Real love has a cost we must pay

One of the reasons that the issue of work-life balance is so slippery is that individuals can never be relieved of the full personal cost of caring for those closest to them.

This week, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, released her plan of action towards gender equality, based on findings from a listening tour of Australia. At a high level, all elements of the Commissioner's action plan are commendable. However, in the area of family-friendly work practices, Ms Broderick has commented that she wants to alter the Sex Discrimination Act to penalise employers who exercise "indirect discrimination" by refusing to promote fathers who opt to spend more time with their families.

This is consistent with her comment, "If there is one thing I could do to promote gender equality in this country, it would be to better share paid and unpaid work between men and women".

But here, things start to get complicated. Of course it is crucial that men and women are offered equal opportunity to participate in the workforce and encouraged to be active in their roles as fathers and mothers. However, establishing equal participation rates in the workplace and at home as targets of government policy will not solve the endemic breakdown of family relationships.

Rather than directly trying to achieve specific work-life outcomes, policy must work to support the quality of underlying relationships and help provide choices that permit parents to spend time together and with their children. Flexible work practices and paid maternity leave, as recommended by Ms Broderick, are good examples.

At the same time, legitimate business interests need to be protected. Employers must be able to reward and promote those who make the greatest contribution. Some of us will make outstanding senior corporate executives. Others will make great parents. Some highly gifted time-managers may succeed at both. And there are interesting questions about whether care skills and business skills are equally spread across genders.

But the key to solving the work-life conundrum will be in elevating the value of caregiving. Influencers of public opinion, including governments and the media, have roles to play in recognising and vigorously promoting the position that caring for those we love is among the highest of all callings.

This week, a Nielsen poll reported that 68 per cent of Australians are prepared to pay more for goods and services if costs increase as a result of the Government's proposed greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme. Similarly, we need to understand the way that our individual actions and public policies support or undermine family relationships.

Just as we, as a society, will bear the financial burden of a carbon trading scheme, we must be prepared to accept the costs associated with helping families to thrive.

Increasing government expenditure to address relational dysfunction is no solution. Simply providing more homes won't solve youth homelessness. Providing more healthy food alternatives will not remove our obesity epidemic. Longer hours of outsourced childcare will not build parents' relationships with their children nor repair families in crisis.

An important step in increasing the visibility of caregiving is for the Federal Government to measure key outcomes. These include an estimation of the value of time spent in primary caregiving and a calculation of the cost to society of damaged and broken relationships. To take just one example, besides the extraordinary emotional and psychological toll of marital separation, the need for two homes instead of one increases the demand for housing, leading to higher house prices and more carbon emissions.

Only when the full cost is counted will it be possible to acknowledge and provide for the complex array of trade-offs in the formulation of appropriate policy.

Even then, just as primary caregiving involves personal sacrifice, we must all come to recognise that our shared future depends on us being prepared to provide for all members of our community to have shared time with those closest to them. Like those who dedicate their lives to the care of others, we may well discover deeper meaning in our life together.

Paul Shepanski is the executive director of Relationships Forum Australia. www.relationshipsforum.org.au

Australians 'ignorant of poverty'

Another interesting article, so true.... I didn't know the true extent of the issues. Hope everyone is well and happy!!:

AUSTRALIANS are ignorant of the extent of child poverty in our region, even though Papua New Guinea and East Timor are as poor as Sudan and Haiti, a new survey shows.

Almost 40 per cent of Australians nominate Ethiopia as the world's poorest country but many countries where children are equally or much worse off fail to register in the public's consciousness.

The survey by ChildFund Australia, an international aid and development agency, reveals the gaps in Australians' knowledge about children in the developing world and shows Australians are unduly pessimistic about progress in improving conditions in many countries.

The study, based on more than 1056 respondents, finds 87 per cent of Australians correctly believe children in Africa face the greatest poverty. Within Africa, Ethiopia is singled out as the poorest country, followed by Sudan, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Somalia.

But countries such as Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, ranked by the United Nations as having worse records on child deaths and on broad development measures, remain outside the consciousness of most Australians.

Australians also appear unaware that since the 1985 Live Aid campaign that brought Ethiopia's disastrous famine to world attention, child mortality there has fallen by 40 per cent.

"Aid agencies face a challenge to better communicate a range of complex information to the public and the media," said Nigel Spence, chief executive officer of ChildFund Australia. "A small number of countries dominate people's thinking."

In the Asia-Pacific region, most Australians nominate India, Cambodia, Indonesia, China and Vietnam as having the worst child poverty.

But Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste suffer deprivation similar to that found in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Haiti and Cameroon. China and Indonesia do not feature on the UN's rankings of 50 poorest countries, or the 50 with the worst record of child deaths.

Most Australians erroneously believe the plight of children in the developing world has worsened or remained unchanged in the past decade.

SMH Article

Can you imagine your eight-year-old daughter engaged in battle with a gun? In wartime girls are drawn into violence in many ways. They can be forced from their homes, separated from their families and lose the chance of an education. They can be abducted by armed groups and forced to act as porters, camp domestics, combatants, spies and even soldiers' "wives". Of the estimated 300,000 child soldiers in the world today, approximately 100,000 are girls.

Let me tell you about a little girl from Sierra Leone named Hawa, whose story is highlighted in the second State Of The World's Girls report, which is released this week. Hawa was three when militia killed her parents. She was taken by the militia and at age eight was "married" to one of the leaders. One of the atrocities Hawa experienced occurred when some of the soldiers wanted Hawa to shoot a pregnant woman, to settle a bet over whether she was carrying a boy or a girl. For refusing, Hawa was herself shot and injured. The soldiers went on to shoot the woman to settle the bet. Hawa eventually escaped and is now getting herself through school. She is one of the lucky ones.

Even after war, recovery can be slow and painful. Boys usually gain preference in the recovering school system as girls are expected to care for younger siblings, marry or complete domestic chores. Some will even have their own children to look after, children conceived though sexual violence. These girls, and their children, will face discrimination and stigma in addition to the struggle to begin a post-conflict life.

Though preference is given to educating boys, countries which spend some time focusing on girls after the conflict are less likely to revert back to chaos and conflict. Girls can make the difference.

The particular vulnerability of girls to the brutality of conflict was brought to shocking life for me as a young aid worker in the Goma camp for Rwandan refugees. During the day, life was beyond difficult. A million people were squatting in filth on a barren rocky field. Trucks came each morning to take away the bodies, hundreds at a time. Amidst this scene strutted teenagers with surly looks, young members of the feared Hutu militias who had just participated in massacring by machete up to 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

I had heard it said "what happens here at night is worse". I tried to imagine how things could be worse. At nightfall we, the relief workers, would retire exhausted to base camps. Under cover of darkness the Hutu militias would then flex their muscle; redistributing food as they saw fit and satisfying their lust for power in sexual ways.

War is all about power and violence. It should not have surprised me that those who had just committed genocide would continue to abuse what little power they had left, and target those who were most vulnerable. There are women and girls around the world in similar situations.

On leaving for Rwanda a wise friend said to me: "You may be tempted to consider the Hutu militia demonic but when you look into the eyes of these young teenagers just remember that such potential for evil is in all of us." Given different conditions, these teens might have been aspiring students with an interest in football rather than violence.

Children do not start wars yet they are most vulnerable to its deadly effects. War violates every right a child has, the right to life, the right to be with family, the right to grow and develop their personality and the right to be nurtured and protected.

War exacerbates injustices. This is particularly so for girls. Girls frequently face discrimination, exclusion, control, and various levels of emotional and physical violence in times of peace.

Only by addressing these very deep-seated prejudices can we construct a world that is safe for girls in both peace and war. If we could deal with the underlying attitudes that make the world intolerable for girls, I am sure we would be a long way toward lasting peace.

Ian Wishart is the CEO of Plan International Australia. Plan's State Of The World's Girls report can be downloaded from www.plan.org.au