Breed, damn you!
Family First Senator Stephen Fielding has released policy into the vacuum: a proposal that every third child will net a family a ‘bumper baby bonus’ of $10,000.
“We need to have kids. If we don’t have kids then when we are all old we have noone paying taxes to support us,” he said.
I remember when I first heard about the concept of a ‘baby bonus’, while I was researching my thesis. Many people may be unaware that Australia in fact introduced an earlier form of maternity payment in 1912, which was abolished only in 1978. The payment spanned and then outlived a time when the Eugenics movement had achieved considerable popularity, pre-Hitler, and the policy was originally explicitly framed as a ‘keep Australia white’ initiative.
The maternity payment was for a ‘viable’ child - a live birth - and was payable only to women who were not ‘asiatics’ or ‘aboriginal natives’ of Australia. This qualification of race was reviewed over time, first to ensure that British women were not excluded by the tag of ‘asiatic’, replacing it with the tag ‘alien’; next to allow women who had married an ‘alien’ but who themselves were white to receive the money (at this time, women assumed their husband’s nationality upon marriage). In the 1940s, the law was amended to allow some indigenous people on stations and settlements - provided they were judged to be deserving - to have a baby bonus paid into their state managed funds on their behalf, and we all know what happened to that money. A series of reforms from the 1950s onwards eventually allowed all people to receive the maternity allowance, before it was abandoned.
Of course, the Australia that produced this policy was a different world; married women didn’t work, as a rule, and as such had no need of maternity leave; and the racist component of the policy was deliberate and explicit. Its demise coincided with the rise of women in the workforce, and the policy debate shifted towards whether or not the provision of paid maternity leave was possible. Of course, in a radical shift backwards, the current Government chose in 2004 to pork barrel its way into power by re-introducing the concept of payment for birth.
The current baby bonus isn’t really that much different to its predecessor. In the interests of compassion, and as a nod to the notion that it is ‘instead of’ maternity leave, the baby bonusstill applies to stillborn children. However, it is unashamedly about demographics, in the “one for the nation” style so famously espoused by our treasurer - not tied to work or aimed at supporting women’s equality.
It is still about race; values; but it has shifted the debate to new and more subtle ground, away from undesirable ‘race’ and toward desirable and undesirable ‘culture’. It espouses the idea that it is far more ‘valuable’ to achieve population stability through birth rather than immigration.
It’s Fielding’s idea that a third child, that child which represents growth in the population rather than simply replacement, is more valuable to the nation than the first or second, and it’s as simple as that. As for the child’s mother, she should be rewarded for contributing to the nation. Not through the provision of paid maternity leave, the guarantee of her job on return to the workplace, better and more available childcare services, sustainable and ongoing support… but with a lump sum payment for fulfilling her role as the nation’s womb.
Lie back and think of Australia.
Post new comment