Editorial: Parental leave funds should go elsewhere

Opinion

When paid parental leave was introduced three years ago, there was an obvious anomaly: a benefit granted employees was denied the self-employed. The exclusion was as intentional as it was discriminatory. The Labour Party was committed to paid parental leave as part of a coalition agreement with its governing partner, the Alliance, but so thoroughgoing were its doubts that as little as possible of the public purse was devoted to the scheme.

How things have changed. A Prime Minister who had to be cajoled into the concept - once saying that paid parental leave would be introduced "over my dead body" - is now considering a major expansion. The Government is ready to include the self-employed in the scheme and is thinking about a near-quadrupling of the length of the leave period. What began as 12 weeks' paid leave has already crept up to 14, and, if proposals along British lines are adopted, will balloon out to a full year.

The first part of the equation - equal treatment for the self-employed - is reasonable on the grounds of fairness alone, albeit that it is expected to raise the cost of the scheme by about $8 million a year. Also, a self-employed mother faces arguably greater difficulties when having a child than employees because her business cannot always be set to one side.

However, any drastic extension to the length of paid parental leave, or the addition of other benefits, cannot be justified. The Government's original doubts resulted in the scheme being tailored to the most needy, and the estimated cost trimmed to $42 million a year. Yet even now it is costing about $70 million annually. That is money which, quite simply, could be better spent elsewhere.

The extension of paid parental leave has been touted by Helen Clark as a means of getting more women into the workforce, and as an inducement to people considering living in New Zealand or expatriates thinking of coming home. Such influence is overstated. It is easy to sympathise with the financial difficulties of childbirth when one income disappears from a double-income household. Yet even a year's paid leave would cover but a small fraction of the costs that a child presents. Only the most unwise of parents would plan to have a child on the basis of such a benefit.

More influential for prospective immigrants or expatriates pondering a return would be the availability of excellent education and health services for their children. That is not the case now, a state of affairs that would not be helped by a vastly more expensive paid parental leave scheme. Quite simply, the benefits of that scheme need to be assessed against other demands on the Government's coffers. And not only in terms of services for children but the pressing concerns of all sectors of society.

Aside from already generous paid leave provisions, New Zealand parents benefit from fully subsidised maternity services, and the right to unpaid leave with no loss of employment for up to a year after birth. That does not make it an ideal world for working women - such a circumstance is well beyond the reach of even the Government's latest proposal - but employees and employers seem satisfied with the present situation. Certainly there has been no public outcry for one year's paid leave.

That raises the question of whether the Government's raising of the proposition amounts to election-year politics. And whether as well as calculating a benefit itself, it is giving Jim Anderton's Progressive Party, the successor to the Alliance, something to grab hold of.

For whatever reason, paid parental leave seems to be acquiring a momentum of its own. Halting that would become a matter of course if the Government revisited its original doubts and recalled the scheme's origin as a political pay-off. Paid parental leave has not suddenly become a better idea, one so good that it must be elevated above far more pressing concerns.