Welfare: why not both?

Now we are a week on from the fallout over paid parental leave, and the government is consumed by other disasters, we can put the issue in its proper context.

First, almost no-one — either on the left or right — supported Tony Abbott’s plan to massively increase paid parental leave,  so we can stop the comparisons between Australia and the apparent maternal paradise in eastern Europe. It’s a bit late to pretend it’s a core issue of fairness now.

Second in the grand scheme of gender inequality, a couple months of paid parental leave pales in comparison with the societal expectation that mothers — not fathers — will sublimate their career to caring responsibilities for decades with a resultant gap in pay, promotion and prestige. Paid Parental Leave doesn’t address this underlying issue at all.

This is not the only concern, a deeper problem stems from government ham-fistedly using welfare to engineer social outcomes like getting women back to work, or gender equity and fairness. With minimal means testing, PPL is structured as a welfare ‘entitlement’ not a safety net. For people who believe in small government, rejecting this broader welfare agenda is a key battle.

Where welfare once attracted stigma because it was seen as being exclusively for the poor, now some payments are seen as entitlements or return for taxes paid. These payments (especially family payments, age pensions and childcare) represent some of the fastest growing areas of government spending over time.

Targeting dole bludgers and refugees, not to mention the perennial favourite — politicians’ entitlements — will never generate sufficient savings to close the budget gap or substantially shrink government. Moreover, history suggests that over time, entitlement payments will expand to overwhelm any short term savings found.

If the welfare state is to be kept in check, then welfare must return to being solely targeted at those who are too poor to look after themselves. Using it to create de facto equivalence between single and dual income households, or families and singles, or as a reward in retirement, is a mistake that legitimises big government redistribution schemes.

By accepting the premise that social engineering is a valid purpose for welfare, not only are we effectively left arguing a supposed moral case — that ‘women of calibre’ are deserving, but Duncan Storrar’s kids are not — but we have no defence to the line from the little girl in the Old El Paso ad: why not both?