Family Futures

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Work, care and family policy in Australia:

a work in progress

Dr Elizabeth Hill, Co-convener, Australian Work and Family Policy Roundtable

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alance

he daily lives of Australian families have funda-

mentally changed over the past two decades, largely

on account of women’s increasing participation in

paid work. Since the International Year of the Family the

participation rate of women aged 25-54 has risen more

than 10 percentage points to 78 per cent.

This change

has been largely driven by the participation of mothers

in paid employment, reflecting changing social norms,

enhanced female education outcomes, improved access to

childcare and more flexible work arrangements. Currently

around half of all mothers with a one-year-old child are

employed and almost two thirds of mothers with a young-

est child aged six are working.

The increase in maternal

employment has seen a similar increase in the proportion

of couples with dependent children where both parents

are in the labour force, up from 58 per cent in 1994 to

65 per cent in 2007. Single mothers are also increasingly

employed, with participation in paid work rising from 44

to 57 per cent over the past 20 years.

Increasing maternal employment has, however, been over-

whelmingly concentrated in part-time work. Australian

women in general have a much higher incidence of part-

time work than men, with three quarters of all part-time jobs

performed by women.

Part-time work has become the most

routine strategy used by Australian women with children who

want to combine paid work with childcare, making house-

holds with one full-time worker and one part-time worker the

most common employment arrangement for partnered parents

with school-aged children. More than a third of families fit this

model, up from 28 per cent in 1996. Households supported by

a lone male breadwinner are slowly on the decline (from 32

to 28 per cent), while the proportion of couple-families where

both parents work full-time has remained unchanged for 20

years, accounting for only one fifth of families.

Children are not, of course, the only dependents that affect

employment – 12 per cent of Australians have caring respon-

sibilities for people other than children.

Among those who are

employed, more than 4 million men and women are responsible

for the care of a person with a disability, chronic illness, frailty

due to old age, or a child under 15 years. This means almost

40 per cent of the Australian workforce has significant caring

responsibilities they must combine with their working lives,

making the development of a rational and equitable work and

care regime an urgent issue, essential to Australia’s future well-

being, economic productivity and social inclusion.

Since the International Year of the Family 1994, work,

care and family policy has become a mainstream concern

in the Australian community and an area of substantial

voter interest at the past four federal elections. In the

2013 federal election paid parental leave was a major elec-

tion issue. Childcare policy has also been a priority of the

past three federal governments and is an area targeted for

reform by the current Government. A national disability

care system has also attracted bipartisan support and will

be fully operational by 2016.

Following is a brief assessment of Australian develop-

ments in the three policy areas traditionally highlighted by

the United Nations Secretary-General as providing essen-

tial support for working parents and carers: parental leave,

childcare and flexible working arrangements.

Paid parental leave

In 1994 Australia was one of only a handful of Organisation

for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

countries that did not have a statutory universal paid

parental leave system. In January 2011 a federally funded

Working carers require job flexibility and respite service to support their

workforce participation

Image: AHRC