take the ■■■■■■ heat out of the property market so that idiots or the desperate aren't forced to pay so much that they literally cannot afford for both partners not to work.
paid maternity leave is an interesting one. Personally, and its just my view (3 kids fwiw, if that matters), i hate that SO many kids spend 5 days per week in childcare. dropped off at 8, see ya missy, i’ll be back this evening. starting as tiny little lads and ladettes. For years on end. I cannot see how that is anywhere near ideal for longer term outcomes. bonding with the baby is important. but so is bonding with the two year old. do we ask the taxpayer to fund home parenting for 12 months? two years? where does the line get drawn? who decides when possible social impact later suddenly assumes more or lesser importance?
the balance is utterly wrong. the notion that you buy a ■■■■■■ place knowing that you can handle the repayments on one income whilst the partner gives the kids the time in the early years (we did this. i still don’t really like our house, lol) has been blown to the schiezen by several factors. one is the insane property market - paying 40,50,60% of weekly income on mortgages is totally disastrous and locks parents and kids into very little wriggle room. it flows into all manner of life choices and pressures.
I would much rather we find ways of making living cheaper and more sustainable than offering ever increasing periods of subsidised maternity leave. If they scrap or modify negative gearing, if they block internationals from domestic property purchases (no idea if these things work or what effect they would have, just examples) and my house value drops by 50%, stiff ■■■■. i haven’t re-financed it 10 times to upgrade the toys, i’ve just tried to pay it off. If it’s still worth the same ratio compared to the neighbour, then it effects me not one iota. If it then allows the average couple on 60k to get into a place of their own and have a family, then i’d much rather that than sit around on the weekend feeling all smug that my average little abode has almost made me a paper millionaire purely because a market has gone stark freaking stupidly mad.
it’s probably impossible, i know. those who bought in the last 12 months would go to the wall because their homes would be worth less than the banks would have listed as security. maybe scrap maternity leave and pay out the balance for those who bought family homes relatively recently? Ludicrous? probably. it’d take far far far better brains than mine to compute the seismic impact such changes would have. But i can see the inexorable drive to a very unpleasant endpoint as things currently are. Which makes me think - even as someone not stuck in a mortgage headlock, i’m inadvertently being forced to make choices. I find myself wondering how the hell my three will ever buy a home. The answer appears to be that i need to crank up my earnings now, invest for them and give them a kickstart. So do i start looking for tax dodges? raking in every cent i can and giving back as little as possible? hey, its for my kids, you know. i’m a good guy. but if i’m accumulating wealth now, someone else isn’t. and then i’ve become part of the drive to measure all success in economic endgames. So i have to choose.
Personally, isn’t there an argument to say that paid maternity leave is actually a contributing factor (and paradoxically a symptom) of the feedback loop that we should actually be trying to break?
of course, i’m ignoring the side of things where both parents WANT to work. That’s a social choice and ideally - but of course impractically - those people wouldn’t want/need 9 months of maternity leave anyway.
Thats a cracking post Sal, and absolutely spot on, that was the decision my wife and I had to make once we started our family, comprimse the area (in our case though we were not in Melbourne, so had the benefit of cheaper housing markets, but my kids are still in childcare 3 days week, she worked part time for just under 2 years, and for the last year and bit its been me, but make no mistake we have been very lucky that we were able to be in that position, I do hate that they go to child care even for that amount of time.
On the paid parental leave, it it wasnt for that suppliment on top of my wives work paid leave we would have been in a lot of trouble after our first, she had complications post birth that meant it was not medically possible for her to return to any form of work inside the first 6 months of my daughters life, that 18 weeks was the difference between bankruptcy for us, luckily in the time between our first and second I got promoted so money was not an issue the second time round, and the little extra cash was more a buffer than a necessity.
I can not even comprehend out familys do it in Sydney or Melbourne, in the past 3 places we have lived (Adelaide, Griffith, Toowoomba, 450 K buys you a nice, well looked after 4br (in Griffith you get a mansion on an acre for that) close to work, near parks, perfect. Melbourne for the same sort of money you would lucky to get a run down hovel in Dandenong, an an hour commute to work. We thought about going back to Melbourne, when @#$% governement harpooned CSIRO, but the idea of dropping the kids of at childcare at 7:30 am and picking them up at 6pm, both working full time and living in Narre Warren and working in the city did not seem appealing. We are big advocates of not extending ourselves to far. We could afford to live closer to the city but are not willing to risk a chance of circumstances affecting our lifestyle.
Something is fundamentally wrong with this country and the way property has become.
