I am copping some flak for suggesting that falling divorce rates are inconsistent with left-familist complaints that WorkChoices undermine the family. It is certainly true that divorce rates are the most extreme indicator of family stresses, and would not pick up lesser harms to families. But are any indicators at all matching left-familist claims?

Commenter Michael Kalecki suggests that:

Work can be bad for families without divorce coming into it. An obligation to work longer hours for example.

That is true, but are people working longer hours since WorkChoices came into effect? Australian Social Trends 2008, published by the ABS, reports that they are not.

In 2005, the year before WorkChoices started, the average full-time employee spent 40.6 hours per week at work. By 2007 it had dropped to 39.4 hours - the lowest it has been since 1986, back in the days before any significant labour market deregulation. Part-timers also worked less, on average - though the drop for them was only small, from 16.2 hours to 16.1 hours.

What about full-time employees working more than 50 hours per week? This number is also trending down, from 23.8% in 2005 to 21.6% in 2007. I can only find trend data going back to 1994, but this is the lowest number since then.

The left-familists assume that employees are powerless in the face of employers indifferent to their other obligations, and that only regulation and unions can protect employees. In reality, the market functions much more effectively than that. As the HILDA data shows, employees rarely experience long-term dissatisfaction with work-life balance. Their job changes or they change their job.

A postscript to last year’s post on divorce statistics.

A common argument of left-familists is that WorkChoices is/was bad for families. I argued last year that this was not showing in the divorce statsitics; that these were continuing a downwards trend.

The divorce statistics for 2007, released today, confirm that this trend continued through WorkChoices’ first - and only - full year of operation.

It is only possible to calculate high-quality statistics in census years, ie divorces as a percentage of marriages, but in 2007 the crude divorce rate dropped from 2.5 per 1,000 persons to 2.3, with a nearly 7% decline in the absolute number of divorces.

Arguably only next year will we get a true marriage test of WorkChoices, because of the need for a year of separation before a divorce, but I doubt this trend will stop. It’s likely to be at least in part a prosperity dividend, and therefore the good economic conditions in 2007 will help produce another low divorce rate for 2008.

I expect the right-wing blogosphere will be all over this op-ed by feminist Leslie Cannold.

The problem - at least for me - isn’t the fact that she supports a bill currently before the Victorian Parliament to formally decriminalise abortions that occur in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Rather, the problem is that Cannold argues that

Men lack moral standing in the abortion debate — indeed are guilty of moral arrogance — when they push for control over a procedure they’ll never have to have because they can’t get pregnant.

Except that she’s serious, Cannold’s op-ed reads like a parody of self-centred feminism, with its characteristic refusal to accept that any of women’s interests can be put up for negotiation (if they complete the pregnancy, the rest of us must pay for their maternity leave, childcare, cover for their absences at work, and then pay and promote them as if nothing had happened).

Nowhere in her article does Cannold even contemplate the idea that killing an unborn child is morally problematic, even if (and here I agree with her) a convincing case can be made that, all things considered, this can be the better overall option in the earlier part of pregnancy. You don’t need to be a potential murder victim to stand up for the people others are proposing to kill.

The evidence of women in the abortion debate will usually be stronger than that of men, because as Cannold says they have a range of experiences that men don’t. But the moral standing of women to participate in the debate is the same as men’s.

On the one hand, the federal government continues to block marriage-like ceremonies for gay couples who want one. But on the other hand, it is planning to impose marriage-like financial responsibilities on gay couples - and opposite-sex couples - even if they don’t want them.

In an SMH opinion piece against this change, University of Sydney law academic Patrick Parkinson explains the change this way:

The big difference [between married and de facto], in NSW at least, is that the courts only divide the property [of former de facto partners] based on an assessment of the parties’ contributions to that property (including contributions as a homemaker and parent). For married couples, the court also looks at the future needs of each partner and their financial resources.

As Parkinson argues, there are good reasons why couples might want to choose not to get married, and as a result have fewer legal protections, but also fewer legal risks. They might not be sure that the relationship is long-term (de facto couples have much higher rates of relationship breakdown than married couples). They might be legitimately protecting the interests of other parties, such as the inheritances of children from previous relationships or, in Parkinson’s example, inheritances from other relatives who may have intended to keep the money in the family (though those people could use trusts to help avoid the money falling into the wrong hands).
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The second work and life index report, written up at great length in this morning’s Fairfax broadsheets, has the usual left-familist calls for ‘firmer employee rights around controlling their working time’.

But it also has the same paradox as the first report: though most people say that they often or always feel rushed for time, and a quarter say work often or always interferes with enough time for friends and family, only 13% say that they are ‘not satisfied’ with their work-life balance, and nearly 70% say they are satisfied.

As I suggested last year, this study is missing a sense of the trade-offs people make. They should ask a lot more about how people feel about the work they do, not just in its personal rewards (money etc), but in how people see it contributing to something worthwhile.

In the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, for example, about two-thirds of respondents agree or strongly agree with the statement that ‘my job is useful to society’, and nearly three-quarters agree or strongly agree with the statement that ‘in my job I can help other people’. 70% say they are proud to work for the firm or organisation that they do, and 60% say they are prepared to work harder than they have to for it to succeed. Read the rest of this entry »

Intimacy for money is a taboo, which is why when newspapers want to dramatise student poverty they talk about student prostitutes or, in The Age today, fake marriages to qualify as ‘independent’ for Youth Allowance:

JOHAN Stutt never planned on getting married at the age of 18 - let alone to someone he didn’t love. Some might say it was a matter of survival.

Stories like this have been around for decades - 20 years ago there were ‘TEAS marriages’ [Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme, a Youth Allowance predecessor], though usually in the version of the story at the time between gays and lesbians, whose marriage rights weren’t worth anything anyway (another reason for gay marriage - reduce welfare rorting!).

But a quick check of the marriage statistics shows that this is not likely to be a growing problem. The teen marriage rate is in long-term decline, and teenage men have a less than 1% probability of getting married for any reason. In 2006, there were 423 marriages by men aged 19 or under (and at a guess, most of them will never enrol in any degree).

We don’t need to worry much about this kind of Youth Allowance rorting, as not many people who would marry someone they did not love. It’s the easy work/earnings test I want to tighten up, and I am quoted saying that right at the end of The Age article. Unsurprisingly, I am the only person going on the record suggesting that in some cases we spend too much, rather than too little, on student income support.

Backroom girl has been vigorously contesting my view on who should be counted as ‘independent’ of their parents for welfare purposes.

I’d say that the following are normally signs of independence:

* receiving no or trivial financial support from parents
* moving out
* starting own family, marriage and especially own children

Under the current independence test, only children will get you straight onto the welfare roll, though if you have been married or [corrected; comment 1] in a de facto relatationship for 12 months you can also get YA in your own right.

Moving out doesn’t make you independent, unless your parents are a threat to you. However, even if your parents help with the bills I’d say living away from your parents does require self-sufficiency in many other respects.

However working 30 hours a week for 18 months or 15 hours a week for two years does make you independent, though the latter does not in my view meet any reasonable test of what ‘independence’ means. A low-skill worker could not earn enough to live independently on 15 hours a week, even in a shared expense household. As the AVCC student finances report found, that’s routine hours for undergraduates and means that many of them would qualify as ‘independent’ for YA after 2 years at uni, despite their actual circumstances not changing at all.
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A bit of a debate is raging in the Youth Allowance post about how dependent students are on other members of their family. Sinclair points out that most 15-24 year olds live with their parents. Based on a mix of census and DEST data, I have estimated in the past that around 60% of late teen uni students live with one or both parents. Of those at home, they are an affluent bunch: median household income is $104,000 a year.

But how much sharing goes on within the household? The AVCC/Universities Australia student finances survey asked this question, referring to parents and partners. For ‘often’ relying on non-cash assistance, for full-time undergraduates:

Meals: 60%
Accommodation: 58%
Telephone: 53%
Use of car: 31%
Clothing: 20%
Textbooks: 28%

38% of full time undergraduates classed themselves as ‘financially independent’.

The 2006 General Social Survey found that of the people who had children aged 18 to 24 living away from home, 58% provided them with support: Read the rest of this entry »

Five years ago, I wrote a paper (pdf) critiquing the idea that HECS contributed to childlessness among female graduates.

Though my conclusion of no effect was supported by an article in the Journal of Population Research last year, using the HILDA survey which has a question on student debt, one of my main theories as to why female graduates have a low average number of children continues to be largely overlooked - and surprisingly so, I think.

My theory turns on the admittedly (and this is why it is surprising) rather obvious point that, despite advances in reproductive medicine, babies are more likely to be born if there is a man in the house, and one likely to stick around long enough to help raise the child. I reported data based on the 1996 census showing that married women in the professional jobs that graduates normally aspire to actually had near-replacement fertility levels. It was the large number of unmarried and childless women pushing down the average.

Unfortunately the marriage factor has been a blind spot in subsequent research that I have seen on this topic. In the Journal of Population Research article they controlled for half a dozen variables, but not whether or not there was a potential father. My suggestion that perhaps one solution to low fertility among female graduates was improved education for boys, to improve the dating market for educated women, was reported as ‘perhaps tongue in cheek’.
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My blog suggestion yesterday that ‘working couples with children’ deserve ‘much less’ welfare assistance attracted some questioning in the post’s comments. NPOV asks

is this from the starting point that you believe almost everyone deserves “less”, and couples with children deserve “much less” because they already get more than everyone else?

Certainly my starting point is the classical liberal one that people are entitled to keep their earnings unless there is some strong reason to tax it away from them. Among the reasons given for taxing, redistribution of cash to families seems to me to be among the weakest. It is not specifically aimed at meeting any need that is generally agreed upon, such as for education or healthcare. It is given to people with incomes that are well above average, who are quite capable of giving their children food, clothing and shelter without any outside help at all.

Though some family welfare meets genuine needs, much of it is redistribution between family types irrespective of need. Recent years have seen a significant improvement in the financial position of families relative to single people and couples without dependent children (though people in the latter still generally have the most to spend on themselves).
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