1/ Would you work for nothing? Nope? Thought so.

Could this be why so many Australian mums work part-time? Tax, welfare and childcare costs mean that full time work for the primary carer is often financially fruitless. Let’s break that down…

2/ A typical Australian woman with young children is employed 2-3 days a week, much less than women in many other countries.

3/ Parents agree that the high cost of childcare is the biggest barrier to working more.

4/ This impacts take-home pay. A family with 2 kids in childcare, each on $60k FTE. The primary carer gets:
-Day 4: about $2 an hour
-Day 5: nothing
No wonder 2-3 days is the norm.

5/ Our plan for childcare:
Boost the Child Care Subsidy to 95% for low-income families, with a gradual taper so primary carers aren’t severely punished for returning to work.

6/ 60% of families would pay < $20 a day per child for childcare. Doing it now would help the COVID recovery.

7/ Making childcare cheaper is a huge economic reform – costing an extra $5b a year but boosting GDP by $11b a year and adding ~$150k to a typical mother’s lifetime earnings.

8/ Added to these financial disincentives is enormous gap between paid and unpaid work by mothers, especially after the birth of the first child.

9/ Unpaid work limits women's choices about paid work. Australia has a more gendered division of labour than most other OECD countries.

10/ Govt parental leave schemes are critical but can ‘lock in’ the mother as the main carer. The Aus scheme makes it hard to share parental leave.

11/ In Australia, we have one of the shortest and least-generous paid leave schemes for mothers, and we offer little for fathers. Countries that target fathers see long-term shifts in sharing unpaid work.

12/ A better model would be 6 weeks of ‘use it or use it’ leave for each parent, +12 weeks to share between them. This would help dads to spend more time with their kids in the critical 1st year and share the unpaid workload.

13/ You can read more about these recommendations in our new report, Cheaper childcare: A practical plan to boost female workforce participation by @danielleiwood @_kgriffiths & @EmslieOwain https://grattan.edu.au/report/cheaper-childcare/