Letter from Elsewhere
© Anne Else; 3 June 2000
All in the Family?
This Letter is late - my apologies - but for an interesting reason. I wanted to write about why we still desperately need feminism. The problem was, where to start? With Morgan "Fingers" Fahey, who continued to have unimpeded access to unlimited numbers of women for years, despite repeated concerns about his activities? With Carla Chambers, who ran a grossly exploitative, dangerous "surrogacy" agency, but under New Zealand law could be convicted of nothing more than fraudulently obtaining fertility pills and post office boxes? With the latest Ministry of Women's Affairs statistics, which show that the more education a woman has, the bigger the gender pay gap? Or with the threatened closure of yet another women's studies department, this time at Massey University?
Today, however, the problem solved itself, with the arrival in my letterbox of a slim booklet promoting the 50th anniversary of the Readers' Digest, "Part of the Family for 50 Years". It contains "four articles … reprinted from past issues of the New Zealand Reader's Digest". They are "Stories about LIVING…Advice about LIFE".
It also contains endorsements from the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, and from the president of Plunket, Pam Murray. Clark's endorsement says "This booklet is a fitting tribute to the qualities that make New Zealand and New Zealanders special." Pam Murray says that both Plunket and Reader's Digest "care about New Zealand's families and in our own way enrich the lives of those families". Contributing to the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society has clearly paid handsome dividends for Reader's Digest management.
It's very disturbing to see Plunket and the Prime Minister allowing their names to be used in this blatantly commercial way. If Plunket received a more realistic level of state funding, instead of having to go cap-in-hand to the corporates, it would not have happened.
But what is even more disturbing is exactly what they are lending their names to. I can only assume that neither had read the full contents of the booklet beforehand. Sandwiched between two articles by Maurice Shadbolt, featuring those venerable icons Murray Halberg and Bill Hamilton, are six pages by one Anne Barker headed "Is the Family Worth Saving?" Illustrated with a glossy photo of a healthy, well-dressed family made up of a tall father, shorter mother and four young children, this piece provides a neat recap of some major planks in a decade of New Right attacks on women and "welfare" (a US term rarely used here before the mid-1980s) - and takes a swipe at liberal clergy along the way.
Barker begins with an account of how a "vivacious and happy" South Auckland teenager turned to drunk, drugs and finally attempted suicide because of her parents' divorce. Then we hear how, for 30 years, "a galaxy of opinion-makers" have told us that marriage, divorce and single parenthood are "all a matter of 'lifestyle choices'". Germaine Greer and Peter Beck, Anglican Archdeacon of Auckland, are the only examples given, however. Beck is in trouble for advocating a broader definition of family, and supporting the idea that same-sex couples "in an appropriately nourishing, committed relationship" could raise children successfully "with the help of outside supporters".
Then follows a familiar litany of statistics about increases in divorce ("up three-fold in 25 years…Each year around 9000 New Zealand youngsters witness their parents' divorce"); in lone parents ("Up to half of all Maori infants under the age of 12 months are in fatherless families"); and in the ex-nuptial birth rate, "a staggering 42 per cent" (mostly to stable, albeit not officially married, couples, though that is not mentioned).
Why is all this happening? Might it have anything to do with greedy global corporations driving right-wing agendas which fuel the drastic reductions in traditional male blue-collar and low-level white-collar jobs, as well as lowering wages and conditions for all but the elite across the board, while hyping the acquisition of more and more consumer goodies as the measure of success in life?
Well, no. According to Bernard Moran, "formerly of the pro-family organisation Family Life International", the real villains are "the decline of traditional religions" (does he mean the witch-burning kind or the wife-stoning kind?); "an increase in materialism" (where on earth might that have come from?); "a value-free media" (the Reader's Digest empire excepted, presumably); and "unrealistic expectations about marriage" (like expecting not to be beaten up by your husband, perhaps).
What is to be done? Moran wants the notion of fault put back into divorce law, because "it's too easy to get out when things get a bit rough". This is a persistent theme in New Right writing. In 1996, for example, the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, part of an international network of think-tanks funded by ultra-conservative US foundations, published Barry Maley's Wedlock and Wellbeing: What Marriage Means for Adults and Children.
Ilene Wolcott and Kate Funder, Research Fellows with the Australian Institute of Family Studies, promptly challenged Maley's arguments for a more punitive application of family law, pointing out that the fault basis for divorce has been "tried and found wanting. It was seen as unworkable, open to gross abuse and demeaning to the people it publicly humiliated." And they point out the underlying agenda of such calls: "It is the economic dependency of women and their assumption of the [unpaid] production of domestic goods and services from which husbands benefit that Maley seems to desire". Alternative strategies such as "providing income support for families, subsidising housing loans for families with young children and helping male and female parents to balance paid work and family life" would be "more powerful in ensuring that long-term commitments are attractive, attainable and sustainable. They are not, however, cheap options."(1)
After Moran, Barker hands the mike to economist Gareth Morgan. He wants to go much further than abolishing no-fault divorce. He is so concerned about "child-caring spouses as economic contributors to society" that he advocates changing the tax regime to allow income splitting (so that rich men get to pay even less tax, by claiming an income for their non-earning wives).
But his main point is that "Benefits for lone mothers can discourage men from supporting the children they have fathered." (To make sure this point is not missed, it is repeated in large type, alongside a child's picture.) The DPB, we are told, now costs "$1.5 billion dollars (Barker's italics and double dollar signs). With the "peripheral benefits that go with it - like the accommodation supplement and emergency benefits" (no mention of market rents and utility costs which leave sole parents dependent on food banks to feed their children), it makes "some women financially better off living alone than marrying a man with irregular or poorly paid work."
I am sure Morgan knows what I am going to spell out, and Moran and Barker probably know it too. Helen Clark certainly does, and I would hope Pam Murray does as well. But let's go over it just once more.
Just like most other New Zealand parents, the vast majority of women on the DPB have indeed been married or partnered. It is precisely the strain of trying to support a family on the meagre (and, thanks to the policies Morgan and his ideological soulmates have advocated, now even more pitiful) earnings from the "irregular or poorly paid work" which is now the only kind on offer to thousands of New Zealand parents that has driven increasing numbers of couples to separate. And it is the policies of the last nine years which have ensured that once the main breadwinner becomes unemployed, his partner is also forced into unemployment. What is ironically known as "abatement" means the effective tax rate on any earnings can quickly amount to over 100 percent, even before the inevitable costs of being employed are taken into account.
Moreover, the DPB does not "cause" parents to separate or women to bear children without a male partner's support. "There is no direct relationship between the generosity of a country's child support package and the proportion of lone parents in the population", says a study of New Zealand's relatively stingy level of help with the costs of raising children. Fertility rates are not correlated with generosity of child support either. "Ireland, the USA and New Zealand have relatively high fertility rates (by OECD standards) and non-generous packages." (2)
Back to Barker. Most astonishing of all, she goes on to hold up Jim Bolger ("a father of nine who has been married for 35 years"), Jenny Shipley and Roger Sowry for their support for families, for example Family Start, whereby "High-risk families with newborn babies will receive individual guidance from the department [of Social Welfare] for up to five years in areas like parenting and money management skills". That's likely to be a big help with overcrowding, benefit stand-downs, inaccessible health care, and having the power cut off. And it would do very little to keep parents together or reduce sole parenting. As Frank Furstenberg, a prominent critic of New Right policies in the USA, neatly sums up:
Where economic and social support for families of all types is meagre, children are more likely to be disadvantaged when they grow up in a single parent household. The reverse is just as true: children are more likely to grow up in a single parent household when they are disadvantaged. Mounting evidence suggests that disadvantage breeds family instability.(3)
Just so. But Barker does not mention the massively increased unemployment, benefit cuts, rent increases and botched health "reforms" which marked the Bolger/Shipley administrations and were largely to blame for the rapid rise in disease and distress now being charted. This article was obviously written before the election - which makes the new Prime Minister's association with it all the more extraordinary.
We have yet to see just how supportive of families, particularly those in most need, her government's policies will be. The Employment Relations Bill, the Property Relations Bill, the moves to cut state house rents and the funding of Plunket's 24-hour parent-line are a good start. So is the additional funding for the Ministry of Women's Affairs. But we are getting very tired of waiting for paid parental leave, and the government needs to know that.
Next time the Prime Minister is asked to publicly praise a commercial publication like this, she should make sure she has read it all carefully first, even if it does make great play with being "Part of the Family". Better still, just say no.
References
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