As Chairperson for the Women’s Electoral Lobby Australia (WELA), I’ve been heavily involved in preparing a submission for the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into Paid Maternity, Paternity and Parental Leave.
The WELA strongly supports introducing industrial based, paid maternity leave as soon as possible with three clear arguments supporting this proposal:
1. Financial reasons for maintaining income in households around the time of birth rather than decreasing it by the loss of an income earner;
2. Physical/emotional needs that arise from the birth and attachment/breast feeding processes that require time out from the paid workforce;
3. The need to promote workforce attachment through a payment linking workers’ care roles with their employment that affirms ongoing commitments and connections with workplaces.
Read our full submission here and here is the Productivity Commission’s website
Eva Cox AO is a contributing author to CPD’s recent publication More Than Luck: Ideas Australia needs now. Eva’s chapter Strengthening our social fabric argues that we need to rethink our tax and income policy practices to make our society more civil. Eva was until recently Program Director, Social Inquiry at the University of Technology Sydney, and is now practicing being an unattached change agent while reviving her consultancy, Distaff Associates. She is the national Chair of the Women’s Electoral Lobby – an organisation in which she was a founding member in 1972. A strong feminist and advocate for women’s issues, she delivered the 1995 ABC Boyer Lectures on A Truly Civil Society which she is still trying to achive (available through ABC Books). She has researched and published on many policy and other social issues recently including: child care, sole parents and welfare payments, superannuation, social capital, community well being, asylum seekers, corporate social responsibility, research and evalution. A frequent media commentator, she sees herself as a problem solver rather than a specialist. Her current research interests include devising a more civil society, teaching community research skillls, policy formulation, indigenous child-care and domestic violence, the Welfare to Work program, and a wide range of gender issues, including parental leave.