Pay Pollies Less, Child Care Workers More
Harold Hark
11 February 2004

You often hear the argument that if we want quality people to enter politics we should pay them more. A similar argument suggests that if our toddler-aged children stay at home with their mums instead of spending their weekdays in child care centres, they will grow up to be healthier, wealthier and wiser.

We can dispense with the latter argument by simply acknowledging all of recorded history. From Gilgamesh to the baby being born this second, the sanest among us have been half mad.

Hanging out with mum until the age of six may be the worst possible preparation for a sane adulthood. Instead of fostering cooperation and independence by learning how to share turf with others in child care, children may have instead learned how to control and manipulate the worn down woman whose love for them is in direct conflict with the realisation that the exciting life of accomplishment so easily taken for granted by men is passing her by.

A government interested in the welfare of its citizens would properly fund existing child care centres, with decent wages for its qualified employees, and then get to the business of building new centres all over the bloody country. Furthermore, they would require all institutions with large employee bases to furnish qualified centres.

I stress "qualified" because under the existing conditions brought on by this ideological government, which holds that women have no real role outside motherhood, child care centres are so underfunded that quality is just not possible. Working parents are contributing to the economy, yet this government, for whom the economy is everything, has seen to it that the workers who look after our precious children are paid third world wages. Extrapolation shows that the government has no interest, in fact despises, women who work. As for their children, you only have to recall John Howard's view on the incarceration of children in his detention camps. While refusing to release them, he blamed their parents for getting them there.

There is no reason why women should be forced to be housewives if they don't want to be.

Children who attend childcare centres and who know they are loved and cared for by their parents will grow up to be a lot more balanced if, during their toddler years, their mothers were not going quietly mad dusting furniture and watching soap operas.

Kids at home have not produced anything remotely like a sane world, so let's give the creches a chance.

With politicians, we have seen that the rise of wages, perks and especially superannuation over the decades has not, I repeat not, produced a better political class. Look at the egregious example of the Illiberal Party. Labor may not be pure, but it is safe to assume that the only reason this lot enters politics is to obtain an overblown superannuation to nest egg subsequent business careers made possible by cosy contacts made while in office. Service to the nation? That's merely the cynical line that comes out of the sound-byte side of these Janus-faced operators.

John Howard says, "I have to say that the salaries paid to senior ministers compared with the responsibilities of people in the private sector are way below what is received in the private sector." [Italics mine]

But government is not the private sector. What the private sector does or does not do should have no bearing on government. Government, according to the Macquarie dictionary is: "the authoritative direction and restraint exercised over the actions of people in communities, societies, and states: government is necessary to the existence of society. [Italics theirs]

"My salary dropped by 75 per cent when I entered Parliament," mewls Bruce Baird, Illiberal MP for Cook. That's right, Bruce, you're not in the private sector any more, you're in government. Or so we like to delude ourselves. In truth, the Illiberals are the private sector in government.

And this is why everyone so distrusts politicians, especially the current breed. Because they are not working for us, for society, they are working for the private sector. They have all but terminated society by turning us into a competitive mob whose only goal is to consume goods. They have encouraged us to turn our backs on others in this one dimensional pursuit of materialism.

OK, politicians work hard. We need them. Therefore maintain their salaries, but investigate those excessive perks; above all reduce their superannuation from the obscene rate of 69 percent to the rate of nine percent the rest of us get. Removing this incentive to greed will help to weed out the scum who enter politics for personal gain. It will allow people with conscience and dedication to put up their hands, men and women for whom running the country for the benefit of everyone, and not just the private sector, is an ennobling task.

Service to the nation is ultimately no more or less important than service to children in child care centres.

Links:
• Annabel Crabb: Latham pledges to sacrifice super
• Annabel Crabb: Costello pans Latham plan
• Geoff Strong: A case of too little and too much: super chief