Australia’s aging population is putting some strains on both our society and our economy. Many of our older workers are leaving the workforce resulting in a diminished tax base and a higher demand for health and welfare services. One of the strategies that both sides of politics is employing is to offer more inducements to have mothers re-enter the workforce. Many professional services firms add their own incentives because it is hard to get experienced, qualified professional people, and their fee-earning potential is reduced when talented women go off to have babies and tend to their children.

So women are lured back into the workforce as soon as they can possibly wrench themselves away from their children. Many of them are caught in an impossible dilemma. They know that whilst they are out of the workforce others are taking over their clients and invading their professional networks. Their professional profiles wane and of course this is part of the intellectual capital that they possess that make them so valuable. They perceive that if they don’t hurry back into the workforce their professional ambitions will be soon thwarted. Yet their natural instincts as mothers are urging them to stay and care for their children. I have worked with many such women and I feel for them with their loyalties torn between family and profession.

In order to return to work there will be inevitable childcare costs. In Australia most institutionalised childcare is subsidised by the state. And I suppose that economists could rationalise that the opportunity costs of lost production from such women would far outweigh the costs of subsidising their childcare. But even with state subsidisation, childcare is still reasonably costly and affordable only to the middle-class and the wealthy. The option of returning to work and providing childcare for your children is not an option for the lower paid. They have to get by using grandparents, other family and friends to care for their children whilst they are at work. This is a prime example of what political commentators have come to call in recent years “middle-class welfare”.

Tony Abbott has suggested that child-care subsidies should be made more flexible and it would be worth investigating whether they should be extended to cover the employment of nannies engaged to come into the home and care for children and perform various domestic duties. I suppose that many mothers would be happier leaving their children at home and being cared for by a trusted carer. But there is a conundrum here. How is it that a government might give support to a mother who hires a nanny but wouldn’t assist if she chose to do those things herself?

The inclination is to get women back into the paid workforce. This suggests that the duties of mothering are not really work unless someone else performs them! It demeans the work of the natural mother caring for her children.

Yes I know I am an old reactionary troglodyte, but I can remember, in my early years, coming home from school to a concerned mother who was interested in how my day went and probably had a cool drink and a snack ready. There was great comfort in knowing she would be there. Or in my early primary years, knowing that I had a mother that would walk to school and then walk with me to the dentist or doctor if I had toothache or needed medical attention. And of course in between times she would cook, clean and sew. And then in her little free time she would tend her flower garden which always seemed to have something blooming and fragrant.

Our nomenclature reveals the injustice. When we talk about “working mothers” we are invariably referring to mothers in paid employment as though the domestic duties of a stay-at-home mother have no significance. Indeed such women are referred to by the productivity commission as “underutilised”!

Now don’t get me wrong -I am not advocating that all mothers should stay at home and tend their children. There are many reasons why women justifiably want to go back to work after having children. They should have the right to pursue their vocational ambitions just as men do. However those that stay at home and tend their children should not be discriminated against by the state. If we expect state subsidies to have others care for our children, there should be equivalent concessions for those who opt to do it themselves.

It is a sign of our social dysfunction that we value the contributions of women who contribute to the “real” economy over those who providing nurture and guidance for our children in the “unpaid economy”.

It would be a far fairer system if we paid a family allowance to families with children that could be used however the family unit determined. If it was used to subsidise childcare that would be fair enough. But the current arrangement discriminates against single-income families in favour of middle-class professionals. As we saw above, lower paid women re-entering the workforce depend on grandparents and others to provide the care that the more wealthy are able to afford childcare institutions to provide. Why should women who rely on their children’s grandparents to care for them be treated differently from someone who chooses to hire a nanny? And indeed, more importantly, why should someone who is moderately wealthy be paid to subsidise their children’s childcare whereas a women who chooses to forgo a career in favour of bringing up a family, receives no support.

It is helpful to the productivity of our economy to have women come and go from paid employment as their circumstances allow. But our society is all the poorer when we value their contribution to the economy as employees over their contribution to society as mothers.