Australian Government Asks Aussie Women to Have More Babies

But Forgets to Say Please.

You’ve got to hand it to the Australian government.

In July 2020, the Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, stood up at the National Press Club, looking for all the world like an embarrassed schoolboy, and urged Australian women to have more babies, amid concerns the falling birth rate has compromised the future tax base of the nation.

His timing, if not his cluelessness, was nothing short of spectacular.

After all, nothing says strategic quite like asking the nation’s women to gestate and populate, just as they double down at home with remote work, running a household and family, while home-schooling the children through a global pandemic. Never mind the government just announced an end to the free childcare policy put in place during lockdown.

I don’t know about you, but for me nothing says ‘sexy times’ more than the thought of a conservative politician urging me to take on some more unpaid domestic work.

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE TIMING

The Liberal-National Party (LNP), currently the governing party of Australia, has form when it comes to women’s issues, routinely demonstrating a cluelessness, dismissiveness, and even hostility, that attests squarely to its conservative world view.

Such routine neglect, and at times outright antipathy, to the issues that disproportionately affect women, is exactly what renders this gambit to get women to have more babies, (with no concomitant policy to make that viable), at best tone-deaf while at worst, deeply insulting.

A HISTORY OF BAD FAITH

In 2018 women made up just 22 percent of the conservative party members in the Federal Parliament. That gave Australia, (a supposedly modern first-world nation), a ranking of 50th amongst all nations for female representation in government, placing them in between the Phillippines and South Sudan.

This longstanding antipathy for female enfranchisement has given Australian women some peak political moments. The following examples, covering a broad area of concerns, are courtesy of those occupying the most senior offices in the country:

Economic Considerations

The party’s former leader, and Australian Prime Minister from 2013 to 2015, Tony Abbott, has been vocal over the years on his views of what a woman’s role should be. Consider this gem:

“I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.

To be fair, that quote is from the 1970s, however more recent examples suggest some sexist old attitudes refuse to die.

In 2013, Abbott famously appointed himself Minister for Women. Not because he cares overly much for women’s concerns, but rather of his 19 members strong cabinet, 18 of them were men. And while the one woman in his cabinet, Julie Bishop, could feasibly have held the position, Abbott inexplicably seemed to want it for himself.

When asked by the media what he’d achieved for women in his role as Minister for Women, Abbott pointed to his government’s repealing of a carbon tax, (one implemented by the previous progressive government), and suggested this would eventually bring down electricity prices (it didn’t), thus giving women more peace of mind with which to do the ironing. (I wish I was making this up).

Health Considerations

Prime Minister Abbott was presented with the opportunity to add Gardisal, an Australian developed vaccine for sexually-transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV), to the national immunisation schedule. HPV causes 70% of cervical cancers so the opportunity presented was one that guaranteed the saving of womens’ lives.

Still, Prime Minister Abbott wasn’t sure. He’d gone on record about the importance of a woman’s virginity and had rejected the idea of vaccinating his own daughters.

Of course, Prime Minister Abbott wasn’t alone in his concern the vaccine was an unholy invitation for female promiscuity. Fellow party member (and deputy Prime Minister of Australia from February 2016 to February 2018), Barnaby Joyce, was upset the Therapeutic Goods Administration would only be debating “the therapeutic aspects”, (i.e. saving lives), and “not there to talk about the psychological implications or the social implications” (i.e.controlling women’s sex lives).

“There might be an overwhelming backlash from people saying, ‘Don’t you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a lisence to be promiscuous’.”, Joyce catastrophized.

In the end, there was no overwhelming backlash when Gardisal was placed on the schedule or even any backlash at all. The Deputy PM then went on to confirm his sexist double standards by cheating on his wife of 22 years with a junior staffer and getting her pregnant. As his fellow conservative party members urged the woman in question to have an abortion (despite Joyce actively and vocally opposing a woman’s right to choose over the years), Joyce proceeded to throw her under the bus by suggesting to the media the baby may not even be his.

To refresh, Joyce was the deputy prime minister of Australia. (Incidentally, Gardisal has seen cervical cancer rates drop by 40% in Australia.)

Right to Choose

In Australia, doctors can conduct an abortion if it is believed the woman seeking an abortion is physically or mentally at risk should the pregnancy go ahead, including for social and economic factors. Nonetheless, abortion remains, technically, a criminal act in some states, and women accessing terminations still face a legal risk.

In the past 25 years, 12 people have been prosecuted under the NSW Crimes Act for abortion offences, four of those found guilty and prosecuted. In 2017, the most recent case, a mother of five was prosecuted for self-administering a drug to cause a miscarriage. (Michael McGowan, The Guardian).

In 2019, the state of NSW was close to passing a bill that decriminalised abortion when a group of conservative LNP politicians and religious figures mounted a campaign against the historic bill.

Again, the ex-Prime Minister (Tony Abbott) and then, current Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, (Barnaby Joyce), agitated against the idea of women being completely free to make their own choices about their own bodies, and weighed in with their tired old brand of sexism, moral hypocrisy, hyperbole, and devious misinformation mongering.

Describing the bill as “infanticide on demand”, Tony Abbott doubled down on his misogynistic Catholicism, while Joyce bizarrely compared the abortion bill to the US slave trade and the abuse of convicts in Australia. Both senior politicians attended a pro-life rally, while also trying to introduce amendments to the bill that would make the situation for women trying to get an abortion, even more difficult than before.

Suffice to say, the conservatives were at it again, led by two of the most senior, political figures in Australian life, gone near apoplectic at the terrifying possibility of greater female autonomy.

Domestic Violence

In Australia, one woman is brutally killed every nine days by her intimate partner. This violence is exacerbated by a corrupted family law court that has been influenced steadily since the mid-70s by, “an incessant and often intimidatory campaign by father’s rights groups”, that gained traction with successive conservative governments.

This tilt away from supporting mothers in the family court system, established into law by conservative Prime Minister John Howard in 2006, allows for a parent who claims their ex is abusing their children, to be termed a “hostile parent”, the consequences of which have allowed for a steady stream of children being sent into the care of an abusive father.

Despite report, after report identifying the damage to children being caused by this steady tilt against the mother, conservative governments continue to let this corrupt system continue unabated to this day.

As pressure mounted for the current LNP government to be seen to be acting on this issue the current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, flagged the establishment of an inquiry into the family courts, despite a multitude of reports already sitting in drawers, detailing a system rotten to the core.

Any hope this would lead to positive change was dashed when PM Morrison appointed Pauline Hanson, founder of One Nation, an extreme right-wing populist party, to head the inquiry. Hanson wasted no time in making her intentions for the inquiry clear on national radio, with unsubstantiated accusations women were making up domestic violence claims to get full custody of their children.

When Hanson was asked for evidence over such a claim she replied, “From my own personal experience, seeing what happened with my son.”

It is worth noting, Pauline Hanson’s son had previously been charged, and pleaded guilty to, breaching a Domestic Violence Order placed against him.

Despite push back from the public, including a petition with 70,000 signatures, the Prime Minister remains supportive of his choice in Hanson.

A JOB FOR THE LADIES

While the current LNP government (the one angling for women to have more babies and secure the economic future of the country), has listened to public disquiet over its “women problem”, increasing female representation in the cabinet from 1 to 7 in June 2019, that doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference to their collective hankering for past social mores.

With the brunt of pandemic unemployment falling disproportionately on women, the government has had little to say on what that means economically for women, who already fall behind men when it comes to wealth markers such as superannuation. Neither have they had anything to say on the extra burden the pandemic has placed on women, the ones usually tasked with anything extra to do with the family.

No, they’ve been quiet on those fronts.

Rather, they seem to have surveyed the hit to employment women have sustained as a demographic and instead of developing policies to get them back in their paid jobs, or researched ways to prevent them falling into poverty, they’ve spied a clumsy opportunity to lift the nation’s birth rate.

QUID PRO QUO

Australia does have a population growth problem. That much the treasurer is right about. At 2.02 in 2008, down to the present 1.74, the birth rate is expected to fall to 0.6 in 2021, the lowest since 1916–1917. The problem is further compounded as closed international borders stall immigration rates.

For a country that has sustained its past economic growth through the immigration of skilled workers, the pandemic represents a double economic blow: increased government debt to compensate the job losses incurred during lockdown periods and a fall in skilled labour.

For how long this situation will go for, no one rightly knows. But it does pose a significant economic dilemma for a country with population growth the treasurer claims will be, “effectively halved” these next few years.

Given such a situation, one can see how a government might look to the nation’s women and implore them to have more babies. One can also see how inconvenient it must be, after years of viewing women as a low political priority — taking interest only when it looks like they might be getting too much autonomy over their reproductive lives — to then have to ask for their cooperation over something so existentially important as the nations’s future economic viability.

How very, very awkward.

TONE-DEAF AND CLUELESS

One is disinclined to invoke The Handmaids Tale as a gratuitous comparison. Still, it’s hard not to think about Margaret Atwood’s novel, turned television series, and the conceit women’s only value, in a world completely run by men, is their reproductive capacity.

Of course, the treasurer asked nicely, no-one is forcing any Australian women to have a baby she doesn’t want to have and ultimately, the tone-deaf request was met with a universal eye roll by women across the country, the story pushed from the news cycle within a few days.

Still, what is there to be said about a government who treats women’s concerns with such sustained neglect and contempt, yet feels perfectly reasoned to ask those same women to have more babies for the economy, at a time their workload has never been greater?

Have they configured new policy in the delivery of low cost, high-quality childcare for the foreseeable future? Have they addressed the increased likelihood of poverty women experience due to years spent child rearing?

Or do they imagine having babies is a matter completely separate from other issues in a woman’s life, such as her economic position; how supported she feels by government policy; how safe she feels in her home and community, and the access she has to reproductive choices and quality health care.

LISTENING TO WOMEN

In the next few years, Australia is set to be a society that has more families without children (couples), than those with children, a trend already underway courtesy of a falling national birth rate.

The government, ever keen to keep the conversation on the economy, and the economy only, believes such focus is all that’s needed to encourage women to have more babies.

Yet significantly, declining birth rates are not just figures speaking to the economy. They also tell us something about what is going on in the collective female mind; how women feel about the future, the community they live in, and what they want from life relative to what is socially expected.

They also act as a barometer of sorts to policy makers charged with making the nation a friendly place for parenting. After all, a state that prioritises the welfare of children by supporting, respecting, and valuing parents, is surely one of the most philosophically vital goals a government can have.

What can it be saying to policymakers then, that Australian women are becoming less likely to want to be mothers? These reasons are there to be known, but for a conservative government such answers might well be too inconvenient.

The treasurer’s own insistence that a strong national economy, is all women need to have babies with confidence, falls well short of understanding this multifaceted issue. As Kristine Ziwica, from Women’s Agenda, puts it:

You have to build a strong, caring economy that works for women — who, you know tend to give birth to the babies — if you want to inspire that kind of confidence. And, judging by recent events, that’s not the current plan.

You can’t take away “free” childcare, discourage women from working more hours through tax policy, ignore the scourge of pregnancy discrimination that affects 1 in 2 women, and generally pursue a “bloke-covery” that disadvantages women and assume that they will be all too happy to return to hearth and home and start breeding.

At some point, conservative governments in Australia — if they want even a hope of reaching population growth rates at replacement level — will need to become more interested in what they have previously found so far beneath them and of such lesser consequence: women’s concerns.