KEY POINTS:
Stay-at-home mums don't get any respect. Maybe a little income-splitting would make us feel better about our dreary lives.
Ouch. The prickly blogger and columnist Cactus Kate recently gave me a "medium to large professional Cactus bitch slap" for writing like a woman who is going to "bloody vote Labour, bake scones and join a PTA".
Ew. I'll have her know we have a beautiful signed portrait of Margaret Thatcher on our wall and my scones are nothing to write home about.
Even that may not dissuade Cactus from her view that I am a domestic sludge with a suburban IQ. I should "put kiddies in daycare, brush hair and get back to Shortland St and lunches in the CBD immediately" she snaps. I wasn't surprised at her prickliness. Middle-class women who stay at home and look after their children are considered by most other women, from Helen Clark down, as beneath contempt. I'm not complaining, just stating the truth. We are slothful ("What do they DO all day?"), simultaneously stupid and conniving depending on wealth of husband, poorly informed ("Haven't they read Betty Friedan?") with abysmal personal grooming. I should know - in my Shortland St lunching days I found it so hard to comprehend why anyone would choose to be a full-time mother, I concluded they must be suffering from some unfortunate hormonal disorder. But now I am at home with two children under 4, I see it a little differently: I know we're bonkers.
Weirdly, the interests of feminists and traditional pinny-wearers seem to converge when it comes to upping the status of stay-at-home mothers. Take the appealing idea of income-splitting. Gak-gak-gak. I can't believe I am agreeing with Peter Dunne. Shoot me if I start wearing Kumfs, saying "beg pardy" and drinking sherry.
Admittedly, like Peter Dunne, income-splitting is not an immediately sexy prospect. The IRD's recently released discussion document manages to make it sound hardly worth the bother. The idea is that the income of a higher-earning partner is allocated to a lower-earning partner, reducing the family's overall tax liability. Families in which one parent earned $120,000-plus a year and the other had no income would gain most. Splitting the income 50/50, the family could cut its annual income tax by nearly $9000. But it's not about the money.
"Possibly this [income-splitting] is the most liberal reform contemplated in New Zealand since the advent of non-fault divorce," writes lefty economist Susan St John. "Like other social reforms such as the DPB it has the power to transform the power balance between men and women in ways possibly not anticipated."
She doesn't seem to agree with it - possibly because it benefits so-called rich people.
But others like it. United Future's Denise Krum: "For me it's very much about the principle of recognition. One partner may not earn the bulk of their household income, but if they are choosing to stay at home and raise kids, and let's face it, that requires some serious sacrifice these days, then we should recognise them through the eyes of our law in some way."
Advocates of income-splitting, Parents as Partners, take the idea even further: They want full and actual splitting, so that a stay-at-home wife receives one half of her partner's income as a wage, on which she pays tax in her own right and ACC levies as a worker. She is then employed, just as he is, with all of the rights and force of the Employment Relations Act. Wacky: Sounds like something Marilyn Waring would approve of.
I had not met Cactus Kate when she wrote her baking scones comments. But I arranged to meet her at the Viaduct forthwith. We drank Veuve Clicquot at Euro and I tried not to mention babies. I picked up the bill. I hope it was tax-deductible.
deborah@coneandco.com
