It’s time: Labor must re-embrace Whitlam’s legacy of boosting women and children

On this day 50 years ago, Gough Whitlam was sworn in as prime minister for the first time, after Labor’s resounding election victory ended 23 years of Coalition rule.

The Whitlam government transformed many lives, but few more so than women and children. Before 1972, Australia had been a “working-man’s paradise” — with unionists emphasising the “working” and “paradise”, and conservatives emphasising the “man”. Whitlam, while seeking to preserve the past victories of working people, confronted the limitations of this paradigm to forge a settlement less centred on male breadwinners. It offered more opportunities for working women while ensuring the well-being of non-working women and children.

Yet in the years since he was controversially dismissed, Australia has inched towards Whitlam’s vision at a glacial pace — sometimes crawling ahead only to stumble and circle back. Half a century on, the Australian state still under-utilises and neglects women and children.

But to fundamentally rewrite our dated social compact, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese must first confront the encumbrances of Labor’s complex legacy.

No longer just jobs for the boys

Until the 1970s, the assumption of a male breadwinner was literally the law of the land. The landmark Harvester judgment of 1907 established that wages for male workers should be sufficient to support a man, his wife and three children in “frugal comfort”. This was a huge victory for the labour movement given the predominant family structures of the time, but as society changed its limitations became clear.

Women workers were explicitly undervalued. Meanwhile, our “wage earners’ welfare state” meant caregivers often depended on their husbands instead of receiving independent government payments. Pre-Whitlam Labor governments did expand the welfare state to take care of many non-workers, but by the 1970s they were well behind many of their European counterparts.

Whitlam sought to change that. He made divorce easier and made welfare benefits available to single mothers. He raised the unemployment benefits from just $10 a week to the pension level, which was also raised significantly. Women were also guaranteed equal pay for equal work, and universal healthcare and other services increased non-worker independence from income-earners.

Super-sized inequality

In some ways the Hawke and Keating years saw a continuation of this thrust, with universal healthcare re-established, plus further equal pay and child payment reforms. But in other ways, Labor slipped back into its labourist tradition of tying family prosperity to the breadwinner’s income.

For instance, the superannuation system strengthened the link between a worker’s lifetime employment income and their savings for retirement, as opposed to the pension, which you’re still eligible for even if you’ve never worked. It predictably worsened inequality between those who worked their whole lives (most often men) and those who took extended breaks from employment (most often women).

A recent industry report found women retire with 30% less superannuation than men. But professor of economics Alison Preston from the University of Western Australia recently found it was even higher, with the mean gender gap for non-retirees a whopping 60%.

Meanwhile, the Hawke government tightened the pension means test after Whitlam had abolished it for people aged over 70. This makes women even more reliant on their husbands’ incomes in retirement, as the means test is applied to the household’s wealth and income, not the individual’s. A poor elderly woman cannot get the pension because of her cashed-up husband, even if the bastard won’t give her a cent of his money.

Albanese must fill in the gaps

After Labor’s mixed record in the Rudd-Gillard era, Albanese has refocused the party to support women and children, with strong childcare and parental leave policies (though the latter is being phased in far too slowly). The government’s recent industrial relations bill also put pay equity in the Fair Work Act. This represents a modest shift back to the women-friendly, state-assisted family model of Whitlam.

But Labor hasn’t fully reckoned with or committed to fixing the shortfalls of the Harvester model. For instance, in May the party backflipped on its plan to pay parents super during parental leave, arguing it was too expensive, despite costing only $200 million a year, a relatively lean sum considering the long-term benefits.

And Labor continues to deny the unemployed (many of whom are single mothers) an adequate income, keeping unemployment benefits at globally aberrant lows. Then there is the lack of interest in capping super balances, reining in super tax breaks, paying super on welfare benefits, or excluding partner incomes from means tests.

Whitlam faced greater economic headwinds than Albanese does, but used the state’s muscle to break with the blokey status quo. For Albanese to have a similarly transformative legacy, he must put men in hard hats and hard-working mums on a more equal footing.

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