by institutions seeking to place relinquished infants. They might also have been enticed by cinema advertisements asking them to consider coming forward. Magazine and newspaper articles depicted married couples who were prepared to adopt a child bearing the stigma of illegitimacy as “open-hearted and generous,” and birth mothers were promoted as “doing the right thing” for their offspring by giving them up.

During the 1950s and 60s, this market spawned the new profession of social work. With private arrangements outlawed, social and welfare workers bent their skills to assessing couples and playing matchmaker with babies. Satisfied couples would sometimes return to adopt subsequent children. Although parents were expected to tell children that they were adopted, the sealing of records meant there was little or no information they could pass on about the child’s origins. It wasn’t until the unsealing of records in most states in the mid 1990s, after intense pressure by lobby groups of the disenfranchised, that adoptees had the opportunity to identify and perhaps trace their birth parents.

The glut of babies to supply a clamorous market had come at a price of enormous suffering for the overwhelmingly young, unmarried (but not necessarily unpartnered) women who had given birth to them. Myriad stories about their shameful treatment are quoted in this book and can be found in many other books, and on websites and blogs. The women recount their ignorance about their condition, their options at the time and their rights; of being pressured by parents, social workers, hospital staff and others to sign away their babies at birth or soon after. Such decisions were often made under the influence of heavy drugs and as the result of other kinds of appallingly cruel, officially sanctioned duress.

Frequently, birth mothers were not told that they had several days in which to revoke their decision to relinquish, and that there was in fact a small amount of government financial aid available to them even prior to the introduction of the pension for supporting mothers in 1973, which would change the equation so dramatically. Had more single mothers been aware of such assistance in those years, more of them might have been able to keep their babies, albeit with financial and other support from their parents.

The second half of the 1970s saw a paradigm shift in the baby market. By 1975 the number of adoptions of children born in Australia had fallen to about 5000 a year, and was on a steady decline; after 1991 it didn’t reach 1000 a year. Fewer babies were being born to single women because of increased use of contraception and access to abortion, and of those who were, their mothers were likely to keep them. The last decades of the century saw the reversal of community and media attitudes towards the morality of mothers raising children on their own. Unpinning the possibility of single motherhood was the increase in the number of women in the workforce and the concomitant rise in the availability and affordability of childcare.

MEANWHILE, the market in babies had taken off in a new direction with the growing national consciousness of war orphans in Vietnam. The dramatic airlift in 1975 of young children, not necessarily orphaned, from a collapsing Saigon to Sydney put the possibility of adopting from overseas firmly on the agenda of hopeful Australian couples (with the added advantage that the birth family was out of the picture). The countries that came to supply these babies included many in the region as well as some in South America, Africa and even Eastern Europe. Adoptive parents endured long waiting lists, intrusive assessments, strict requirements and much bureaucracy; they also needed to travel to collect the child and, ideally, return to the birth country for later visits.

Between 1970 and 2008, more than 10,000 children arrived in Australia as intercountry adoptees. The authors of The Market in Babies have frank reservations about this practice, not least because it reproduces “the same relationships of power and inequality” that adoption within Australia under the old system had reinforced.

For the tiny numbers of people who presently manage to adopt children born in Australia the environment has totally changed. Those few pregnant women who relinquish their babies at birth have a say in whom they go to. Under the “open adoption” conditions that have prevailed for many years, adoptive parents must be prepared to engage in face-to-face contact and/or exchange of information with birth relatives.

People wishing to raise “other people’s children” are limited to applying for those with “special needs,” which could be a physical or other disability, a difficult background, or simply the fact that they are older than babies and toddlers. For various reasons these children cannot live with their birth families, but those families remain in the picture. The placement is likely to be some form of permanent care or long-term fostering rather than adoption; although these forms of care sometimes turn into adoption, that shouldn’t be the expectation.

IT IS to a quite different way of making a family – via offshore surrogacy – that the authors turn their attention in their closing chapter. With the disappearance of baby adoption here, and in the face of an overwhelming desire for a baby of their own (often underpinned by the belief that a right is involved), some Australian couples and unpartnered people are paying women, typically in India, to bear babies for them. (Altruistic surrogacy is the only kind permitted in Australia, and as such is very limited.) In these cases, reproductive technology has generally not worked or is inappropriate.

Paying to have a child gestated in the womb of a woman overseas is “the newest model in the market for children,” the authors write, and “looks set to take the place of adoption” as a way of acquiring a child. The woman who is commissioned to act as a “gestational carrier” for the pregnancy is not the one who provides the egg; this may come from the would-be mother in Australia or from another woman, in India or elsewhere. The sperm comes from the father. Prospective parents in Australia pay about $10,000, including the surrogate’s fee, for the IVF and other services involved. The surrogate is typically involved in order to educate her family, buy a house, or start a business – investments that were previously out of her family’s financial reach. After the birth, her job is done; she hands the child over and it is brought to Australia, or one of the many other countries from which commissioning parents come.

In 2011, more than 250 Australians paid to have babies created via the large and hitherto-unregulated Indian industry. Very recent legislative changes in India are closing off that market to same-sex male couples and unmarried people from abroad, however, as well as imposing other restrictions. But there are other surrogacy markets in other countries (and a lively international trade in eggs and sperm), which prospective Australian consumers will no doubt be exploring. Judging by websites promoting Indian surrogacy services, and the (generally ecstatic) postings by those whose babies were created in this way, for many people (parents and would-be parents) no moral, psychological, legal or other issues complicate the happy scene. •

The post Rights and desires appeared first on Inside Story.

OVER the past forty years the economic fortunes of Australian households have fallen into two fairly distinct periods. In the “disappointing decades” of the 1970s and 1980s, to use economist Bob Gregory’s label, real wages stagnated, unemployment increased fourfold and male full-time employment as a proportion of the population fell by 25 per cent. Since 1991, by contrast, Australia has been one of the fastest-growing advanced economies in the world, enjoying twenty-one years of unbroken economic growth and largely escaping the global financial crisis, or the Great Recession as it is still known in Europe and the United States.

Chart 1 shows an index of real median household income based on ABS Income Surveys since 1981–82. For middle-income Australian households, income growth over the first decade was very low, with small gains in the late 1980s lost in the recession of the early 1990s. But it is fair to point out that many other countries had similar or worse experiences; real median incomes in New Zealand, for example, fell 15 per cent in the 1980s.

As Australia’s economy started to recover from recession in 1995, median incomes began to grow, accelerating once the mining boom got under way in 2003. Median household income fell marginally in the period after the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, but the latest ABS survey shows that in the most recent period, middle-income Australians experienced income growth comparable to the rise before the start of the mining boom.

Chart 1: Trends in real median equivalised household income, Australia, 1981–82 to 2011–12 (1981–82 = 100)

Source: Calculated from Johnson and Wilkins (2006) and Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household Income and Income Distribution surveys, various years.

The benefits of this growth in income appear – at least on the surface – to have been widely shared. Chart 2 shows the pattern of growth for households at different points on the overall income distribution, ranging from households at the tenth percentile (where only 10 per cent of the total population have lower incomes) and for different decile points up to the ninetieth percentile (where only 10 per cent of the population have higher incomes). Although the poorest households haven’t done as well as higher-income households, their real disposable incomes are now more than 40 per cent higher than they were in 1995. Middle-income households are more than 50 per cent better-off over the period, about three times the increase enjoyed by comparable households in New Zealand.

Chart 2: Trends in real incomes at different decile points, Australia, 1994–95 to 2011–12
Cumulative percentage change in real equivalent income-unit income

Source: Calculated from Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household Income and Income Distribution surveys, various years.

The growth in incomes for middle-income households in the period leading up to the GFC was the second-highest in the OECD, exceeded only by Ireland. But the richest 10 per cent of Australian households had the highest real increase in incomes of any advanced economy, with the result that inequality grew quite rapidly until 2008. Since then, inequality has reduced a little for two reasons – the age-pension increase in 2009 boosted the incomes of the poor, and the income of lower-income working families grew more quickly between 2009 and 2011 than did incomes among higher-income households.

For most households in Australia, incomes are now higher than they have ever been. Wealth holdings, not surprisingly, reflect similar trends. The most recent Credit Suisse Global Wealth report – prepared by Anthony Shorrocks, one of the most highly respected world experts on wealth distribution – estimated that average wealth in Australia in 2011, at US$397,000, was the second-highest in the world after Switzerland and that Australia’s median wealth of US$222,000 was the highest in the world. This mainly reflects high rates of home ownership. Relative to the rest of the world, very few Australians have a net worth of less than US$1000; this reflects such factors as relatively low credit-card and student-loan debt. The proportion of those with wealth above US$100,000 is the highest of any country – eight times the world average. With 1,861,000 people in the global top 1 per cent, Australia accounts for 4.1 per cent of members of that wealthy group, despite having just 0.4 per cent of the world’s adult population.

The most recent ABS Survey of Wealth and Wealth Distribution shows that average and median net worth dropped slightly between 2009 and 2011, but the changes were not statistically significant. Real median wealth is about 8 per cent higher in real terms than it was in 2005–06. In the United States, by contrast, real median wealth is about 35 per cent lower than in 2005, and median household net worth (including homes) is a bit less than US$67,000, compared to A$434,000 here.

Although it may be unwise for any politician to say it, it remains the case that most Australians “have never had it so good.”

THAT’s not to say that everyone’s income has risen. The ABS income and wealth surveys only provide a series of snapshots of economic resources at different times. Individuals or households at a particular point in the income distribution in one year are not necessarily the same as those who are at that level in other years. Individual incomes are dynamic: even if most people are better-off than similar people in the past, individuals rise up and fall down the income ladder. Young people leave school or university, find jobs and then perhaps get promoted, so their incomes rise over time. Older people start off with higher incomes but may retire or become unwell. And individuals face risks over the course of their lifetime that can have a significant impact on their incomes.

The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, or HILDA, has tracked a sample of around 13,000 people in 7000 households every year since 2001. It shows how individuals experience a wide range of life events with potentially major implications for their economic status. Around 3 per cent of the population are fired or made redundant each year, for example. Between 1 per cent and 1.5 per cent of the population change each year from being in a couple with children to being a lone parent. Health risks are even more prevalent: around 8 to 9 per cent of the population experience a serious personal injury or illness each year, and around 1 per cent experience the death of a spouse or child.

As a result of these and other life events, around 3 per cent of the population have a major worsening in finances each year. Between 2001 and 2008, between 40 and 50 per cent of Australians experienced a drop in income, and roughly 10 per cent fell more than 20 percentiles in the income distribution. To put this in context, in most income groups an individual who fell 20 percentiles would lose around $200 per week, while a high-income individual who experienced such a fall would be around $500 per week worse off. A couple with children whose incomes dropped from the ninetieth to the seventieth percentile would lose more than $1000 per week.

At the other end of the scale, a relatively low-paid worker might lose his or her job and get a new job at lower pay, moving from the fortieth percentile to the thirtieth percentile. There, they may be better-off than a comparable person was ten years earlier, but their own income would have fallen significantly.

Around half of those in the richest income quintile in 2001 were still in that income group in 2008, but the other half were in lower income groups. Only 30 per cent of those in the middle-income group in 2001 were in the same group in 2008, with 30 per cent worse off and around 36 per cent better off.

As in other rich countries, the main way that Australia cushions the impact of these adverse life events is through its welfare state. Healthcare covers many of the costs associated with sickness, but it is the social security system that deals with the decline in incomes associated with these social risks.

THE increase in household incomes has come in a number of ways, but perhaps the most important has been in the growth in wages and employment after the recovery from the recession of the early 1990s.

With real wage increases low and employment declining, the “disappointing decades” had a profound effect on overall earnings. In the ABS income surveys, the total volume of male earnings in 1995–96 was only 2 per cent higher in real terms than in 1982. The employment-to-population ratio for men fell from around 73 per cent in 1982 to 65 per cent in 1993.

In contrast, total real male earnings increased by 47 per cent between 1995–96 and 2007–08, while total real female earnings increased by 54 per cent. The real increases in earnings for men were greatest in the bottom three deciles and in the top decile; for women, the increase was least for women in the richest 20 per cent of working-age households.

Combined with Australia’s income-tested social security system, rising employment below the median income meant that the welfare safety net contracted during the period of high-income growth. This is only to be expected in a tightly targeted welfare system and reflects the positive labour market outcomes of the period.

Employment growth combined with a series of reforms of the social security system from the early 1990s onwards led to a very large reduction in the number of people of working age who relied on government benefits for more than 50 per cent of their income. As Chart 3 shows, welfare reliance among working-age households fell from 21 per cent in 1996–97 to about 12 per cent just before the GFC; it rose in the subsequent period and fell slightly in the most recent two years. The decline is particularly marked among households just below age-pension age – from 38 per cent in the mid 1990s to just under 20 per cent in the most recent survey.

Chart 3: Change in working-age income support recipients, 1996–97 to 2011–12
Percentage of households with benefits as main income source by age group

Source: Calculated from Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household Income and Income Distribution surveys, various years.

As the social security system contracted, though, it also became less effective at reducing inequality. As noted earlier, in part this was a reflection of a positive trend – the fall in reliance on welfare payments after 1997. But for people of working age an important factor in this contraction was the decision to link payments for the unemployed to the consumer price index rather than to wages and household incomes, which were rising more quickly. As a result, the incomes of people receiving unemployment payments stayed the same in real terms during a period of unprecedented real income growth.

The effects of this are shown in Chart 4. In the mid 1990s the level of Newstart payments for a single person was close to the single rate of pension for a person with a disability or an age pensioner. After 1996, though, pensions increased at the same rate as wages while Newstart and a range of other allowances remained indexed to prices. As real wages rose, the gap between pensions and allowances widened, and by the time of the most recent survey the single rate of Newstart had fallen to not much more than 31 per cent of median income.

Chart 4: Payments for single pensioner/beneficiary as percentage of median equivalent income, 1994–95 to 2011–12

Source: Calculated from Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household Income and Income Distribution surveys, various years.

Many poverty studies use 50 per cent of median income as a relative poverty line, and Chart 4 shows that the unemployed have fallen from just below that line in the mid 1990s to less than two-thirds in 2011–12. The poverty gap has widened and widened.

Put another way, in the mid 1990s a single person receiving Newstart would have been about $10 per week (in current terms) below the tenth percentile of the income distribution, but by 2011–12 he or she would have been close to $160 per week below that percentile. What we are seeing is the continuing impoverishment of the unemployed.

One of the recurrent themes of the recent election campaign was that Australians’ cost of living is “skyrocketing.” While research by NATSEM shows this is far from true, it is true to say that the unemployed are, in effect, living at what were relatively low living standards nearly twenty years ago. If anyone can legitimately complain about cost of living pressures it is people receiving Newstart.

Unless policy changes, the gap can only grow, and working-age social security recipients will fall further and further behind community living standards.

The impact of falling relative standards for Newstart recipients is also likely to be accentuated by the decisions of successive governments to move parents from the parenting payment to Newstart once their youngest child turns six (if partnered) or eight (if single). Single parents on Newstart do receive a higher rate of payment than single people, but the indexation provisions mean that these payments will stay fixed at their current real value and also fall behind any improvement in community incomes.

A very small real increase in Newstart was associated with the compensation package for the “carbon tax,” although pensioners got higher dollar amounts than Newstart recipients, a decision based on the questionable assumption that your electricity bill is lower if you happen to receive a lower Centrelink payment. But it appears that the Coalition government will scrap this income support bonus for the unemployed – but not for pensioners.

On top of that, family tax benefits are now indexed to prices where once they were effectively indexed to wages. As with the indexation of Newstart, the inevitable effect of this relatively recent change will be to reduce the effectiveness of family payments in reducing poverty and inequality.

At a broader level, these and related trends pose the risk of residualising social security recipients and fundamentally changing the nature of the Australian social security system. Although international commentators have characterised Australia as a “residual welfare state,” those more familiar with the Australian situation – such as Frank Castles – have argued that it was more appropriate to view Australia as a “radical welfare state”:

Australian means-tested benefits were not focused on the very poor, but were designed to exclude only the well-off middle classes and the prosperous. Around 70 per cent get the age pension and few people see it as degrading to be a welfare beneficiary… The Australian system of benefits was designed to be as non-discretionary as was humanly possible... There was no issue of whether one was “deserving” or otherwise…

As this quotation suggests, Castles thought this lack of discretion was under threat in the early 2000s, particularly with the extension of “mutual obligation” after 1996. In fact, the introduction of the liquid assets test for Newstart in 1991 could be seen as an earlier stage in this process of residualisation, reinforced more recently by the introduction and extension of income management for some groups.

These shifts also go to the heart of the question of whether income growth in Australia has been inclusive. The rising tide of employment has lifted many but not all boats: a small minority have remained jobless, as welfare recipients, for much of the last decade. While the size of the group in this position appears to have shrunk, its distance from the mainstream has widened.

Each of the policies described above has important goals for which arguments can be made, and some policies may well have positive results for some of those affected. And it remains true that the best form of welfare is to get a job. But not everyone can get a job.

In combination with the downward drift in payment levels for less favoured categories, the social policies on offer from the major parties suggest that working-age welfare recipients are increasingly being seen as the undeserving poor. In effect, we are saying to many working-age recipients that they will never enjoy the future improvements in living standards that the rest of Australia will enjoy. We are also saying this to the children of parents moved onto Newstart.

It’s time to ask whether maintaining incentives to work means that we need to continue to impoverish the poor. •

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IN recent times the Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella has been at the centre of a media controversy over her former lover’s multimillion-dollar estate. Mirabella – then Sophie Panopoulos – formed a relationship with Colin Howard, a former professor of law who was roughly forty years her senior, in the mid 1990s. They lived together in an inner suburb of Melbourne for about five years.

Howard made a new will in 1997, naming Mirabella as sole executor and beneficiary, notwithstanding the fact that he had two adult children. Three years later Mirabella moved to the central Victorian town of Wangaratta, set up shop as a barrister, got to know the locals, and laid the groundwork for her political career. In 2006 she married former army reserve officer Greg Mirabella.

Howard didn’t change his will, and remained close to Mirabella. He even moved to Wangaratta to live on an adjoining property. And when he died last year, aged eighty-three, Mirabella was granted probate for his estate – which included a terrace house in Carlton, an upmarket inner suburb of Melbourne.

At the heart of the media controversy was the profound tension that exists between testamentary freedom and family provision in Australian inheritance law – and the differences between what the law allows and how Australians choose to distribute their estates.

ACCORDING to the principle of testamentary freedom, inheritance is a personal decision. You alone decide what happens to your estate. You can leave it to your spouse, or your lover, or your first-born son, or your children in equal parts, or your grandchildren, or your favourite charity, or your pet Pomeranian.

The principle of family provision couldn’t be more different. It sees inheritance as a family decision: you are the custodian of your family estate, which includes the wealth of earlier generations – and perhaps the wealth produced by your deceased spouse as well. You have a responsibility to deliver it to the next generation as your forebears delivered it to you.

On the face of it, testamentary freedom seems to be aligned with the zeitgeist. It fits in neatly with Mirabella’s libertarian political philosophy and with the individualism that these days crosses party lines. It’s all about choice. Our lives are the sum of our individual choices and this means that we are in charge of our destiny – right to the end.

Family provision, on the other hand, appears more attuned to an earlier sensibility, and the legislation that supports it in Australia dates from the early twentieth century. Family provision underpins the transmission of wealth inequalities from one generation to the next – as Gina Rinehart and James Packer know so well – but it also protects vulnerable family members, notably spouses and children. It allows a court to vary the provisions of a will if it judges that family members haven’t been adequately provided for.

A recent survey of probate records lodged in the state of Victoria during 2006 provides a detailed insight into will-making in twenty-first-century Australia, and shows how the tension between the two models plays out in the wills that Australians actually make. The survey found that when we write our wills we tend to follow three main principles.

The first principle applies to “first estates” – estates where there is a surviving spouse. Here the spouse pretty much gets the lot. The survey shows that in more than four out of every five cases the estate goes mainly to the spouse.

The second principle applies to “final estates” where there is no surviving spouse but there are surviving children. Here, the estate is usually divided equally among the children: in the survey, almost 90 per cent of final estates with surviving children were divided equally.

The third principle applies to final estates where there is neither a surviving spouse nor surviving children. These estates are the most open-ended. Yet even here the survey shows that more than 70 per cent of estates go to family members, mostly nephews, nieces and siblings.

In other words, inheritance is still very much a family affair – a case of family provision rather than testamentary freedom – and follows a straightforward hierarchy. Spouses come first. Children come second, in equal measure. Second-degree family members – nieces, nephews, siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts – come a distant third.

Because women live longer than men, and marry older men, first estates go mostly to wives. (Given the precarious interdependence of old age, it would make a lot more sense if women married younger men. But that’s another story.)

In earlier times, wives didn’t have first call on the estate. Rather, the older principle of “primogeniture” – familiar to readers of early nineteenth-century English novels – meant that it went mainly to first-born sons. In these circumstances, widows often depended on the charity of their children.

This situation survives to some degree in Australia’s intestacy laws, which apply to estates where the deceased did not leave a will. In all states except New South Wales, these laws require that first estates be shared between spouses and children. In other words, they are seriously out of step with how most Australians actually leave their estates.

New South Wales is the only state to have updated its intestacy laws to reflect community attitudes. Since 2010, first estates in that state have gone to spouses in full; presumably the other states will catch up eventually.

Final estates are a bit more complicated. The Victorian survey found that these were overwhelmingly divided equally among children. Increasing longevity means that these children are usually middle-aged, and sometimes elderly – in fact, the average age of child beneficiaries in the Victorian survey was fifty-three, and the oldest was eighty.

Although most Australians leave their estates equally among children, roughly one-in-five exercise their testamentary freedom. Of these, a little less than one-in-ten modify the “rulebook” and leave small bequests to other parties, mostly grandchildren. A little more than one-in-ten break the rulebook and don’t share their estate equally among their children.

Most of that second group favour some children over others or arrange for more complicated distributions among family members. A tiny number skip a generation and give the estate to their grandchildren. And a really, really tiny proportion – 0.02 per cent in the Victorian survey – leave their estate to charity. When it comes to inheritance, children trump charity absolutely.

Finally, consider the most interesting category of all: the estates where there are no surviving children. Most of these final estates go to second-degree family members. But second-degree relatedness is a much weaker claim on inheritance than marriage or parentage. Almost 20 per cent of these estates went to people who were apparently unrelated through kinship, and 6 per cent went to charity.

In the survey sample, the average charitable bequest for someone without children was $62,000; the average bequest for someone with children was $5000. A person without surviving children was at least six times more likely to leave a charitable bequest than a person with children. And a person without surviving children was almost twenty-five times more likely to make a charity his or her primary beneficiary. In the absence of children, charity flourishes.

BUT there is a huge discrepancy between what people give to charity when they’re alive and what they leave to charity through their estates.

In 2004 the Giving Australia Project estimated that the vast majority of Australians, 87 per cent, made a donation in the previous year. Yet an even bigger majority – 94 per cent, according to the survey – make no provision for charity through their estates. Although there’s no reason why people couldn’t leave most of their estate to their family and still make a modest bequest to charity, this is obviously not part of the mental landscape of most Australians.

So inheritance in Australia is overwhelmingly a matter of family provision, with testamentary freedom operating mostly at the margins. But testamentary freedom does empower testators, providing them with an opportunity to exercise personal discretion, and take into account individual and family circumstances. People might, for example, leave small bequests to grandchildren as a token of their affection. Or, when they’re still alive, they might distribute pre-inheritance funds to one child and take this into account when they divide up the estate.

Testamentary freedom also provides leverage. It means that no family members can take their inheritance for granted; they must remain alert to family obligations right up until the end. It reminds us that family provision and family affection are not ordained by nature.

Even so, most Australians don’t exercise their testamentary freedom. Or perhaps more accurately, most people choose to do the same as each other. They leave their estates to their spouses first, and then to their children in equal measure, and then to second-degree family members.

Sophie Mirabella’s inheritance might be aligned with the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist does not remotely align with how most Australians actually leave their estates. •

• For a fuller discussion of the survey results, see Christopher Baker and Michael Gilding, “Inheritance in Australia: Family and Charitable Distributions from Personal Estates” in the Australian Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 46, No. 3, 2011.

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ANNE-MARIE Slaughter’s recent role as director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton explains the viral attention her 12,000-word essay in the Atlantic has received over the past few weeks. An ex-colleague of a secretary of state, former dean of a big policy institute and law professor at Princeton is obviously going to be listened to. But this doesn’t explain the lightning response her essay is sparking the world over – including attracting a million-plus online readers.

Her essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” has touched a nerve that, among women of a certain age and education, jangles at the slightest touch. For these women, the mere mention of work–life balance – and any hint of valuing family over professional advancement – puts them on the defensive. The concept of having it all, of fulfilling work and a happy family life, makes their ears prick up and look warily at each other. (I should know – I’m one of them.)

So great has been the impact of this essay that just keeping up with the responses has been, for Slaughter, equivalent to the high-powered White House position she recently left. Clearly there is something about the work–life debate that makes female columnists especially narky. In a 10 July opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review, Emma-Kate Symons let fly. Slaughter’s thesis is “skewed by upper-class pretensions… It’s anti-feminist, elitist and dangerous for women.” “Goodness,” I thought, “is she responding to the same essay I’ve just read?” And if “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” were all that Symons says it is, would it really have been circulated the world over in a matter of days, and recommended on Facebook 168,000 times?

So what’s all the fuss about? The Atlantic essay describes at length Anne-Marie Slaughter’s change of heart on stepping down from her “dream job” in the White House. Within days of resigning she had, she realised, changed sides. One day she was held up as a high-powered exemplar of a successful work–life balance. The next day she was openly admitting to having – temporarily – toppled off it. No news there. As countless surveys attest, the women in the latter category far outnumber the women in the former.

“Millions of women,” she notes in her essay, “feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).” To respond to what she calls “the maternal imperative” at the same time as climbing the professional ladder in the shortest possible time is, she writes, to attempt to achieve incompatible goals.

Ultimately Slaughter is calling for a shift in professional culture towards a more flexible and compassionate attitude to family demands, one that would inject more give into a system that all but forces women to choose family over career in times of personal stress. In an interview with Der Spiegel in the wake of her essay, she summed it up this way: “We are making it impossible to pursue your ambition and be the parent that you must be and want to be.”

In some ways Slaughter is an unlikely advocate for this point of view. In Der Spiegel she freely admitted that she did academic work in her hospital bed just hours after giving birth, went back to work at three months, has always been the family’s primary wage earner, and has travelled constantly. Given all this, her rise to director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton – a role she coveted for decades – comes as no surprise.

The real irony is that the Atlantic chose to call her essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” when in fact she insists that women can have it all, and that she has managed just that – though not at the White House. Yes, women can have a successful career and a happy home life, she suggests, on one condition. “I have always been able to have it all,” she told Der Spiegel, “but what I realised was that this was because, as a professor, I controlled my own time.”

Of course, most women in full-time work with children at home can’t control their work schedules – which means, according to this definition, that most women can’t have it all. These are precisely the women who have caused the avalanche in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s inbox. “In 95 per cent of the cases,” she told Der Spiegel, “the response is ‘Thank you.’ I am bowled off my feet. I knew that the cause was important, but I didn’t realise how many women feel they are struggling with trying to make it all happen – working around the clock and being there for their children.”

Not everyone agrees with her. Sheryl Sandberg, the second to the top at Facebook, recently admonished a younger generation of women not to take their feet “off the gas pedal.” You aren’t committed enough, she exhorted. This is a view, Slaughter points out, that assumes commitment is “a function of personal determination.” Or, in simple terms, that women struggling to reconcile work–life demands should “just try harder.”

Working women, says Slaughter, already try harder and work harder than they’ve ever done. “The lives that working women lead are equivalent to training for a marathon, and more, in terms of discipline and sheer will-power.” She should know – for two years she rose at 4.20 am each Monday for the train to Washington, returning late on Friday.

And so it was that, late one Sunday night in New Jersey, her ten-year-old son begged her in tears not to take the train to Washington the next morning. The sacrifice that she was asking him to make – to let her go so that she could work on behalf of the country – just didn’t wash. “I don’t care about the country,” was his flat reply. Realising that her son needed her more than her country did – that she was indispensable to him, but not to the State Department, and that her absence might be harming him at a deep level, led to her decision to rejoin Princeton’s law faculty before her tenure there expired. “I didn’t just need to go home,” she recalls, “I wanted to go home.”

On leaving her post in Washington – “increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet” – she received two main reactions. The first, mainly from older women, was disappointment that such an important role model should be seen to retire from public life. The second response was curlier. “I wouldn’t generalise from your experience,” a colleague told her. “I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great.” It was the second reaction that she found the more hurtful – a “rude epiphany” that unleashed in her a “blind fury.”

The final trigger for Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic essay came not from anger but sympathy. She was asked to give a talk in Oxford about work–life balance to a large mixed group of bright young things. After she finished speaking a young woman came up and thanked her for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” “The audience was rapt,” she noted. This talk led to several similar talks (she commonly gives forty to fifty a year), and at a dinner following one of these talks she chatted to a couple of young female lawyers who were discussing the dearth of legal role models who demonstrated a successful work–life balance. The only models they had, the two women complained, were women who “take two years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.” “Both were very clear,” she writes, “that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.”

SLAUGHTER’s essay is long and demanding because the issues she tackles are just that. Critics have slated her for being elitist. But her campaign – to create a groundswell of support for more flexible and compassionate ways of working at a professional level – is directed at the whole of society, and not just her demographic (which she freely describes as “highly-educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place”). Of course the critics are right – critics often are, to some extent. Most women will never hold a high-powered job in the rarefied atmosphere of the White House. They will never ask themselves, late on a Sunday evening as they pack for Washington, “Who needs me more, my family or my country?”

And yet, in another sense, Slaughter’s decision to leave the White House reflects every working mother’s struggle. “Who needs me more, my family or my work?” is a question that conceals a trickier question within it. “What do I need more, in my journey to be myself, my family or my work?” And it’s pointy questions like this one, Slaughter suggests, that weigh less heavily in the minds of fathers than in the minds of mothers.

It’s important to mention that Slaughter’s sons were ten and fourteen when she faced her crisis in Washington. They weren’t one and three, for instance – the age at which the Mummy Wars are commonly fought. The teenage years, she insists, are every bit as vital as the early years in terms of family relationships. Being available as a parent in the teenage years “is just as important as in the first years of a child’s life.” This, she observes, is a particular problem for ambitious women who are often “peaking at forty-five to fifty-five” – messily coinciding with their children hitting their teens.

In the second half of her essay, Slaughter unpacks the assumptions that are often rolled out to explain the professional success of women with children. It’s possible if you are committed enough. This is the cry of first wave feminists who feel let down by younger women’s less strident efforts. “What’s the matter with you?” they seem to be asking today’s less driven women. It’s possible if you marry the right person. This assumption is just as loaded. Not because it isn’t true – Anne-Marie Slaughter’s husband put in the lion’s share of her sons’ care – but because it’s the society you live in, as much as the man you marry, that keeps the work–life seesaw in balance. It’s possible if you sequence it right. This assumption has some force for Anne-Marie Slaughter – as a necessary but not sufficient condition for women to succeed in having it all. Besides, in her experience there is no sequence, no ideal timing for childbearing, that doesn’t involve a few trade-offs.

The career arc, as she draws it, looks rather different today from the way it looked in the mid twentieth century. Instead of having your kids in your twenties, staying in one job for your whole career, retiring at sixty-seven and dying at seventy-one, these days we can, she reckons, have children later, work until we’re seventy-five, have multiple jobs, and enter an “encore career” in our seventies. Assuming “health and fortune” are on our side, we might expect to enjoy a fifty-year career stretch that allows for a bit of “stair stepping” – or “putting money in the family bank” – during the middle years.

Slaughter still works at a high level for long hours at Princeton – she just no longer takes a plane to Washington to work. Yes, she makes a stand for more compassion and flexibility in the workplace, for school and work schedules to better coincide, and for all of us to talk openly about the most central relationships of our lives. But not for a minute does she suppose that any of this could ever be simple or easy. The strength of her essay is that it’s nuanced – dare I say balanced?

Halfway through the essay she stops her flow to cite an American study on happiness. Despite a narrowing gender gap at work, the study finds that the happiness levels among women in general has declined. “Women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.” On top of a wage gap, there is now a well-being gap, with women exhibiting more stresses than men. Perhaps this is what has got so many women talking.

In concluding, Slaughter makes a special plea. She would like society to value those women who, during periods of family stress, choose to value family over professional advancement. “If we really valued these choices, we would value the people who make them; if we really valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retrain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.” But of course what she is really seeking, apart from a bit more give within society, is for we, as individual women, to value the choices that the maternal imperative compels us to make – which is a much a taller order. •

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TREASURER Wayne Swan has described the 2012 federal budget as a “battler’s budget” and “a Labor budget to its bootstraps,” and commentators have variously seen it as “a big taxing, big spending budget, including a big increase in welfare,” “a big dose of class warfare,” or a bid to “smash the rich.” Indeed, the class war aspects of the budget have been seen as undermining previously announced reforms. But the real story of this budget is less about class war than about a complex interplay of measures in the context of a series of Labor budgets.

While the budget aims to achieve a small surplus – which is no surprise – it brings some unexpected changes, including an increase in Family Tax Benefit Part A, or FTB-A, the income-tested cash payment for families with children, the biggest share of which goes to families with the lowest incomes. All families eligible for FTB-A will receive an increase, but those with two or more children receiving the maximum rate or part of the maximum rate of FTB-A will receive an extra $600 a year, or an extra $300 a year if they have one child. Those receiving the base rate with two or more children will receive an extra $200 a year, or an extra $100 a year if they have one child. The higher amounts will be payable to families with one child earning less than in the range of $61,000 to $67,000 a year (depending on the age of the child), with the income level at which these higher amounts are payable increasing by around $15,000 a year per child. This comes at a cost of around $1.8 billion over four years.

Families with school-aged children who receive FTB-A will also get the SchoolKids Bonus, worth $410 for each primary school–aged child and $820 for each secondary school–aged child. This will replace the Education Tax Rebate, which tended not to benefit low-income families. In 2012–13, this is the largest item of new spending costing, more than $400 million in the coming year and nearly $2.1 billion over four years.

A new Income Support Supplement to be paid to recipients of Newstart (the unemployment benefit) and people receiving Youth Allowance will cost around $1 billion over four years, and give recipients $210 a year for single people and a combined $350 for couples.

The government also announced the first stages of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, substantial improvements in dental healthcare and new spending on aged care reforms, among other items. These initiatives are forecast to cost around $3.2 billion over four years. A further $200 million will go to reforms to childcare assistance for lone parents moving from welfare to work.

These figures need to be put into context. Combined, the “spreading benefits of the boom and support for families” package, the dental health package, the first stage of the disability scheme and the aged care package will increase spending over four years by around $8 billion. Out of a total annual federal budget spending of $376 billion, close to $132 billion or 35 per cent goes to social security and welfare, and a further $61 billion to health. Over that four-year period, $8 billion represents less than 1 per cent of total spending on health, social security and welfare.

At the same time, relatively substantial savings are being made in social security and welfare – including nearly $700 million over four years on Parenting Payment changes, $360 million on lowering the age of eligibility for FTB-A and $127 million in restricting the portability of pensions.

The size of the Australian economy and the size of the federal budget mean that small percentages translate into large numbers. But whether it all adds up to a “big increase in welfare” is debatable.

Some of the smaller changes are particularly welcome, even if their impact is more symbolic than substantial. The Income Support Supplement will be equivalent to an increase of around $4 a week in the single rate of Newstart, which is not likely to make much of an impact on the deepening poverty of this group, but it is at least some recognition of the fact that there has been no real increase – that is, over and above inflation – in the payment for close to twenty years. Just as welcome is the decision to double the liquid assets test thresholds, which will help reduce the likelihood that people will have to impoverish themselves just to get on to Newstart in the first place.

To fund these and other initiatives and bring the budget into surplus the government has outlined around $32.6 billion in savings over four years, although for the purposes of the headline surplus it is the $4.4 billion of savings in 2012–13 that is relevant. In this year the largest single saving is $965 million in defence spending, followed by $600 million by deferring changes to the superannuation concession cap, around $450 million by deferring increases in overseas aid, and $320 million by not proceeding with the company tax cut.

Whether these changes constitute “class warfare” is also debatable. In fact, the one major change that specifically targets the very rich – the reduction in the tax concession for superannuation for very high earners (those earning over $300,000 a year, a subset of the top 1 per cent) – actually has a small cost to revenue in the 2012–13 year. Over a four-year period, the changes labelled as “improving fairness in the tax system” will become more significant, however, bringing in additional revenue of around $2.5 billion.

Assessing the overall effect of the budget on income distribution is complex. Since 2008, Labor budgets have included tax cuts and pension increases, as well as changes to the income-testing and indexation of family payments, and other changes to “middle-class welfare.” Carbon pricing starts from July this year, and a major component of the government’s plans for a clean energy future is an assistance package to compensate for higher prices affecting households. The government will increase pensions, allowances and family payments and cut income taxes for lower-income taxpayers, and the estimated impact of this is likely to be mildly progressive (after factoring in the regressive impact of the price increases).

On the other hand, earlier Labor budgets continued to implement tax cuts foreshadowed by the Coalition government, which significantly raised the threshold for the top tax rate. As a result, relative to John Howard’s last year as prime minister, a taxpayer at $180,000 will have benefited from total annual income tax cuts of around $6000 by 2012–13 while a median taxpayer around $55,000 will have received tax cuts of around $1800 a year. Although the Treasury analysis of the cumulative effect of these tax cuts shows that they are a much higher share of tax paid for lower income individuals, if the tax cuts were calculated as a proportion of disposable income they would appear less progressive.

The Treasury has also calculated the cumulative effect of budget changes since 2007–08 on the real disposable incomes of selected types of households. While this does not measure the overall distributional impact, some of the results for specific types of families are illuminating – although it should be borne in mind that these calculations only show the impact of changes in the tax and benefit systems at the specified income levels. Sole parents completely reliant on benefits have seen a lift in real disposable income of around 7 per cent, and single people have generally done a little better. Wealthier single-income couples with children have generally gained the lowest real increases in disposable incomes.

WHAT is most obvious is that pensioners with no private income have fared best since the Labor government came to office, receiving real increases of 12 per cent for couples and nearly twice that for singles. This massive redistribution to the poor occurred in the 2009–10 budget and was supported by all sides of politics, even if it tends to be largely forgotten now.

Cumulative increase in real value of single pensions under different governments, 1972 to 2011, in 2011 dollars

In fact, the 2009 pension increase was the largest single increase in real terms for single pensioners since the age pension was introduced one hundred years ago. Overall, the increase roughly equalled all the above-inflation increases that pensioners had enjoyed between 1996 and 2007 under Howard government budgets and was larger than the increases that single pensioners enjoyed in the entire period of the Whitlam government in the 1970s – long thought of as the high-water mark of welfare state expansion in Australia.

On a year-by-year basis, the comparisons are even more striking. The Whitlam and Rudd–Gillard governments did more for poor pensioners than any other government in the last half-century.

Annual average increase in real value of pensions under different governments, 1972 to 2011, in 2011 dollars

Now that’s what I call redistribution! •

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Seeing her situation replicated around her, Asher started what she describes as a deliberate and structured inquiry, conducting in-depth conversations with mothers and fathers in Britain, Sweden, Iceland and Australia and dipping into the academic literature. Her aim was to explore how family life in Britain might better be organised and what would be required to bring about the necessary structural change. Because government policies, employment structures and prevailing attitudes are built on the assumption that mothers will have the primary care of their children, most parents don’t have the option of sharing the care of their children and employment. Although mothers, father and children all lose out, it is mothers whose illusions are shattered. Addressing this inequality, Asher argues, will enable us to address other social problems, including relationship breakdown, child poverty and social atomisation.

Asher begins by mapping out the problem, drawing on her own experience as well as the stories of other mothers and fathers. She makes a forceful case that the gains women have made in education and employment vanish after they have children. Although she found that the extreme polarisation between her husband and herself ended after she returned to paid employment, their respective roles and status had changed irrevocably. After the children come, men and women’s lives are pulled in separate directions. The most common arrangement is what might be called the modified breadwinner model, with the father in full-time employment and the mother in a part-time job. Women and men work the same number of hours but the nature of the work, the status and financial rewards are completely different. Once women return to paid employment they still do more of the care and domestic work. Parenting inevitably involves compromise but it is women who make most of the changes and bear most of the cost.

Asher argues that the different expectations of men and women start before the child is born. Women-centred maternity care doesn’t treat men as equals, and the pressure to breastfeed risks leaving women exhausted and keeping men at a distance. Meanwhile, Britain’s unequal parental leave scheme makes it more likely that mothers will take leave to care for children. British women have access to twelve months maternity leave, thirty-nine weeks of which is paid (at a low flat rate that may be topped up by employers), whereas men are eligible for only two weeks paternity leave (also paid at a low flat rate that may be topped up). Although unused leave can be transferred from the mother to the father, the gender wage gap and employer resistance act as powerful deterrents. After a very short time, the mother has more experience with the baby and the father is back at work – a pattern of specialisation that determines longer term behaviour. Women build networks and become entrenched in the role of primary carer even once they have returned to the workforce.

Part of the problem, according to Asher, is the “parenting industry.” Like the British government, this cluster of pundits and institutions places mothers in the role of primary carer. It also fosters self doubt, exploiting mothers’ insecurity with manuals and every other imaginable product. Although women can use advice in sophisticated ways, Asher is concerned that they still internalise stereotypes of what a good mother should be. Time-use surveys reveal that mothers are spending more hours in the labour market but also more time looking after their children: as the Australian researcher Lynn Craig has carefully documented, they have cut back on everything else in order to protect time with their children. Several of the women Asher spoke to reported that they were depressed in the months following the birth of their child. Asher argues that this is an entirely rational response to “the isolation and standard setting they were exposed to, combined with chronic exhaustion, relentless grind and loss of autonomy.” The mental stress is not a medical problem but a social one, she writes, and it will only be solved by changing our social arrangements.

Asher’s discussion of the nature of paid employment reveals a depressingly familiar story. Long hours of work, inflexible jobs and financial hardship inevitably puts strain on family life. Asher argues that a culture of “presenteeism” makes it very difficult for women to compete and for men to do their fair share at home. As a result, women are disproportionately underrepresented in top level jobs. Having children is still damaging for a woman’s career and the evidence shows that progress towards gender equality in employment has stalled and may even be reversing. In response to the pressure, many women downgrade their careers, either working at lower level jobs or part-time. They lose opportunities for promotion and their pay drops or, at best, stagnates. Despite the availability of flexibility, managers in Britain tend to operate on the assumption that workers will be in full-time positions, working standard hours (as a minimum) and doing their job in the workplace. More troubling is evidence that attitudes to maternal employment in Britain are becoming more conservative, particularly among members of younger generations.

Although much of Asher’s commentary refers to the experience of educated professional parents, the people she interviewed come from a broad range of backgrounds. While long-hours jobs are an issue for some, others experience a combination of too few paid hours and very low rates of pay. Employment is important because it can give women greater financial security, but poor quality, low wage jobs do not necessarily provide an escape from poverty.

And fathers? Their expectations are changing, but Asher argues that the shift in the nature of contemporary fatherhood has been overstated. Although British fathers are expected to be more hands-on now than in the past, this is always in addition to their main role as the breadwinner. Asher points to evidence that children benefit if their fathers are actively involved in their lives. Yet many men do not take even the limited amount of paternity leave available to them. Asher is clear that fathers’ paid employment is a type of involvement in the care of their children, just as necessary as the care that mothers provide or arrange. The problem is the polarisation into two distinct roles. Fathers say they wish to spend more time with their children but often they are not interested in following through; indeed, some find it is easier to work late than deal with tired children. The social expectations of fathers are more limited and less prescriptive than they are for mothers, which means that fathers are often treated as heroes for doing what mothers do every day.

Particularly interesting is Asher’s chapter about women’s complicity in these unequal arrangements. She argues that, like men, women have a hand in settling their own fates. Many women give contradictory signals of maternal fatigue and resentment and territorialism. Maternal gatekeeping might be an adaptive response to inequality, but it lets men off the hook. It means the structural factors that narrow the options available to most women and men are not confronted. For some women motherhood provides a way out of an unsatisfactory job. Just as men assume that women will care for the kids, women assume that men will bring in the money. In the short-term it may make practical and emotional sense to move into the roles of breadwinner or carer but there are long-term consequences. Women run the risk of permanent exclusion from decent employment and men risk weak relationships with their children.

Concluding that family life in Britain is hard, Asher embarks on a search for alternative social arrangements. Predictably, she looks to the Nordic states, but she also seeks ideas in Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and, interestingly, the United States. While not many writers on work and family look to the United States for inspiration, Asher argues that we can learn two things from experience there. First, don’t keep women out of the workforce for long periods of time; secondly, equalise the entitlements between fathers and mothers. Although US provisions for parents are stingy, Asher concludes that employing women is not seen as a risky option by US employers. In contrast, she is disappointed with the approach taken in Australia; the introduction of paid maternity leave, she argues, has shifted Australia from a more neutral position to one where women are presumed to be the primary carers.

Based on her scan of international arrangements, Asher concludes that it is necessary to designate periods of parental leave for both fathers and mothers. Parental leave must be paid at a higher rate and fathers and mothers must be encouraged to take comparable, relatively short periods of leave. Asher proposes a new parental leave scheme for Britain offering thirteen months’ paid leave, half designated for mothers and half designated for fathers on a use it or lose it basis. Paid by the government, this leave would provide full wage replacement but be capped for the wealthiest. Asher acknowledges that this scheme is costly but believes that the costs are easily outweighed by the benefits: parent who share care are more likely to work as a team to raise their children; children build a close relationship with both parents; and there will be less domestic tension and less strain on relationships. If couples do separate women are in a stronger position because they have stayed engaged in the labour market and fathers are more likely to maintain close connections with their children and contribute to the financial cost of raising them. Children should grow up with the expectation that they will play a range of roles.

In her final chapter Asher draws together the various strands. She is blunt about the problems we face but optimistic that we can find a solution. She points out that lesbian couples with children provide an example of how families can function. They are far more likely to share the paid and unpaid work equally than are heterosexual couples with children. Asher also sees signs of positive shifts in the attitudes of employers.

This is a passionate and articulate examination of the inequality between mothers and fathers. Although it focuses on Britain, it is very relevant to the situation in Australia. My main reservation is that Asher does not adequately deal with the problem of choice. She says that a new child throws all the cards in the air and that society should not dictate how they fall. But she also presents a clear and compelling case that social institutions and policies should encourage a fairer distribution of carework and paid employment. Shared care is a particular arrangement of the cards. Shattered would be a stronger book had she grappled with this apparent tension between choice and justice and provided a more complex argument about the nature of individual freedom and of individual and social responsibility.

Asher identifies the problems but also some practical solutions. She calls for changes to current British work and family policy but also suggests things that individuals can do before these structural changes are introduced. These range from consumer boycotts of “mumsy” products to more open discussion about the challenges and choices. In the words of Bill, one of the fathers she interviewed:

Mum has got to let go and Dad has got to do it properly and not just say. “What do you mean she has not been fed?! She’s had a crisp!” It’s working together as a team… sharing it so that more people enjoy it, not seeing it as a chore or like a job but as a way of life.

The post Modern families appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN Susan became pregnant with twins, she saw it as an opportune moment to invest in a wireless broadband connection. As the head of a small university department, she carried a lot of responsibility and could already anticipate that her absence on maternity leave would pose a problem for colleagues. As it turned out, her workplace did contact her every day of her maternity leave with queries of one kind or another. Her willingness to engage in work when she was on leave was admirable testimony to her commitment to the job, but it also indicated her employer’s inadequate staffing and planning procedures. Susan realised that there was no one to explain details to her replacement while she was away. Yet her own actions contributed to ensuring that these shortcomings would continue in future.

By the time the twins were born, Susan was reliant on her home connection to stay in touch with work. “I’m a bit obsessive about it,” she says, estimating that she would check her email roughly every half-hour. “Even if I’m cooking I’ll go and check if I’ve got another email come through. Is that bad? That is bad.” Returning from work at the end of the day, she would take her laptop out on the deck with a glass of wine to answer her email, which was “kind of unwinding while still doing something.” Susan was an archetypal multi-tasker. She answered email while watching TV and even when she was in bed.

Susan had decided to stay home one day a week to spend time with her boys and cut down on the time they were in childcare. “Someone said, why don’t I cut down my work to four days a week? I said, well, I do more than five days a week work anyway, so why should I not be paid for it?” She didn’t feel guilty about spending the day with her kids, because she knew she would make up the time later. On her home day she used the time the boys were sleeping to do essential work: “They’re only little for so long and I don’t want to have them in care all the time, and I know I miss out on seeing all these little milestones being achieved.”

Susan was finding that one of the few things she could do while the boys were awake was “answer small emails. Sometimes I can mark some assignments and do a bit of searching on the web. Anything that requires full concentration, I have to wait until they are asleep.” The arrangement was “a bit of a holding pattern,” she says. “I’m doing my job and I think I’m doing it well but I’m not extending myself to the point where I could see myself moving. If I’m looking for a promotion in the next year or two, I wouldn’t be thinking about that until I could really put more than my 100 per cent in.”

Susan’s perception that she would need to put in “more than my 100 per cent” reflects a judgement about the kind of work rate expected of full-time employees in her industry. “I think that probably towards the middle of next year I’ll have to face the reality that if I want to move forward in my career, I really have to be here every day.”

Dilemmas like these were a recurrent theme during research for the Working From Home study, funded by the Australian Research Council, which began in 2007. The project set out to investigate technology’s impact on the lives of employees in the information and communication spheres of the “knowledge economy.” To gather material for the study we chose four large organisations – in education, government, broadcasting and telecommunications – and recruited twenty-six people, whom we interviewed each year for three years, where possible, to track their working lives. We found that the relationship between work, home and technology was complex and often fraught.

The study took place during a period of considerable social change. In politics, a federal election with a strong emphasis on workers’ rights saw the Labor Party triumph in 2007 after twelve years in opposition. Soon after, the global economy turned violently downward, pushing Australia from prosperity to near recession and bringing unprecedented levels of national debt. Meanwhile, evolving communications technology facilitated the tremendous interest in social networking sites, from MySpace to Facebook, and then the surge to Twitter. In the final year of the study, the release of the iPhone in Australia changed the communications landscape once again.

Our interviews revealed the extent to which these new technologies encourage the tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of their daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of fulfilment and intimacy. The growing attraction of mobile communication devices is one of the strongest indications that a substantial number of people see paid employment as the most compelling demonstration of virtue, accomplishment and self-identity that society makes available. With a range of online subcultures developing in support of these tendencies, a mutually reinforcing cycle of chronic connectivity has developed among professionals at each level of the workplace hierarchy.

ONE of the major hopes for remote-access computer technology was that it would solve the problem of the “absent father” – the parent whose work prevented the experiences and pleasures of watching children grow up. Today, professional demands affect both parents, and while technology may allow them to be present in the home, many are working even when they appear to have left the office behind.

Miranda, a telecommunications employee, was one participant in the study who described her frustration when her husband works at the dinner table. “The only time I find there are issues from a household relationship point of view,” she said, “is if my husband has the laptop at the dinner table, which he has done in the past and I’ve gone off my nut… I give him the raised eyebrow and put a stop to that one. But he does it from time to time.”

Miranda’s husband was the deputy principal of a local school, which meant he sometimes needed to be on call. Checking emails at the dinner table is something he did more often “when there’s a bit of stress at work.” But Miranda would ask, “What’s twenty minutes? Unless someone’s died. And even then they’re dead, so twenty minutes isn’t going to make a difference.” On these occasions, with her dad proving unresponsive, Miranda’s daughter would talk to her mother during dinner, and that’s when Miranda would “put my foot down and tell him to put it away.”

Like many of the women in our study, Miranda preferred to use technology in areas shared with other members of the family – in her case, the dining room. As she explained, “This is like the centrepiece of the household, this dining-room table.” While her daughter did her homework at the table, Miranda would be in the kitchen making dinner. “Then I’ll come over here and sit at the laptop and I can work, email, do whatever I need to do. And she’s there and she can ask me questions, ask for help.”

Barbara, a head librarian, also worked at the dining-room table, a preference that had developed early. “I think lots of people use the dining-room table or the kitchen table to study,” she told us. “I feel strangely uncomfortable at the desks upstairs. I mean, it just isn’t my workspace.”

Men, by contrast, often have a dedicated office away from the rest of the house. Miranda’s husband used his study “as a place of escape, especially if he knows there’s work to be done in the house.” Clive, a university professor, also confined his work to one room that was “slightly isolated from the rest of the house.” Clive’s teenage children used their laptops in other rooms, and even in bed, to his bewilderment. “Marjorie would divorce me if I did that.” In contrast to Clive’s large, self-contained study, Marjorie had a desk and computer set up in their bedroom.

Clive described his use of technology at home as “almost a hobby.” In these relaxed surroundings, Clive felt more comfortable blurring the lines between work and leisure: “So if I’m doing an email here and then I slip into Facebook and do a quiz on books or something – in a way, I suppose I play with technology more here than I would at work.” A recreational element enters the equation as wireless connectivity makes the business of work effortless. “I think we’re all sort of habituated to working at different times,” said Clive. “I think that’s the very bizarre piece of it. When you’re home, it’s a bit like the equivalent of doing a model railway or being a stamp collector in the past, or something like that.” The downside was a sense of physical isolation among family members dispersed across the house.

CLIVE’s experience is one of the happier examples of working from home, partly because his children were older and partly because he was relatively senior in the university. By contrast, a number of other parents in the study reported struggling to finish work because their children required more interaction at home. In Tanya’s case, her part-time status meant that she could finish her formal day at the library mid-afternoon and pick up her children on the way home. These shorter days fitted the school schedule, and sometimes Tanya stayed home entirely if her kids were sick or needed transport to appointments. This flexible arrangement was the backdrop to her tendency to finish off a report or check her email at home if she felt she was falling behind.

“Because I work till 2.30 to get the kids, I’ll often have a five o’clock deadline for something so I end up coming home and then finishing something,” she says. “I don’t always do it, but just every now and then it will involve doing a report. And then it’s the case of trying to compete with limited space with everybody else.”

Tanya recognised that “there’s not the explicit expectation that I’m going to do that, it’s more up to me I suppose.” She acknowledged that she has discussed her extra home work with her partner, who “doesn’t think I should be working when I’m not getting paid for it.” She told us that these tensions often arose when she wanted to work in the home office and her partner needed to be online as well. Tanya saw it as “really imperative” that her husband, as a small business owner, was available online. “So yeah, it is a bit difficult sometimes. But just occasionally I just really have to do something and I will throw everybody off, but then that just puts my husband back with his work, basically.”

Wireless broadband was the technological advancement that helped the family stay online and be together. Like several other working mothers we interviewed, Tanya used wireless to stay connected online and maintain involvement in other things happening around the house. Tanya described this shift in the dynamics of the house as “a double-edged sword.” Wireless allowed her to break free from the confines of the study and move out into shared space, but the quality of interaction seemed to change in the process. “You’re with the family but you’re not kind of thing.”

A number of parents in the study shared Tanya’s sense of partial presence in the company of family when combined with online connection. In her words, “It feels nice and superficially it looks like everybody’s a bit more involved together, but probably the reality is not.”

Geoff, an IT manager, registered a version of this experience. He and his wife Linda, a software engineer, had two young daughters. Linda’s work often involved long hours on urgent projects with fixed deadlines. In some cases this meant working from home until as late as three in the morning to get a job done. Geoff saw this as one of the negatives of online connection at home, although it was better than Linda having to take a taxi to work because “she’s able to do it here and then just go straight to bed.” In the binge culture of this kind of work, location made little difference to Linda’s working hours. Despite her presence in the house, she was inaccessible to her family during these times.

Geoff’s job at a university generated home-based work of its own. He was obliged to respond to crises during the workday, and commuting to different branches of the university took up time between jobs. This didn’t leave him enough time to answer all his emails at work – there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Most nights, rather than stay late at the office, he spent time answering emails at home.

On the surface, this arrangement might seem like a testimony to technology’s flexible benefits – giving Geoff the freedom to leave work and still keep up with his employer’s expectations. But it’s not as flexible as it might seem. Geoff answered his emails upstairs in the home office, away from the family; his daughters, meanwhile, “have kind of learned that they don’t come near me really if they know I’m doing something.” He worries that TV and the internet “have basically taken over in our house as the primary means of entertainment and interaction.”

A degree of exhaustion pervades Geoff’s description of family life. He was genuinely worried about the amount of attention he could give his kids, and struggled to generate the energy to engage with them after a long day of work.

Donna, meanwhile, was trying to limit the amount of work she did at home. “But if it’s going to make my life easier the next day at work it’s worth it,” she added. We can get a glimpse of the intensity of her work – as a project coordinator in a government institution – in the way she described the difficulty she has in adjusting to being home. “I spend maybe an hour trying to get in my head, ‘now I’m home.’ My work’s still very on my mind.” The days she spends working from home involve less of a transition: “I don’t have that whole, ‘Well, I’m home from work, I’m stuffed, I’ve had the journey…’ It’s a little bit softer.” Some things helped to ease the adjustment on arrival home from work: “I have a glass of wine and sit on the couch and I just stare at a wall. I put the TV on but I actually don’t watch it.”

During the course of these interviews Donna reported that her daughter Chloe spent a lot of time on the computer. At one stage, Chloe was taking days off school to use the internet to talk to her online friends. “She wanted to visit them when we were up in North Queensland. She wanted to stay with them! Never met them, considered them to be friends.” Donna thought Chloe seemed depressed and withdrawn. She took her to see a counsellor, who diagnosed an internet addiction, estimating that “90 per cent of the kids she sees have internet addiction.” In light of the range of comments from the study’s participants who diagnosed themselves as addicted to email and other online platforms, this seemed crucial. Is internet addiction less of a problem when it affects adults and relates to work? If so, why?

The second time we met Donna, during a period when her workload had noticeably slowed, it became apparent that Chloe’s depression may have had other causes. Having taken some time off for a holiday, and facing a less hectic workload, Donna had started to reflect on the amount she had sacrificed to stay on top of her job. “I think my daughter could have done with me a little bit more at home during sort of Year 11 and 12,” she said. “But now it’s almost too late, she’s finished Year 12, and she’s working herself and doing similar hours that I’m doing.” Donna continued: “I think she could have really done with a lot more support at that time… But my partner works a lot of night shift and he does a lot of hours every week and usually has twelve- to fourteen-hour days and sometimes seven days a week. So it’s not like he’ll notice, because he’s not there either.”

One of the factors Donna acknowledged to be driving her long hours at work was the bond she’d made with one of her colleagues. “The other person I worked with was very passionate and a workaholic with, you know, no partner, no children… a single person, a career-minded person and she was fantastic. We just drove through everything.” She admitted that “if I had to work with her again I’d probably end up doing the same thing.”

CONTRADICTIONS like these highlight how work-based relationships generate their own kind of intimacy, with accompanying benefits for self-esteem and motivation. In Donna’s words, “You’re enjoying what you’re doing and you’re running on adrenaline.” For a number of people we interviewed, work was a source of fulfilment that rivalled family life. It took priority to the point where other relationships could sometimes be neglected.

Clive was one study participant who noticed the potential consequences of such a shift. Working from home, “the positives are also the negatives. What is it doing to relationships and what is it doing to interaction and conversation? Is it really meaning that when I come home, the atomised reality of work becomes an atomised reality of home?”

Despite a lot of good intentions, the quality of home life is irrevocably affected by attention-seeking technologies. Indeed, in many cases, online devices appear to be as demanding and compelling as children. Meanwhile, the next generation of workers grows accustomed to providing entertainment for themselves by way of the same devices. The long-term effects of these changes are yet to play out, but we can already see the challenge that online connectivity poses to cherished ideas of domestic fulfilment. As Clive concluded, “It’s so immediate and so visually stimulating. Why would you want to exchange it for cornflakes?” •

The post Home offices and remote parents appeared first on Inside Story.

The first question I was asked concerned the extent of misattributed paternity. We don’t know the true figure, I said, for the simple reason that it’s impossible to test a genuinely random sample of the population. There are always people who will refuse to participate in random studies. This isn’t a problem if those who refuse are no different from those who do participate, but it would certainly be a problem for a study of this kind, because women with doubts about who fathered their children would be the most likely to find reasons not to participate.

Almost immediately an irate listener called to ask where on earth the program obtained its “experts.” He referred confidently to a British study which showed that misattributed paternity affects more than 30 per cent of the population. By this reckoning, more than three-in-ten people are mistaken about the identity of their father. Later in the program an interviewee from a fathers’ rights group reiterated the claim that misattributed paternity is widespread in Australia.

I did many similar interviews around this time, and they all followed the same course. Interviewers wanted to know the extent of misattributed paternity and I invariably said that the answer was unknown. Yet my interviewers invariably found other “experts” who declared unequivocally that misattributed paternity is widespread. Most of them said that 10 per cent of the population was mistaken about the identity of their biological fathers, but sometimes they said the figure was as high as 20 per cent or even 30 per cent.

I was a little annoyed by this experience, so I set about reading every piece of available research on the subject, including the British study that allegedly showed a rate of 30 per cent. I also kept close track of new findings in the field, and did my own research. In the process I found out quite a bit about how an urban myth was born and transmitted around the world, and how it helped create a new industry.

The stubborn figure of 30 per cent comes from the published transcript of a symposium on the ethics of artificial insemination that was held nearly forty years ago, in 1972. “We blood-tested some patients in a town in south-east England,” Dr Elliot Philipp told the symposium, “and found that 30 per cent of the husbands could not have been the fathers of their children…”

At this point Dr Philipp was interrupted by a judge, who observed that “surely the figure of 30 per cent must be a minimum?” The judge clearly understood that while blood tests could definitively exclude paternity, they could not definitively establish it. This is why experts in paternity testing generally speak of an “exclusion rate” rather than a “non-paternity rate” or “misattributed paternity rate.”

Dr Philipp agreed that the figure was “a minimum.” He then explained how he came to be doing the tests. His team was “screening some female patients by testing their husbands for their blood groups” as part of a study about the formation of antibodies. The results surprisingly showed that “30 per cent of the children could not have been fathered by the men whose blood group we analysed.” Another participant asked about the number of people who were tested. Dr Philipp replied, “Not large – between 200 and 300 women – but large enough to give us a real shock.”

As we’ve seen, this brief conversation took on a life of its own, despite the fact that Dr Philipp never published the findings of his study. As a result, his precise tests and his population sample were never identified. One participant at the symposium described the sample as “highly biased,” but we can only guess what this means. It might mean that the sample consisted of unmarried mothers, who were an easy target for medical studies at the time. Later studies leave no doubt that misattributed paternity is much more likely for unmarried mothers than married mothers.

More generally, the fact that the findings were never published means that they were never independently evaluated by other experts. Ironically, during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s there had been refereed studies about paternity in Britain and the United States, based on blood testing and published in reputable journals. None of them came close to 30 per cent.

Dr Philipp’s findings survived the test of time simply because they are shocking. Talkback radio gave them a new lease of life, and so has the internet.

Since Dr Philipp’s study, testing for paternity has become much more sophisticated. DNA techniques invented in the 1980s mean it is now both cheaper and more accurate – so much so that the accuracy of these tests is now more than 99.99 per cent, a pretty reliable basis for establishing paternity.

As a result, an industry dedicated to paternity testing has emerged, pulling in people from all kinds of related businesses. One of the entrepreneurs I interviewed had his start in a small bird-sexing business in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. One day, he recalled, “the phone rang and I picked it up.” When the person on the other end asked whether he tested for paternity, he replied, “No, we don’t.”

The next day there was another call: “Do you do testing of paternity?”

“No, we just do animals.”

The next day there was another call: “Do you do testing of paternity?”

“Can you hold on one minute?” the entrepreneur asked. He put down the phone and said to his business partner, “Can you believe this is the third phone call I’ve had this week? Somebody wants paternity testing.”

And his partner said, “We’ll do it!”

Most of the demand for paternity tests comes from mothers who want to establish paternity in order to secure child support. Some of it comes from fathers – often divorced or separated – who want to disprove paternity in order to avoid child support. In the United States more than 400,000 paternity tests are carried out every year. In Australia the figure is about 10,000, but only half of them involve Australian citizens; the balance are “export” cases, with offshore customers sending their specimens to Australian laboratories for testing.

These figures translate into more than five times as many tests per 1000 births in the United States than in Australia. One of the main reasons for the difference is that in Australian law the “marital presumption” that a husband is the father of his wife’s children also applies to de facto couples. (This was introduced without fanfare back in 1975.) In the United States the marital presumption doesn’t apply to de facto couples, which means that the paternity of children born outside marriage must be established legally. This routinely leads to paternity testing.

In 2008 the non-paternity rate reported by paternity testing laboratories in the United States was 25.9 per cent. My survey of a selection of Australian laboratories for the same year arrived at a non-paternity rate of 23.7 per cent.

The problem with these figures is obvious. The participants are not a random sample of the population. On the contrary, they are a group of people who have doubts about the paternity of a child or children. The main thing we can say on the basis of these figures is that about three-quarters of people who have some reason to doubt paternity will find that their doubts are unfounded.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the figures is that the non-paternity rate in Australian laboratories appears to be lower than the rate in American laboratories. Given that Americans are five times more likely to have a paternity test at all, this suggests that the extent of misattributed paternity is much lower in Australia than the United States.

For the best available evidence about the extent of misattributed paternity we need to turn to medical research. This research is motivated by a medical condition or treatment, such as cystic fibrosis or bone marrow transplantation; the discovery of misattributed paternity is an unintended consequence. Occasionally researchers – like Dr Philipp – report their unintended findings; fortunately, most of them report their findings in more detail than he did.

Some scholars have aggregated all this evidence to produce an average “non-paternity rate.” The problem with doing this is that the quality of reports varies widely, as illustrated by Dr Philipp’s findings. It makes more sense to identify the best studies – those that fully explain how they came to their conclusions.

The best British study, published in 1991, suggests a non-paternity rate of about 1 per cent. A 1992 French study indicates a rate of 2.8 per cent. A 1994 Swiss study has a maximum rate of 0.78 per cent. A 1999 Mexican study comes in at 11.8 per cent. And the best North American study, published in 2009, proposes a rate between 1 and 3 per cent. There are no published Australian studies.

These figures could all be distorted by the problem of who is willing to participate, which I mentioned earlier. Even so, there are some striking differences between countries. The rate of non-paternity in Mexico is especially high and the rate in Switzerland is especially low. Almost certainly there are underlying cultural differences in how marriage, sexuality and parenting are organised in these countries, which shape these different rates.

Following this logic, it seems likely that the Australian rate is in the same ballpark as rates in Britain and the United States. Australia has more in common with these countries in terms of how family relationships are organised than with other countries, such as Mexico and Switzerland. By this reckoning, the rate of misattributed paternity in Australia would be somewhere between 1 and 3 per cent.

More precisely, the rate of misattributed paternity in Australia is probably closer to 1 per cent. By most measures family relationships in Australia have more in common with those in Britain than in the United States. That figure is also consistent with the evidence from the paternity testing industry that Australian rates are lower than those in the United States.

There is one other source of evidence on misattributed paternity. A succession of large-scale representative sex surveys were launched in rich countries in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis. They included questions about multiple sexual partners, which are a necessary condition of misattributed paternity, and so they might provide a vehicle for independent estimates of misattributed paternity.

I have done my own calculations based on British surveys in 1990 and 2000, for which raw data is available. They indicate an underlying non-paternity rate for children born in 1990 of somewhere between 0.7 per cent and 2 per cent. The estimated rate differs widely according to the marital status of the mother. For the offspring of married women, the rate is between 0.3 per cent and 0.6 per cent. For cohabiting women, it is between 1.1 per cent and 2.7 per cent. For other women – single, divorced, separated or widowed – it is between 2.3 per cent and 8.1 per cent.

My calculations for the survey in 2000 indicate an underlying non-paternity rate for children born in that year of somewhere between 1.3 per cent and 3.4 per cent. The non-paternity rate rose between 1990 and 2000 for two main reasons: first, a higher proportion of women (married, cohabiting or other) with two or more sexual partners, and second, a higher proportion of births outside of marriage.

Published data from the 2001 large-scale sex survey in Australia suggests that Australian rates are in the same range as those in Britain. Australian women are slightly more likely to have had two or more sexual partners in the previous year, which implies a higher non-paternity rate. They are slightly less likely to have children outside of marriage, which implies a lower non-paternity rate. In other words, the two patterns roughly cancel each other out.

At the very least, these surveys indicate that the extent of misattributed paternity is increasing in rich countries such as Australia, largely because of the weakening hold of marriage on sexual behaviours. Yet the increase is taking place from a low base. The evidence from sex surveys is pretty much the same as the evidence from medical research. It shows that estimates of 10 per cent, 20 per cent and 30 per cent non-paternity rates are massively inflated.

The really interesting question, then, is how the urban myth of rampant misattributed paternity persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

At least three parties have promoted the myth. The first of these are the fathers’ rights groups who have mobilised around DNA paternity testing as part of a broader campaign against the child support system. They believe that the system is stacked against them, and that paternity testing can correct this bias a little. They cite high rates of non-paternity to support their claims of widespread paternity fraud at the expense of fathers. They are especially active on the internet, which provides a medium for the rapid spread of such claims.

Second, there are the DNA paternity testing laboratories and their agents. The industry in the United States is especially large, and includes specialist laboratories with dedicated media units and call centres, and independent brokers who recruit customers on the internet and on-sell the tests to laboratories. The US industry can’t do much to increase demand for the tests among single mothers, but it can take active steps to increase demand in the other main market, alienated fathers who are often paying child support.

These steps include promoting the view that misattributed paternity is widespread. Brokers and laboratories promote this view through the internet (including links with fathers’ rights groups) and the media (including live television shows where paternity disputes are played out in front of a studio audience).

Finally, evolutionary psychologists provide intellectual credibility for inflated non-paternity rates. Evolutionary psychology explains human behaviour in terms of our genetic code formed in deep ancestral time. It prides itself on its scientific approach, in contrast to what it calls the “standard social science paradigm.” Specifically, evolutionary psychologists argue that while men’s short-term sexual strategy is based on obtaining large numbers of partners, women’s strategy involves obtaining men of “high genetic quality.” In close connection, men are “hard wired” to take care that they do not raise the progeny of other men.

Evolutionary psychologists believe that high non-paternity rates provide independent evidence of their theory of human behaviour. They are responsible for very badly designed studies that arrive at high estimates of misattributed paternity. They also coordinate meta-studies that treat all existing research as having equal merit. Their studies provide academic legitimacy to claims of extensive misattributed paternity.

After I did that research on the true extent of misattributed paternity, I had several articles on the topic published in top-ranking international journals. But my finding that the extent of misattributed paternity is tiny is neither shocking nor, it seems, newsworthy.

Bad news travels fast; good news more slowly. No wonder that fathers’ rights groups, the paternity testing industry and evolutionary psychologists find an audience for their inflated estimates. No wonder that a snippet of conversation lives on as an urban myth. •

The post The fatherhood myth appeared first on Inside Story.

THIS month’s federal budget has sparked a heated debate about family assistance. Tony Abbott has painted a picture of the government’s pulling the family assistance rug out from under the feet of families already struggling with rising costs of living. The opposition leader went so far as to say that the reforms announced in the budget were not about middle-class welfare, but “class warfare.”

The government’s task of communicating what the budget will mean for family assistance has not been helped by the fact that the changes are difficult to explain, largely because the family assistance system itself is very complex. So the debate has tended to focus on whether a family on $150,000 is rich or not. What seems to have been neglected is serious discussion about whether the changes will help low-income families provide basic opportunities for their children, which, after all, is what family assistance is about.

The budget included three key measures affecting family assistance. The best way to make sense of what the changes mean is to look at how they will affect Family Tax Benefit Part A, or FTB-A, by far the largest component of the overall system, paid to some 1.8 million families.

The first measure introduces a pause in the indexation of the FTB-A supplement – the amount, currently worth around $725 per child, paid at the end of the financial year when a family reconciles its family assistance payments with its total income reported to the tax office. Pausing the indexation of this amount is an effective way of generating savings because all families forgo a relatively small increase in their entitlement. Fortnightly payments will still increase on 1 July as usual, but the supplement will stay at its current level, rather than increasing by around $18 per child per year. And this is the extent of the bad news for the overwhelming majority of FTB-A families: they will not receive an extra $18 per child at the end of the next financial year.

The second measure extends an already existing pause on the indexation of the so-called upper thresholds. There are several upper thresholds in the family assistance system. Most of them are set at $150,000 and act like cut-off points beyond which a family is no longer eligible for benefits like FTB Part B, the dependency tax offsets, the Baby Bonus or Paid Parenting Leave. But it is the indexation pause of the FTB-A upper thresholds – which have nothing to do with that magic number of $150,000 – that affects the greatest number of families.

The FTB-A upper thresholds are not eligibility cut-off points. Instead, they determine the income level at which a family starts to lose their entitlement. The government talks about thresholds rather than a threshold because they are worked out using the number of children in the family. To calculate the income level at which a family loses entitlement to FTB-A altogether, you therefore need to have a specific “family” in mind.

Take the case of a family – whether there is one parent or two, one income or two is irrelevant – with two teenage children aged thirteen and sixteen. Figure 1 shows how much FTB-A this hypothetical family would receive in the 2011–12 financial year were the budget measures not to come into force. The chart reveals the typical two-plateau structure of FTB-A. Starting from the left of the chart, low-income families receive what is called the maximum rate of payment, worth around $8450 per year. This starts to reduce when the family income exceeds $46,355 until it hits the second plateau, called the base rate. The upper threshold for this family, after which the base rate starts to reduce, is $100,740. The payment cuts out completely at a family income of just less than $115,000.

Figure 1: FTB-A entitlement for a family with two children aged thirteen and sixteen before the budget changes (2011–12)


In a well-designed system, families near the point where they lose FTB-A entirely would take little interest in whether they fell on one side of the cut-out point or the other. But this all changed when Kevin Rudd introduced the Education Tax Refund, a centrepiece of his 2007 election campaign. Most families can take advantage of the full value of the Education Tax Refund (currently around $800 for a secondary school student) provided that they earn at least one dollar of FTB-A. The same goes for other benefits like the Teen Dental Plan. But earn one dollar too much, and you lose the lot. This provides a very strong incentive for families to remain on FTB-A, even if the amount of FTB-A involved is very little.

The third budget measure represents a significant step towards improving the overall adequacy of FTB-A. The Henry tax review summarised research showing that family assistance adequately covers the cost of raising a child in a low-income family up until the age of fifteen. Once a child turns sixteen, the system falls woefully short. In fact, the annual payment made to a low-income family currently drops by over $4000 when a child turns sixteen, as shown by the “Status Quo” columns in Figure 2. The budget seeks to address this by harmonising the maximum payment rate for children aged thirteen to nineteen. This change also simplifies not only FTB-A, but its relationship to Youth Allowance as well.

Figure 2: FTB-A maximum rates by age (2011–12)


How does this reform affect our hypothetical family? The impact can be substantial, as shown in Figure 3. If the family receives the maximum rate of FTB-A, it will be $4172 better off next year, and all families on an income of up to $88,500 will see some increase in their payment. The changes will have other effects not shown on the chart. Provided that a family receives more than the base rate of FTB-A, it is eligible for rent assistance, and the children are entitled to a healthcare card, both potentially valuable forms of additional assistance.

Figure 3: Effect of budget reforms on the FTB-A entitlement of a family with two children aged thirteen and sixteen (2011–12)


The impact of all three budget measures and the trade-offs between them are captured quite nicely in Figure 3. First, low-income families with children aged sixteen to nineteen stand to benefit substantially. Second, pausing indexation of the supplement slightly reduces the entitlement of all FTB families (notice how the “Budget” base rate plateau sits slightly lower than the “Status Quo” base rate). Finally, extending the indexation pause on the upper thresholds means that our hypothetical family loses all entitlement to FTB-A when its income reaches $112,100, instead of $114,850.

Taken together, the three budget measures produce a better-targeted FTB-A system that more adequately covers the cost of raising children of all ages. This – rather than a pointless debate about whether a family on $150k is rich or not – is the message that should be reaching the public. •

The post Family assistance: what the changes really mean appeared first on Inside Story.

“RAISING a child, Kathy and I agreed, was one of the most complex and rewarding things we would ever do. It was all about development: gross motor, fine motor, sensory, cognitive, social and emotional. The terms flooded into our lives and fascinated me. A budding human being was a creature teeming with life, with potential. And that potential needed the right conditions: loving parents, stability, a watchful eye, a firm hand when required, or a delicate touch. This was where the challenge and achievement lay — in taking responsibility for the creation of a happy, useful human being.”

These heartfelt words come from When Horse Became Saw, Anthony Macris’s deeply moving memoir about coming to grips with the emergence of severe autism in his only son. And while most of today’s parents will never know the extremes of joy and heartbreak Macris has known, I think they would endorse his attitude to child rearing.

I admit to being a less than disinterested commentator. My partner and I have nine children between us and are grandparents to a total of thirteen. That’s an awful lot of experience, but we both feel that in some ways it counts for very little. We have seen a huge attitudinal shift in the way our kids raise their kids compared with how we raised them. For them, Macris says it all — parenting is about creating happy, useful people. Not feeding, clothing and guiding them but creating them. No wonder it can be so daunting, demanding and all-consuming, and has old hands like us frequently biting our tongues. Make no mistake, this is touchy terrain.

Margaret K. Nelson is professor of sociology at Middlebury College, an American liberal arts college of high repute. Her previous works are about single mothers, working families and the provision of care. Who’s Watching? Daily Practices of Surveillance Among Contemporary Families, which she edited with Anita Ilta Garey, came out in 2009, and Parenting Out of Control contextualises this aspect of parenting in the wider issue of class. It’s an American book, with certain American idiosyncrasies, but much that she has to say on the subject will resonate here.

Intrigued by the emergence of what are popularly called “helicopter” parents (there’s even a Wikipedia page about them), Nelson and her research assistants interviewed ninety-three parents (mostly mothers) in thirty-seven locations across the United States. Most of the parents interviewed had at least one teenager at the time, and their stories are skilfully woven into the text.

Nelson does her best to be the neutral social scientist, but it’s soon apparent where her sympathies lie. The parents who are “out of control” belong to what Nelson calls “the professional middle class” (in my shorthand, these are the PMCs). Nelson groups her respondents according to their education: for membership of the PMC, a master’s degree or a PhD is the minimum. Middle-class parents have bachelor degrees, and what she calls the working class have only finished high school (though some may have taken university-level subjects).

Compared with the PMCs, the MCs and WCs in Nelson’s sample had more recognisable styles of parenting, to some extent forced on them by their limited resources. Unlike the PMCs, they tended to believe their kids already had distinct and differing personalities, and that their job was essentially to guide them through the difficult passage to independent adulthood — an approach not so different from that of their own parents. Moreover, they appreciated what their parents had tried to do with them, even if they bridled at their upbringing at the time. Not so the PMCs, who universally felt that their way of parenting was more concerned, involved, respectful and loving than that of their parents. (One woman went so far as to insist they didn’t love their children as much as she loved hers.)

Yet the poorer, less-educated parents seemed more savvy about their kids than their PMC counterparts. Paradoxically, although they spent less time with them, they appeared to know them better. They had more realistic expectations about their potential and the dangers that faced them. The WCs, in particular, had well-grounded fears about drugs, sex and violence on the street, and tried to prepare their kids for what they were bound to encounter. By contrast, the PMC parents were mainly worried about the sex and violence in the media. Both MC and WC parents were willing to try technological constraints such as blocking R-rated material on television and computers but, except for an extensive reliance on mobile phones, PMCs were appalled by the notion of electronic monitoring. They kept their children “safe” through constant connection, watching pornography with them if need be, discussing the issues and negotiating over what was and was not permissible.

This kind of parenting would be very time-consuming indeed. Yet incredibly, although a number of PMC families had two parents working, usually in high-powered, demanding jobs, they not only spent more time with their kids than MC and WC parents did, they spent more time with them than their own parents had, even when those earlier families conformed to the traditional breadwinner father, stay-at-home mother model. Nelson finds that two things tend to give in such a situation: the parents’ relationship with each other, and other social relationships. In other words, when helicopter parents pride themselves on being “friends” with their children, it often turns out that these are the only people they have time for. Nelson points to studies showing that PMC parents spend less time with each other than their parents did in 1975, and to the high incidence of divorce and separation among them.

Of considerable concern to me is that many professionally qualified women choose to stay at home with their children in order to avoid these pitfalls. This is one development that has had real traction in Australia, where policies introduced by the Howard government were designed to achieve this very outcome. Individual achievement and women leaders aside, policies such as Family Tax Benefit B and letting the market have a free run in childcare have seriously slowed the progress made over previous generations, and will have consequences for these women as they age.

And is it good for the kids? Nelson describes a typical morning on her Middlebury campus, where students into their twenties stroll to classes with mobile phones glued to their ears, in very many cases talking with their parents. Granted, technology makes this possible, but it’s worrying nonetheless. All the parents interviewed, whatever their class, approved of giving phones to their children, for safety reasons mainly. But the degree to which they were used to foster emotional connection was far, far greater in PMC families.

Nelson concludes that the offspring of helicopter parents are at risk, in effect, of arrested development. “Unless there are changes — in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in communities, in state actions — that demonstrate that child care is a community responsibility,” she writes, and as long as there is the “extreme income inequality” that makes the consequence of “failing” so dire, there’s a strong possibility that this sort of parenting will continue. It all depends on whether or not the kids of this generation will come to react against their upbringing and raise their children differently. For that to happen they themselves “will have to grow up enough to know their own minds.”

The fundamental issue is control. The PMC strategy of connecting, negotiating and talking through situations with their children represents a commitment “to psychological and moral training” rather than “physical constraint and clear limits,” a policy she suggests might be ultimately more “controlling” than setting firm parameters. The less-educated who were interviewed tended to be “sensible gardeners” of their children, inclined to believe that they come into the world with their own personalities and talents, and less apt to conceive of them as “creations.”

All this notwithstanding, and despite the catchy title and the comic-inspired cover, Parenting Out of Control is essentially an academic study, with the requisite detailed statements of intention and endless summings up. I found the reading pretty tough going but the content fascinating, and was grateful for the excellent index and appendices.

The pressure on American professionals to reproduce their class has had far-reaching social and political effects, most particularly on America’s public schooling, a phenomenon all too familiar in Australia. Poorer kids are the ones who miss out, but the children of the elite, embarked on an endless rat race, have their share of problems too. Beginning as early as preschool, the business of getting into the “right” school and ensuring that extracurricular activities will pave the way into a good college, make childhood and parenting a breathless round of sports, music lessons, volunteering and “experiences” of one kind or another. This would certainly lead to the anxiety referred to in Margaret Nelson’s subtitle, exacerbated to the nth degree by the excessive valorisation of “choice.” As for these being “uncertain times,” the assertion seems quite bizarre. Born at the fag end of the Great Depression, nurtured under a war economy and the ushering in of the atomic age, I can’t help feeling that Nelson’s elite has it fairly light in the anxiety department.

TAKE, by contrast, Condoleezza Rice’s childhood. Condi was never one of my favourite people; at the height of her influence in the second Bush administration I gleefully dubbed her “the Stepford wife.” That she was black and a woman meant little — to me, she embodied all the faults inherent in a meritocracy. But Extraordinary, Ordinary People has softened me and, if it hasn’t reconciled me to her politics, it goes some way towards explaining them.

It was E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, published in 1957, that introduced this naive white liberal to the idea of an African-American middle class. Frazier offered a searing indictment of its conservatism, which he saw as a parody of the white middle class. The FBI hounded him as a communist, but the book had an impact. Electrifying when I read it, with hindsight I feel it’s too harsh — but, like much of the literature of the time, it had a point to make. The black middle class had been cautious, and to some extent subservient, but it too was swept up in the civil rights movement and made its contribution. Martin Luther King, after all, was a graduate with a PhD; his fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy had a master’s degree from Atlanta University. Both would have qualified as members of Margaret Nelson’s professional middle class.

Rice spent the better part of her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, arguably the most racist city in America. Her parents, John and Angelena, belonged to that first generation of middle-class blacks to go to the colleges that were the preserve of “blue bloods” — descendants of freed slaves with “bloodlines going back to doctors and lawyers of the late nineteenth century.” The Rices saw education as essential for ameliorating the abasements of their second-class citizenship. As their daughter puts it, “The White Man” had all the power. “Certainly, in any confrontation with a white person in Alabama you were bound to lose. But my parents believed that you could alter that equation through education, hard work, perfectly spoken English, and an appreciation for the ‘finer things’ in ‘their’ culture… ‘[T]hey’ might not like you but ‘they’ had to respect you.” The institutions Rice’s parents attended, segregated as they were, did much to instil dignity and pride.

They were both teachers, and John Rice, a preacher, became a university administrator. Their only child, Condoleezza (the name was concocted by Angelena from the Italian musical term for playing sweetly), was lavished with attention, although with both parents working, this also came from extended family members. With this important distinction, and the fact that she once was spanked, Condoleezza’s upbringing was not unlike that espoused by Nelson’s PMC parents. She was treated with respect, almost as an equal, and participated in regular family discussions on a wide range of issues. If ever there was a product of Hillary Clinton’s dictum that “it takes a village to raise a child,” Condoleezza was it. Except for the fact that Condoleezza’s village was an enclave.

It’s easy to forget today that as recently as the 1960s there was only one restaurant in Birmingham where blacks were permitted. When John Rice enrolled in a summer program at New York University, the family travelled with him, but there was nowhere they could eat until they reached Washington, and they had to make sure not to travel in the dark. Lynching was frequent (the last in Alabama was in 1981), homes were bombed right through the 1950s and 60s, and the violence increased as segregation was attacked. “By 1962,” Rice writes, “my parents’ attempts to shield me from the hostility of the place in which we lived were no longer succeeding. Birmingham would shortly become ‘Bombingham’; it was a very scary place.”

It came to a head in 1963. Condoleezza had turned eight the previous November, when the black boycott of downtown stores was already under way, but her memory of that year is seared into her consciousness. With winter and spring came the voting-rights actions, the sit-ins, the marches; on 16 April Martin Luther King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and that September, two of Condoleezza’s friends were killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

Rice gives King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference their due, but reserves special praise for Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who led the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People before joining up with King. He and John Rice were friends, and Condoleezza remembers their many evening porch conversations determining tactics and strategy. In the end, fearing for the safety of his parishioners, John Rice decided not to join Birmingham’s famous Southern Christian Leadership Conference march but formed a street watch instead.

The point of the recollection is twofold. Rice is at pains to insist that Birmingham’s middle-class blacks supported the actions wholeheartedly, even when for one reason or another they felt they couldn’t take part. (“If everyone who says he marched with King actually did,” her father said, “there wouldn’t have been any room on the streets of Birmingham.”) And it was because of his watch that she became a “fierce defender” of the Second Amendment, upholding the right of citizens to bear arms. John Rice and his friends stockpiled them, waiting for Bull Connor (Birmingham’s inaptly titled Commissioner of Public Safety) and his hoons.

As ever, the issues on the ground were more complicated than standard reportage would have us believe. As for Condoleezza, I was reminded that for many years most African Americans supported the Republican Party; after all, Republicans were the party of Abraham Lincoln. John Rice’s politics partly explains Condoleezza’s embrace of them, though she, like him, would have voted for Bobby Kennedy if she’d been given the chance.

Extraordinary, Ordinary People is an absorbing memoir, and I’ve only picked out the eyes. It tracks Condoleezza’s development from precocious child to aspiring figure skater to foreign policy expert, then on to college administrator, national security adviser and America’s sixty-sixth secretary of state. No slouch herself, it’s to her parents she refers when she writes of extraordinary people, all of her people in fact, in what was a most extraordinary, extraordinarily uncertain time. •

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FOR ME, it was the interview with Christos Tsiolkas on ABC’s Lateline – in place of the ubiquitous parliamentarian or the occasional policy wonk – that confirmed the position of his award-winning book, The Slap, in the zeitgeist. That may seem strange, since plenty of people were already talking and writing about the novel and the modern-day dystopia experienced by its protagonists. It had already won the glowing praise of many reviewers, wowed the judges of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and started appearing with frequency in the clutches of commuters on public transport. It now sits atop the country’s bestseller lists – and not just those of the independent bookstores. The recent sale of the TV rights has made it official: The Slap is now more than a book – it has become part, if not the effective instigator, of a national conversation about families and children.

When Australians respond to stories about themselves, this is surely to be celebrated. But, despite the hype, it is debatable just how meaningfully The Slap captures contemporary Australian life. It certainly succeeds as an entertaining and absorbing, if not particularly lyrical, read. At times Tsiolkas’ characters convey sentiments with such searing clarity that what is said or thought cannot help but resonate with different readers. The fact that the story is told, Rashomon-style, through the eyes of eight interconnected people only enhances this possibility. But does the novel really manage to illuminate the thornier, but perhaps more mundane, problems of raising children and maintaining marriages and friendships?

The essence of the story is simple. In a first chapter of mounting tension, family and friends gather in a suburban backyard for a barbeque. As is the way of such occasions, affectionate companionship, small talk and the odd bitter exchange are all part of the mix. Friction is generated among a number of the guests over jobs, values and differing cultural backgrounds – and the party is increasingly punctuated by the petty battles of the children present. One little boy, Hugo, is a particular handful – spoilt by his parents, the drunken Gary and dippy Rosie. During a game of backyard cricket, tempers flare and Hugo receives the slap of the book’s title, not from either of his parents but from another adult, the host’s cousin Harry. Pandemonium not so surprisingly ensues and the gathering breaks up with threats of legal action, but not before Hugo tearfully declares, “No one is allowed to touch my body without my permission.” Herein lies the central question of the book. Superficially it may be seen as a “how” question, about the acceptability of corporal punishment. But really it is all about “who” – Tsiolkas is interested in where responsibility lies for ensuring that the single-minded selfishness of a baby (it is significant that, although almost four years of age, Hugo is yet to be weaned) gives way in the young (and not so young) to a respect and consideration for others. Integral to this question is a related one about the implications of affluent Western society’s apparent privileging of childhood in recent years.

When Hillary Clinton advised “it takes a village” I’m pretty sure she wasn’t advocating the thumping of kids by strangers. Tsiolkas isn’t either. But, like the then First Lady, he has his eye on the interconnectedness of domestic relationships as the key to the kind of young people a society produces. In interviews, the author has revealed that one of the catalysts for The Slap was his encounter with a gang of rowdily offensive teenage boys on a crowded suburban train. But in the novel that has resulted, the young people are all pretty likeable and it is the adults in middle age who wreak havoc – on others but also, a lot of the time, on themselves.

The main oppositional forces in the book are Harry and Rosie. Tsiolkas’ clever shifting of perspective throughout the story enables more to be gradually revealed about the actors in his suburban drama as the story progresses, but I cannot help thinking that he misses an opportunity by making the key protagonists as extreme as he does. Harry, it emerges, has form in the aggro department and isn’t so much a guy pushed to his limits as one who is never far from them. We are left in no doubt that, although a proud and loving father to his own boy, he is otherwise a misogynistic thug, enjoying a relationship with a mistress that is just shy of outright prostitution and dabbling in minor criminal activity on the side. He is a character with plenty of angles for his creator to explore, but how much more confronting to readers would it have been if they could more easily recognise themselves – frazzled, tired or disapproving – in the person who could strike another’s child?

At the same time, it is hard to imagine anyone warming too much to Rosie, Hugo’s indulgent and self-righteous mother. It is hard not to scoff at a character who announces that she has dispensed with showering on weekends so as to teach a four year old about water restrictions. In a disturbing coda to the chapter told from her perspective, Tsiolkas has Rosie reflect on her troubled teenage years and acknowledge that “she was a slut” – dirty trash with “bad blood” who, even now, others see as tarnished. The point of this seems to be to emphasise that any sense of worth that Rosie has is derived solely from her role as a mother. While that provides a neat contrast with her two professionally successful friends, the choice to make Rosie as broken as Harry is latently violent cannot help but drive the conflict at the heart of The Slap further away from the difficult interactions which generally rational adults may have with each other about parenting and the behaviour of their children.

Despite, or indeed because of, her best efforts, Rosie is a lousy parent in the sense of equipping her son to grow into a happy and thoughtful young person. In nurturing their bond she virtually ensures his isolation from all others. Unlike Hector and Aisha, the hosts of the barbeque, who are surrounded by extended family, Rosie and Gary are cut adrift from their own relatives. What is more, Gary, excluded by Hugo’s intimacy with Rosie, clearly resents his son.

This is one of the more interesting issues raised by The Slap – the dislike parents can feel for their own children. His father’s disconnection from Hugo is due not just to Rosie’s near obsession with the boy, but also to the fact that Gary is, at heart, a deadbeat. More challenging is Hector’s almost unconscious distaste for his pudgy pubescent son. This is alluded to in mere glimpses of his, or his wife’s, thoughts. But it is a far more taboo topic than many of the others Tsiolkas places at centre stage – namely infidelity (which is practised with a solid respect for cliché: older man with schoolgirl; fling at an overseas conference) and abortion (handled with similar predictability). Both of these, with minor variations, are such ubiquitous plot devices in accounts of suburban disenchantment – across the spectrum from Revolutionary Road to Home & Away – that Tsiolkas might as well be colouring from numbers.

At one point in The Slap, a character wonders whether the world is divided into three genders – men, women and “women who choose to have nothing to do with children.” There may be something in this, but again Tsiolkas displays a preference for the obvious over the complex. Despite having some of the book’s tartest and funniest lines, the hard-bitten Anouk, representing this “third gender,” is essentially a caricature of the careerist childless woman – as hackneyed now as it was in the heyday of that tiresome 1980s soap thirtysomething. The truth of any supposed “third gender” is, of course, that it is comprised simply of women who do not have children – for whatever reason, but often not due to any choice of their own. Sure, women’s career goals are not irrelevant, but rather than being an isolated consideration it would seem far more common for them to intersect with the difficulty of finding a committed partner or the tragedy of infertility. One suspects that the impact of these other phenomena are more prevalent, not to mention more interesting, than a woman with options rejecting motherhood to pursue a literary career (not, as the saying goes, that there is anything wrong with that).

FRUSTRATINGLY, Tsiolkas again indicates he is not oblivious to these more complex issues through a few references towards the end of the book to Harry’s wife falling pregnant after several years of “trying.” But not only is her story relegated to a faint backdrop while that of Anouk is given direct exposition, no evident link is made between the efforts at the heart of Harry’s marriage to conceive another child and the depths of his own simmering anger and frustration. The effect of childlessness on both women and men – and how this truly shapes their attitude to any children in their lives and those living in their community – is unexplored here. That our society still does not quite know how to regard those who are not, for whatever reason, “breeders” is, however, slightly more satisfactorily highlighted.

A truly contemporary theme on to which Tsiolkas does undoubtedly latch is that of vanity – particularly in males. Cousins Harry and Hector are in their early forties but still strive to define themselves through their good looks and physical fitness. The onset of middle age has apparently never seemed more frightening than in today’s youth obsessed culture and this is far from confined to how women feel about their bodies. The men constantly appraise themselves, each other and their partners – but in this perhaps they are aping the competitiveness and insecurity of the women in their lives. At one point Aisha reflects that while she may not particularly like her husband Hector, she takes great pride in his appearance and their attractiveness as a couple. This, far more than any emotional connection between them, she fears losing.

The futility of these efforts to retain vigour and beauty are exposed with great pathos through the character of Hector’s father, Manolis. The sad reminiscences triggered by his attendance at the funeral of an old friend and the general bewilderment of the older generation with the affluence and messiness of their children’s existence are the most affecting part of this tale. For all our frantic endeavours to live fabulous lives with fulfilling jobs and indulged children ferried around in designer prams and silver four-wheel drives, our worlds will eventually shrink and we will resign ourselves to life’s disappointments and our own diminishing relevance to those coming after us.

The Slap also challenges the popular pretence that twenty-first century Australia is a classless society. But it is not stratified in ways that lend themselves to easy categories. The family of Greek immigrants Manolis and his wife Koula has prospered here through hard work, and Harry in particular enjoys a lifestyle that we now expect to come with success. Quite apart from any grief they cause him through their pursuit of legal action over his hitting Hugo, Harry despises Gary and Rosie as losers who rent a shabby house. Gary is the archetypal argumentative “bogan,” with chips on both shoulders, who drinks to excess. People with these flaws certainly exist, but it is pretty galling to see the disdain with which Gary is viewed by Manolis and his family as just one example of the degeneracy of Anglo-Australia. Tsiolkas suggests that those who have arrived through post-war immigration are the drivers of the newly emergent “aspirational” class of Australians. In this he may well be correct, but the generalisation is discomforting all the same. Gary is another character reduced to a one-dimensional representation, diverting the complexities that the book claims to explore into avenues all too familiar in a society that is quick to judge bad parenting and hates bludgers. In any case, aspiration evidently has its limits – as is made clear when one of the book’s well-off characters claims he cannot be a man “who sends his children to private schools.”

With so many screwed up adults running the show, what hope is there for the future? At various points in The Slap adults decry the rudeness and self-obsession of Generation Y (or are we already up to Gen Z?). While this is sure to echo with anyone over thirty, we might ask whether the true horror of young people is their occasional ghastliness, or whether it’s the realisation of what has slipped through our own fingers. It is striking that the only completely honest relationship in the book is that between two teenage friends, Connie and Richie. Each has their problems, but their mutual respect, trust and, yes, love demonstrate that, despite the talent of adults in the throes of a mid-life crisis for self-sabotage, in the best of our relationships lies our strength. It is tempting to think that with these two young people Tsiolkas finally transcends cliché. Or is it simply that, by contrast, the disaffection and tribulations of the forty-something middle-classes are inevitably formulaic?

If that is so, then the point is well made – but it is hardly revelatory stuff. I tend more to the view that The Slap, while skimming on the surface of debates about modern domesticity, avoids diving beneath the surface to the more confronting, and yet more germane, issues facing the generation currently responsible for the direction of our society and our kids’ happiness and sense of self-worth.

Perhaps those stories, playing out in homes all over the country, lack the edgy, sexy vibe Tsiolkas maintains throughout this book. But that doesn’t make them less real or undeserving of a novelist’s attention. •

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