Last week the United Nations chastised Minister of Women’s Affairs Jo Goodhew and the NZ Government for our low level of paid parental leave.
Tonight the Government gets a chance to rectify it, by supporting my Bill to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks.
Instead, they plan to veto it for trumped up financial reasons.
Follow the debate from 8pm tonight.
New Zealand is the best place to raise children for many reasons. But the provision of paid parental leave is not one of them. This bill I’d doomed to fail. It is not affordable. even Clark would not allow an extension of PPL under here watch, There is nothing for nothing, and already the hard working middle classes are burdened with paying excessive taxes to support the social policies of the Labour government. This bill as you know is doomed to fail and hopefully at e first reading.
You are just buying into the upward race for ‘society’ to pay for raising children. That further erodes parental responsibility. And it is the gradual degradation of parental responsibility that has made NZ a decreasingly safe place to be brought up in.
So extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks further erodes parental responsibility.
But both parents working 40-60 hours a week, with latchkey kids doing whatever latchkey kids get up to unsupervised, is doing what for parental responsibility?
@al1ens + 1
@Lindsay Mitchell – you are just buying into a theory of society whereby each human is an individualistic, isolated, atomised unit where every individual actor is only responsible for themselves, and there’s no way that society should provide a little so that parents and children can enjoy stronger relationships.
And you’re just so freaking far off the mark in your comments! You know what makes societies less safer to live in? People with childhoods with weak/unstable emotional attachments to their primary caregivers/family, with little experience of nurture by their parents, who internalise the idea that it is OK to damage those around you.
Remember when even labourers’ wives could afford to stay at home indefinitely? The low level of real take home pay is the real problem.
“hard working middle classes”
There is no middle class, that’s just a claimed title, but at least you’re still aspirational.
There’s something wrong when mums and dads aren’t paid to stay home for a few extra weeks, but funding is given for childcare by strangers.
Lindsay Mitchell makes a valid point all the same, but PPL is still a good thing.
The European practice is a full year.
So why not the option in the bill of either 6 months at the minimum wage, or 12 months at half this rate?
As for the supposed cost – there is the cost of subsidised child care if they return to work sooner, there are cost offsets in lower WFF payment entitlement, and the reduction in UB cost for the duration someone else is in a temporary job position.
LM, should note that low wages result in the need for support for families and yet she opposes increases to the minimum wage. The parental responsibility refrain is to divert attention from the lack of jobs and low pay for work – the consequence of the capitalist free trade model. Exacerbating this is allowing foreigners to buy up local residential property – bid up the price.
http://union.org.nz/vote-fairness/wage-problems-cant-be-overlooked