Dialogue: This country no longer great place to bring up children

New Zealand risks its international reputation by languishing behind most other countries in the area of paid parental leave, writes TIM BALE*.

More than ever these days, countries trade on their reputations. In an increasingly interdependent international economy, New Zealand needs to market itself as much as the goods and services it produces.

Luckily for us, our image is positive. If we're known for anything overseas, it's for sporting success, for being "clean and green" and - I've lost count of the number of times I've had to listen to this - for being "a great place to bring up children."

But reputations eventually have to rest on reality. If they don't, they become myths - comforting to begin with but less and less convincing, and more and more hollow as time goes on.

Worse, they allow us to put off taking action before it's too late - before it becomes obvious to the rest of the world that our brand is a busted flush.

When it comes to sport, there may be little we can do about it. Likewise, the environment. President Bush's backtracking on the Kyoto Protocol will affect us. Even the best biosecurity offers no guarantees. And if we carry on signing free trade pacts that arguably allow foreign firms to sue us for losses inflicted on them by our environmental protection laws, how long will such laws last?

But when it comes to children, we do have a choice.

We can carry on pretending to ourselves that at heart we're all still traditional "mums and dads" bringing up ruddy-cheeked Kiwi kids in a 1950s fantasyland which puts the rest of the world - riven with class inequality and paved with concrete - to shame.

Or we can take our heads out of the sand and look around us; acknowledge that, yes, of course we're still better off than many but admit that, when it comes to how we support children and those responsible for them, we have precious little to offer or to teach those from the sadly growing list of countries with a higher standard of living than ours.

Take paid parental leave, back in the news in the run-up to the Budget. For years this country has done nothing and fallen badly, laughably behind the vast majority of countries with which we routinely compare ourselves.

Never mind Norway or Sweden where a year of parental leave is available, paid by the state at 80 per cent of wages. The European average, taking maternity and parental leave together, is 22 weeks on full pay - and that's not including one-off birth payments.

Included in that average is Portugal - one of the European Union's poorest states - which can afford 14 weeks' paid maternity leave followed by at least six months of unpaid parental leave.

Even Britain, long among the least-generous states when it comes to maternity pay and parental leave provision, has announced its intention to make improvements.

In so doing, it is following Canada, which after years of fruitless worrying about its competitive position vis-a-vis the United States, has begun to move to catch up with the rest of the non-American world.

But although the argument here now seems to have moved on from whether there should be paid leave at all to how long it should be and how it should be funded, it still seems to concern only the weeks up to and just after birth.

We might use politically correct terms such as "paid parental leave," but what Helen Clark, Laila Harre, the Council of Trade Unions and the Employers Federation are skirmishing over is basically "maternity pay."

Which at least means that, whoever ends up footing the bill (in Europe it is usually a combination of payroll taxes, compulsory insurance and general taxation), there should soon be some tangible help for the mothers of newborns.

And, who knows, if international evidence is heeded and it is paid at a rate realistic (that is, high) enough to encourage take-up, it might even pull in a few fathers as well.

But if it stops there, we won't be much nearer catching up with the rest of the world. Because it's not standing still.

Recognising that having children is more than a lifestyle choice or a consumer decision but what real human beings actually do, most countries have long taken a few months' maternity pay as a given.

They're now moving on to build welfare systems that make juggling paid and domestic work less of a trial, knowing that for most advanced countries it is this - not the power to hire and fire at will or drive down wages - that makes for a more flexible labour market.

They're also waking up to the fact that the new world of work (or sometimes lack of work) is imposing considerable strains on family structure. With those strains come threats to the welfare - and even the reproduction and survival - of the children we'll all be relying on as we get older.

That's why, unlike New Zealand, many of them also maintain non-means-tested financial support to those bringing up children until those children are old enough to support themselves.

Those who see the Government's plans for paid parental leave as the stepping-off point on a slippery slope are right. But it's a slope we have to climb, not one we should avoid sliding down. Not even trying to catch up with our competitors could badly damage our brand.

Sooner or later it won't be just us who notices our poor child health and education statistics, our tragic rates of child injury and abuse, teenage pregnancy and suicide.

And some of those who will notice will be our customers and the potential migrants who, according to those who mocked Jenny Shipley for her concern about the national birth-rate, will see us right in years to come.

Though "putting kids first" could be a powerful message for whichever political party truly makes it its own, only the naive would offer family-friendly policies as a simple solution to everything.

But take the brain drain. Apart from the US, the only comparable country as mean on maternity pay as New Zealand is Australia. Perhaps this is one game at which we can beat them.

* Dr Tim Bale is a lecturer in political science at Victoria University.