Hoyden about Town » economics

Media Circus: Heatwave edition

tigtog — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 23:02:43 +0000

Discussion starters for 2013′s first media circus:

approx 100 people missing in Tasmania’s bushfire emergency; not-quite-record high temperatures are causing spot fires around the nation. Stay safe, everybody.
Andrew Elder is unimpressed by some efforts to gee up the left:

Abbott cannot convince anyone that any policy area would be better managed by him and his crew than by the incumbents. That’s why they can’t and won’t win. It’s in the media’s interests to pretend it’s a tight race and that there is intense political competition, but there isn’t really. The competition isn’t there – people who follow politics see it now, and those who don’t follow politics closely will see it when they choose to look, which will most likely happen closer to the election.
Don’t piss off John McAfee.
Kudos to Belvoir Street Theatre for their Peter Pan giveaway for single parents who’ve just been moved on to Newstart:

At Belvoir we think theatre is a necessity, but we know that for a lot of families it is a luxury, especially for single parent families. With over 80,000 single parents moved from a parenting payment to Newstart on 1 January things are that little bit harder.

We’d like to share the joy of theatre with some of these families. We’re offering a complimentary ticket for one adult and one child to see Peter Pan for families who have been moved onto Newstart. We have limited availability for a small number of performances so get in touch as soon as you can.

What’s piqued your media interests lately?

As usual for media circus threads, please share your bouquets and brickbats for particular items in the mass media, or highlight cogent analysis or pointed twitterstorms etc in new media. Discuss any current sociopolitical issue (the theme of each edition is merely for discussion-starter purposes – all current news items are on topic!).

It’s almost as though there’s a causal link here…

Beppie — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:30:50 +0000

Rosie the Riveter

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Benjamin Preiss reports that the gender pay gap has doubled over the last year — with women, as usual, coming off worst in most professions. Meanwhile a few weeks ago, Josephine Tovey and Amy McNeilage reported that in New South Wales girls have outperformed boys in maths for the first time– though for many years, girls have outperformed boys in every other HSC subject.

There is always much hand-wringing when the HSC results are released, about how and why our education system is failing our boys (and quite often the blame is assigned to female teachers — especially if you read the comments), but I would suggest that our boys aren’t being failed at all. Priess paraphrases Professor Anne Bardoel, saying that “the findings [about the gender pay gap] were surprising given that female students often outperformed their male peers,” but I don’t find this surprising at all. I would hypothesise, quite simply, that boys don’t work as hard at their schoolwork because they don’t have to. Because they are still, in the vast majority of professions going to earn more than their female classmates. Because if they enter into a female dominated profession, such as primary teaching, they are far more likely to be promoted above their female peers. Meanwhile, boys have many more options with respect to entering trades — particularly well-paid ones — in comparison with girls.

Really, is it any wonder that high school boys don’t do as well as high school girls? Why in the world would they need to, when it seems that the old adage that women and girls have to work twice as hard to be thought half as good still has a lot of truth to it.

Media Circus: yes it’s still the silly season edition

tigtog — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 21:00:16 +0000

Discussion starters for this year-end edition of the circus:

The various year in retrospective pieces dominate the news shows while most reporters take a holiday break – what are they missing right now? Have you found any particular retrospective compilation particularly engaging?
(I quite liked Forbes’ Lump of Coal Awards For The Worst Fiscal Ideas Of 2012, at least in part for the conclusions I disagree with.)
Fiscal cliff fiscal cliff fiscal cliff fiscal cliff, fiscal cliff fiscal cliff fiscal cliiiiii-iff!
The mass demonstrations in India calling for more effective policing and stronger penalties against rapists are becoming calls for the application of the death penalty to the six suspects currently in custody following the vicious gang rape in Delhi.

“The real problem is the conviction rate, the delay in the administration of justice, the lack of sensitivity of the police with dealing with such matters, the lack of security in the city,” said Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who was present at the protests in New Delhi. “Last year, the conviction rate in New Delhi for those who appeared in court for rape cases was less than 5 percent. The problem lies in the certainty of punishment rather than the severity.”

The current law imposes a maximum of life imprisonment for gang rape, but now that the victim has died from her injuries, the death penalty becomes a legal option as the charges are upgraded to murder.

What’s piqued your media interests lately?

Education is a political issue. This is why.

blue milk — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 03:44:51 +0000

This, “For many poor students, leap to college ends in a hard fall” is a very well-executed piece in The New York Times. It follows three talented, but terribly disadvantaged, girl students who make it into university but then manage to go no further, and it shows why education doesn’t always lead to social mobility; in fact, it very often holds poor people down while further elevating middle-class and upper-class people. How education systems can actively work against the poor is an area of injustice I find deeply concerning because it is frequently ignored.

By now, almost every policy-maker can acknowledge the returns to education as a social investment, but what they don’t always appreciate are the ways in which poor people find the path through education more difficult to navigate than do students from more wealthy families. Not because they’re somehow less canny, but because the institution is rigged against them. The concept of not being able to afford university fees is something most people can grasp, but the other kinds of barriers poor kids face in getting an education can easily look like disinterest, a lack of motivation, and mindless self-sabotage from the outside. This is dangerous when it comes to policy-making.

Reading that article by Jason DeParle I am struck by the number of times a lack of social capital (ie. inside knowledge and the prerogative to use it) disadvantages these three students as they try to succeed. Social capital is a type of capital that tends to get inherited and locked down by class. It can be difficult to observe because it won’t show up in a tax return. My own single-parent family lived below the poverty line while I was going through high school and university but we had one big advantage – my mother had come from a well-to-do family and she had the social capital from those beginnings to know how to navigate the system and to feel entitled to do so when push came to shove. I don’t want to down-play how difficult I found my time growing up in poverty or how lasting its effects have been for me, but social capital is a type of advantage I’ve seen up close and been gifted.. and I will never under-estimate it.

Some of the big policy messages coming out of that article in the New York Times include:

low-income kids lack social capital which would otherwise help them navigate educational institutions and their place in them;
low-income kids need to earn money while also studying full-time;
low-income kids often have to leave their community and family to go to a good university and therefore encounter emotional disadvantage;
low-income kids often provide the unpaid care services their families require at the expense of their own education and needs (and low-income families are less able to pay for therapies they need and so rely more heavily on unpaid care work in their own families, plus, being poor is stressful and physically depleting);
low-income kids try not to achieve too much academically in order to protect their families from further expenses and a sense of rejection;
low-income kids are expected to adapt to the culture and lifestyle of high-income kids when they attend university;
low-income kids are disadvantaged by not being able to afford the extra-curricula help that high-income kids receive with their education;
low-income kids go into debt to pay off their education but with the risk of lower chances of graduating and consequently lower chances of gaining a high salary job to pay off their debt;
low-income kids are more likely to see education as a ‘selfish’ pursuit on their part; and,
low-income kids lack a safety net when things go wrong.

And here are some recent Australian examples where similar experiences are holding poor children back in education – “Children hide poverty to protect parents, study finds”:

”Their demands were incredibly modest,” the nation’s leading poverty researcher, Peter Saunders of the University of NSW, said.

The study is the first in Australia to hear children’s accounts of what it is like growing up poor. Almost 100 young people from 11 to 17 were interviewed, as well as teachers and parents.

The children’s tendency to deny wanting what other children ordinarily had was a way to ”protect themselves from the pain of missing out and their parents from the anguish of having to say no”, the report said…

… The children felt keenly that their parents were not respected by school staff. Many were bored by and disengaged from the curriculum, and they were frustrated with teachers who could not maintain discipline and didn’t seem to care. The children appreciated enthusiastic teachers and meaningful curriculum but ”this type of opportunity for learning was too often missing from young people’s accounts of school”.

The increasing trend for schools to impose ”user pays” levies for some activities was also detrimental. One parent reported her fury at the discovery, after four years, that the school had a fund to help. Professor Saunders said the schemes were not widely advertised for fear that demand would outstrip supply.

And, “Aussie school children left hungry report”:

Ms Chambers said some parents were keeping their children home from school on days they couldn’t afford to put food in their lunchbox, and often missed meals themselves to ensure their family was fed.

Cross-posted at blue milk.

The ‘damaged women’ vote

blue milk — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 06:51:58 +0000

Recently we were being trolled by an Australian economist, Dr Steven Kates about the Obama win in the United States of America. Among his conclusions, that the Obama vote was made up of the medicants (ie. people who need significant medical treatment and can’t afford it, as in, I guess any of us at some point in our lives), the resentful and the envious (ie. anyone not feeling the ‘trickle down’ buzz these days), the abortion-rights lobby (apparently those unjustifiably concerned about reproductive rights), social science know-nothings ( hah! from one economist to another) and damaged women (ie. my personal favourite).

The interesting thing to note about Kates’ hate is that it includes almost everyone but older white men, like himself. This is funny only because the failure to understand the needs and perspectives of people other than your own little cohort is precisely what’s biting the US conservatives on the arse right now. It’s even starting to bite conservatives in Australia, where the mainstream media and the political opposition have both been taken by surprise by the groundswell response to Gillard’s misogyny speech and other recent events in political and public sexism.

But the peculiar thing about Kates is not his thorough dedication to supply-side economics – a school of thought being increasingly side-lined by the last decade or so of interest rate and inflation rate data, and where the debate about government policy and unrestrained markets has moved to such an extent that even the IMF is publishing working papers on revisiting the Chicago Plan – there’s still plenty of supply-siders around and economics is split on almost every issue; no, the really peculiar thing is that Kates wrote such a nasty piece about voters. Trash the other political side, sure, but trash the people you want voting for you? Not so smart. This kind of nastiness scares voters away.. as well it should.

Miss 31 voted for Obama and is representative of the women who are in massive agreement with the cries of misogyny and the lack of respect for women. There is no point going too far into this, but the most influential social philosopher of the twentieth century was Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Philosophy. You would have to be at least as old as I am to recall what a shock it was to read Hefner’s “philosophy” in the pages of Playboy back when I was about 14 in the 1960s. Here’s the gist: all those uptight girls hanging onto their virginity ought to liberate themselves and get into the sexual scrum with the boys. In an era when a goodnight kiss was a big deal this was magic. And with the likes of Germaine Greer and her buddies saying the same just as the birth control pill was becoming readily available, a new world opened for which neither the young women of the time or the young men were really prepared.

But who has come out of this genuinely hurt by the changed attitude to women. Both men and women are worse for it, but if you ask me, it is women who have been psychologically damaged far more than the men. And I suspect Miss 29 has not avoided the deep and fearsome pains of commitment-free sexual relations either.

These are the attitudes that Obama was tapping into. Watching the Middle East burn and the American economy trashed by debt and deficits are irrelevant to such women whose anger is beyond all understanding, particularly for men of my and Romney’s generation.

There is quite the hint of ‘hysterical’ in this nonsense description of women. It is both insulting and patronising to argue that women, as voters, are people who obsess over contraception, abortion and sexual assault at the expense of caring about, or even understanding, economics. For starters, all those factors actually impact directly on economic outcomes for women. And secondly, a lot of men care about reproductive rights, too. After all, not many men only want to have sex for making babies these days. For that matter, contraception and abortion are not just issues for women having “commitment-free sexual relations”, they’re also issues for married women, possibly more so given people in relationships have more sex than single people. This is something Kates might want to consider when he is trying to understand “deep and fearsome pains”.

The gross over-simplification of women and the issues we care about is something I am seeing a lot in Australian media discussions of women voters at the moment. We’re about to head into an election year for the country and I suspect the stereotyping of women is only going to intensify. Women, being blinded by their silly, little causes. Women, angry and irrational. Women, not understanding economics. While that’s happening it’s worth remembering this. Kates, and others like him, tend to think that people didn’t vote for Romney because they didn’t hear the Republican message. They like to think their message was obscured by reactionary left-wing causes and Obama-inspired, greedy self-interest. (It’s amusing to reflect upon how appalled these people can be by others voting in self-interest when they invest so much in notions of self-interest to deliver positive outcomes for all in an environment of ‘small government’). So let’s be clear here, the problem isn’t that ‘damaged women’ aren’t and weren’t hearing your message, the problem is we heard it and we really, really don’t like it.

Cross-posted at blue milk.

Does Keynes still have the secret to happiness? And even for parents?

blue milk — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:58:12 +0000

You must read this wonderful essay in aeon magazine from economist, John Quiggin – “The Golden Age: The 15-hour working week predicted by Keynes may soon be within our grasp – but are we ready for freedom from toil”.

Quiggin takes Keynes’ theory and in this essay fixes up some of the old oversights by talking about how happiness and money could be shared more equitably to include the marginalised like, stay at home parents, women, artists, the working poor and those who cannot (for a variety of reasons) work. After you have read this essay you will understand why capitalist feminism, which dominates in the USA, can frustrate me.

But far from weakening Keynes’s case against a money-driven society, the problems of caring for children illustrate the way in which our current economic order fails to deliver a good life, even for the groups who are doing relatively well in economic terms. The workplace structures that define a successful career today require the most labour from ‘prime-age’ workers aged between 25 and 50, the stage when the demands of caring for children are greatest.

Yes, the essay does have a bit of economics in it but I think it is all quite manageable, so don’t be put off, read on .. and if you’re having trouble with understanding any of it copy and paste the relevant bit into the comments below and I, or someone else here will try to ‘layperson’ the economics for you.

Cross-posted at blue milk.

Disability funding: shirking the NDIS is a disgrace

tigtog — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 05:29:07 +0000

Eleanor Gibbs has a cracker of an article in New Matilda on the national disgrace that is the continuing roadblocks to the National Disability Insurance Scheme:

So here we are: the conservative states are demanding increased taxation to pay for increased services, and progressive groups are demanding the implementation of a market-based, individualistic funding model that will turn people with a disability into “potentially empowered consumers“. The cognitive dissonance, it burns!

But why does any of this matter? Surely any funding is better than none? What could possible be wrong with supporting a disability funding model that is “an entitlement-based funding mechanism, which will provide flexible, person-centred supports so that people can participate in ordinary, daily life.”

For starters, how about this study of a Queensland program of individualised funding that found:

“… few consumers felt that individualised funding arrangements had personally delivered the benefits which the quasi-market model and associated policy paradigm had indicated that they should receive.”

We are citizens, not consumers.

The real reason why you should be careful in your discussions about mothers

blue milk — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 09:58:19 +0000

I really like Feministe, I think the site produces some amazing writing, and I appreciate Mamamia for seeking to incorporate feminism in a mainstream, commercial motherhood site because that isn’t easy, but oh my god…

Reading these posts at Feministe on stay-at-home mothers, and then this one on the ‘choice’ to be a mother, and then this one on birth activist mothers at Mamamia – I just want to remind complainers that mothers aren’t touchy about mother-blaming discussions like these because we’re such sensitive little flowers, we can take a good, juicy discussion, really; we’re sensitive about these discussions because you are running roughshod over the truth of our lives.

We’re surprised, as feminists, that some of you are not more suspicious of lines of debate designed to isolate us and make us defensive. A feminist discussion does not need to make us all feel validated, it doesn’t have to avoid tough questions, but it does need to be honest about women’s lives, it’s part of the whole point of it being feminist. And that discussion should also include the voices typically excluded, that’s also the whole point about it being feminist. If your hypothesis about motherhood does not fit the marginalised mother’s life then it has failed to explain mothers. (And we can have conversations about very particular groups of mothers sometimes, like the 1%, but there’s a fair bit of generalising going on at the moment with this one which makes me think we’re all really looking for a broader discussion).

Some thoughts I have after reading the posts on the following -

Stay-at-home mothers:

I want to say something important here as someone who works in the field of economics. Some of you seem to me to be failing to understand all the obstacles holding mothers back. They are not entirely about the patriarchy, they’re also about capitalism. That is not to say that I think we should all drop out and live in a commune, but it is saying that if you are promoting some of the most exploitative elements of capitalism as part of your feminism then you will be missing the mark. If you do not understand how capitalism survives on (not just benefits from, but in its present form could not survive without) the unpaid caring work of women (that this isn’t just ‘lip service for mummies’, this is an economic truth), then your feminism is missing the mark. Self-ownership through wages has been an incredibly important development in feminism but it has not made unpaid caring work disappear – 50% of all hours of work performed in the USA are UNPAID.

You have some of the most inflexible workplaces in the Western world, with or without children, you have it tough in the US. But workplaces can change. We can focus feminist efforts on changing institutions of power to be less exploitative of unpaid caring work instead of just saying women must somehow ignore the realities of their lives. (Because how much real ‘choice’ about work does a mother get who has a severely disabled child? How much real ‘choice’ is there for a mother when the only job is a full-time job with long hours? Why are mothers supposed to think anything apart from raising their children is a worthy pursuit of their lives? And anyway, how many women are actually stay-at-home mothers for their entire lives? It is surprisingly low, so, do we need to suggest stay-at-home mothers are behaving like ‘indulged children’? Could we instead talk about how and when they return to paid work and what are the vulnerabilities involved? And, stay-at-home parents are not homogenous either, some of them are even fathers).

I feel like we have been here before – like, Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work, which had some important things to say, but which was also flawed – can feminism not learn from this and maybe take this discussion forward a little?

The ‘choice’ to be mothers:

Why aren’t feminists being more suspicious of ‘licence to breed’ rhetoric? Because you know who that argument gets used against most, right? Who are these careless mothers? The mindless mothers? Who are the mothers people assume to be having children without ‘good reason’ or for the ‘wrong reasons’? For selfish reasons? Single mothers, black mothers, immigrant mothers, teenage mothers, poor mothers, mothers on welfare, mothers in non-traditional family structures, mothers with disabilities, mothers with children with disabilities… I mean, come on!

Also, why assume mothers don’t already think about having babies, and that they aren’t asked to defend their decisions all the time? I get that women who choose not to have children are fucking tired of being asked to justify their decisions and how wrong it is that they are made to feel like deviants, but this is not an answer.

Birth activist mothers as birthzillas: I won’t go too far into this one because I’m writing an article about it – but talk about bullshit, sexist stereotype.

You know, the real reason why you should be careful in your discussions about mothers is not because we’re over-sensitive, it is because motherhood is political and complicated and a core part of feminism, and if you’re simplifying all of that then you’re missing the big picture.

Cross-posted at blue milk.

Why women can’t have it all, how they’re not to blame, and how we can make it better

blue milk — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 05:44:53 +0000

This is a great piece at The Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter and everyone is talking about it.

“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” is long and jam-packed with excellent points; it is a sophisticated discussion of women’s lives and the problems we encounter balancing work and family.. and you almost never see a nuanced discussion like this in the public arena. I loved this article, of course I do, it is making many of the same arguments that myself and some other feminist bloggers have been making foreveeeeeeeeeer. And it is getting enormous mainstream attention and with that the opportunity for genuine public debate and change. Hooray.

Here’s the TL;DR version:

The backlash against women by other career women when those women ‘opt out’ or ‘slow down’ at work. Women are being blamed for not being able to combine a demanding job with family life by other women.
How the message has changed in the way it is delivered to young women (for better and worse) from ‘you can have it all’ to ‘you can’t have it all’.
This new message lets workplace change ‘off the hook’.
Women (and men) who have managed to ‘have it all’ are frequently never forced to confront how much of that achievement has been down to the fortune of having family-friendly working arrangements, elements that are missing from most other jobs in the USA.
High powered jobs may only be sustainable for parents for a maximum of two years and what cost is there for this loss of experience?
Women in leadership roles need to be more open to hearing the truth from younger women about the difficulties with combining work and family given the way workplaces are arranged. Less individualism, less personal blame.
All the unidentified advantages many women in leadership positions have over other mothers and being careful not to over-generalise their experiences.
The half-truths: it’s possible if you’re just committed enough; it’s possible if you marry the right person; and, it’s possible if you sequence it right.
How to fix this: changing the culture of face time; revaluing family values; redefining the arc of a successful career; rediscovering the pursuit of happiness; innovation nation; and, enlisting men; .

Like I said, everyone is talking about this article and here are some of the more interesting conversations:

“Why Does the Atlantic Hate Women?” at The American Prospect.

She’s right about this core truth: Being both a good parent and an all-out professional cannot be done the way we currently run our educational and work systems. When I talk to friends who’ve just had children, here’s what I tell them: Being a working parent in our society is structurally impossible. It can’t be done right, so don’t blame yourself when you’re failing. You’ll always be failing at something—as a spouse, as a parent, as a worker. Just get used to that feeling. Slaughter’s entire article is worth reading for her nuanced exploration of that alone. It’s true for people at the top; it’s even more true for people at the bottom, who have no sick leave, no choice in their shifts, no freedom to run over to the school if a child is sick.

“Anne-Marie Slaughter Looks at the Real (and Messy) Balance Between Motherhood and Feminism” at Balancing Jane.

And I know that so much of that earlier debate focused on how women’s “choices” can’t be at the heart of feminism, but I just don’t buy it. I think that it’s valid to want to be a valuable professional, and I think that it’s valid to want to be a competent parent. I don’t think that those choices and wants are somehow outside of the debate of feminism. I think that they are at the very core of that debate.

I also think it’s very important to pay attention to the way that Slaughter frames the importance of role models. Jill’s comment on Feministe was largely about how women need to be in those high-profile jobs to pave the way for the young feminists coming up behind them. But Slaughter’s experience suggest that simply being present in those jobs is not enough. The young women coming up behind her have, time and time again, expressed that they have no interest in following her unless there is a path that allows them a balance between family and work.

“Maybe It Would Help If We Called It Having A Life Instead Of ‘It All’” at Wandering Scientist.

This is why I think you should go read the article, even if it feels like rewarding the editors of The Atlantic for their mother-baiting. The quality of the article makes up for the obnoxiousness of its presentation. It is long, but it is worth the time. I liked seeing someone in a mainstream venue look at the work vs. family issues and conclude that the problem is with the work place, not the women. If there is anything I hate more than writing that inflames the “mommy wars” it is writing that refuses to contemplate the possibility that a work environment that is currently unfriendly to people who want a life outside of work could change without undermining the company involved.

“More Thoughts on Blogging” at Echidne of the Snakes.

That’s an old method of ruling: Telling people that they must all fight over the crumbs under the table of the actual rulers, that the enemy is that other person crawling there next to you, not the guys and gals sitting at the table. The mummy/mommy wars are real but they are also excellent devices to keep women divided and thus easier to control.

We should probably all get anger training. Some of us need to reign our anger in more, others need to let it out albeit in controlled ways. But the kind of anger Wurtzel’s piece provokes is not going to be used for any kind of constructive energy.

This is why I don’t want to join in the debates as such although the basic theoretical reasons why the debates exist need to be analyzed. And that is why I want the anger aimed at the real culprit: The system and its myths and how they manage us, not on other women.

“Elite Women Put A New Spin On An Old Debate” in The New York Times.

When Ms. Sandberg confessed in a recent interviewthat, contrary to her work-hound reputation, she leaves work at 5:30 p.m. to eat dinner with her children, and returns to a computer later, she earned yet another round of attention, and her words were taken as the working-mom equivalent of a papal ruling.

But her advice also spurred quiet skepticism: by putting even more pressure on women to succeed, was she, even unintentionally, blaming the victim if they did not?

Enter Ms. Slaughter’s article, posted Wednesday night, in which she described a life that looked like a feminist diorama from the outside (a mother and top policy adviser for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton) but was accompanied by domestic meltdown (workweeks spent in a different state than her family, a rebellious teenage son to whom she had little time to attend). As she questioned whether her job in Washington was doable and at what cost, she began hearing from younger women who complained about advice like Ms. Sandberg’s.

“Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Atlantic” at Bitch Magazine.

As a childfree young-ish person, I found Slaughter’s arguments both interesting and depressing. Slaughter herself mentions a generational shift she’s noticed in women’s expectations, and I have to anecdotally agree. Women of my generation don’t, in my experience, expect to “have it all” (which in this case means a successful career and kids) without making big sacrifices. The very notion of having “it all” sounds so ludicrous to me that I can’t help but put it in quotes.

And here’s a good interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter at the fabulous The Hairpin.

If Women’s Liberation meant anything, it meant giving women a full range of choices, so that if a woman thinks that that’s what she’s best at, and that’s what she’s happiest doing, then we absolutely need to validate that choice. And many women have written about that. About the importance of not buying into the idea that going to work is only done outside the home. At the same time, the whole reason there was a feminist movement in the first place was that overwhelming numbers of women found that they wanted to have more choices, so it’s not like we haven’t tried a world in which women stayed home. And I think some will, and great. I would go crazy. If I stayed home. I would go ab. Solutely. Crazy. I think my own mother, who became a professional artist, would have been happier in many ways if she’d had both a career and children when we were young, because she’s a very creative person and I think she needed an outlet other than in the house.

It’s a question of following your own instincts. But I’m pretty confident that given the right conditions, a huge number will choose to do both. But they’re not going to choose to do both if it keeps coming down to a choice between one or the other. And that’s what I meant by as long as you give me flexibility, I can do just abut anything. I can work and then go home to be with my kids, and then go back to work later, or take a business trip and work like crazy, but then spend a couple days being a mom. And many women — I think virtually all women — can manage that. The problem is where they work.

Cross-posted at blue milk.

A poster appearing around Brisbane

blue milk — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:54:05 +0000

Text from the spoof newspaper article poster that has started anonymously appearing around Brisbane, Queensland:

DEMOLITION WILL HONOUR SIR JOH BEJELKE-PETERSEN

An unnamed source within the Brisbane electorate today accused Queensland Premier Campbell Newman’s LNP government of secretly planning the demolition of the new Cloudland. The destruction of this venue would be seen by many as a tribute to former Queensland Premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

There is some doubt as to the validity of this claim but the rumours are indicative of the extent to which Premier Newman’s actions have raised the spectre of Bjelke-Petersen. Premier Newman may not intend to associate himself with the Bjelke-Petersen period, however his actions since winning the state election in March invite comparison with the ‘deep North’.

Last week Aboriginal protesters were forcibly removed from Musgrave Park for the first time since Bjelke-Petersen was in power. The deployment of 200 police officers to evict peaceful protesters in an Aboriginal tent embassy echoed displays of force common to the Bjelke-Petersen period.

Premier Newman has also been accused of Bjelke-Petersen style cronyism following a significant number of LNP appointments to apolitical boards and key public service roles. The positions were not advertised.

The late Bjelke-Petersen would surely approve of a Bill introduced by LNP Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie last week to amend the Industrial Relations Act. The proposed changes will give the Attorney-General authority to control wages and to terminate legal industrial action.

Premier Newman is yet to approximate Bjelke-Petersen’s environmental record, but he has made a solid start by dismantling Queensland’s carbon reduction schemes, winding back wild rivers legislation, attempting to halt funding for a solar thermal power plant, seeking to open National Parks and recreation reserves to tourist vehicles, allowing kill permits for flying foxes and dismissing protections for koalas in Queensland as ‘mindless green tape’.

Premier Newman’s decision to cancel the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards signals a Bjelke-Petersen era disregard for the arts. Funding cuts to social service targets including Sisters Inside, The Queensland Association for Healthy Communities and Family Planning Queensland are reminiscent of the social conservatism of the Bjelke-Petersen era.

Mass redundancies in the public service, the cancellation of hundreds of contracts in departments such as Queensland Health, a hiring freeze on all non-frontline staff and the nebulous definition of ‘non-frontline’ recall the high unemployment levels that characterised the Bjelke-Petersen years.

Similarities between the policies of Premier Newman and Bjelke-Petersen have been remarked upon by commentators across Australia. Premier Newman was sworn in less than two months ago. In this time he has demonstrated more Bjelke-Petersen traits than Bjelke-Petersen had himself at the same stage of his Premiership. Should Premier Newman wish to distance himself from the Bjelke-Petersen period and the climate of fear associated with it, he would be well advised to demonstrate this distance before the two men are inextricably linked in the public mind. And go easy on the bulldozers.
Premier Newman could not be contacted for comment.

Lots of Queensland political history referenced here, including the tragic demolition of Cloudland, which was famously mentioned in Midnight Oil lyrics, and the scary days of Sir Joh’s rule in the state.

Hoyden about Town » economics

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