Unapologetically Ita, page 19
We need to keep ‘older’ workers, as well as ‘old’ workers, employed. Australia needs their tax payments. The ABS defines ‘older’ as over sixty-five. Researchers usually classify ‘old’ workers as fifty or fifty-five and over. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: ‘In April 2021, approximately 619,000 older Australians (aged 65 and over) were employed in the labour force. Of these older workers, 3 in 5 (61%) were men and 2 in 5 were women (39%).’ Older people are most commonly employed as ‘professionals, managers, and clerical and administrative workers… in the industries of health care and social assistance, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and education and training.’ There are many ways the workplace could be made more attractive to older workers. Offering older workers flexible work hours would be a good place to start. Providing retraining courses is another.
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Good communication skills are essential for anyone who wants to be a successful leader. Most people think they are rather good at communicating, but in reality few are. You can’t lead successfully if you can’t communicate in a way that touches peoples’ minds and hearts. No one will follow a leader who isn’t able to effectively communicate a message, whether it’s good or bad news. People can accept bad news if the message is delivered with confidence, clearly and succinctly.
Once all a leader had to do was tell people what to do, but today’s leader and the leader of tomorrow will have to be able to ask. There is no way anyone could possibly keep up with everything a leader has to know in a world that is changing so fast. It’s one thing to encourage people who work for us to keep learning, but today’s leaders cannot exclude themselves from the learning process. Learning must be a leadership priority – reading, studying, taking a course, picking other people’s brains, thinking creatively, being smart enough to have around them people with a diverse range of skills and knowledge, all of whom are encouraged to come up with creative ideas, the best ideas, even risky ideas. Leaders must be prepared to take risks – not careless risks, but risks that have been thought through.
True leaders aren’t timid; they dare to rock the boat. The world would be a very dull place if no one ever dared to do that. Leaders are people who are prepared to put their reputation on the line. I have never let the fear of failure stop me from having a go. To have a go and keep on having a go is the difference between a winner and a loser.
Leaders also need a healthy sense of humour to keep them sane in stressful situations. It’s the only thing that does. Question your own performance. I never accept second-best from myself. Opportunities occur when you least expect them – like the night I was offered the chairmanship of the ABC, definitely an unexpected opportunity. You need to recognise opportunities when they come along and be ready to grab them.
Throughout my career I have always placed the utmost importance on integrity, on honesty in everything that I do. In order to succeed at anything, you must keep your word. It’s my experience that when you keep your word, you become a person people trust. When people trust you, they give you responsibility and jobs to do; they are keen to have you as a member of their team; they are happy to do business with you.
Leadership is about seeing the future. No one knows what the future will be like – we never do. We imagine the future, and when we get there everything has changed. But the future is still the future. Whatever it holds, we are all going in that direction.
Be optimistic about the future. Leadership is about seeing opportunities. It’s about inspiring people to see where they are, and where they have not yet been but could be if they embrace your leadership and follow your dream. Leadership is a privilege. It gives a person the opportunity to shape the future and to make a positive impact.
Chapter Ten The Diminishing of Motherhood
Once almost all little girls wanted to be mothers when they grew up. They used to pretend they were mothers when they played with their dolls. But as women have gone out to work and sought careers, motherhood has been devalued and is no longer considered an option by many women; nor is it highly regarded by many in the community.
The rejection of motherhood starts early. An article in The Sydney Morning Herald not so long ago illustrated this well. A class of girls in Year 1 were told to dress up as ‘useful people in the community’. There were nurses, doctors, teachers, firefighters, a crossing guard and builders, but not one child dressed up as a mother. Paid work rather than the unpaid role of motherhood is more highly valued, even by children.
Is feminism to blame for the devaluation of motherhood? Probably, but I don’t think it was intentional. The early feminists aggressively pushed their message: get a job, pursue a career, don’t have children. Put yourself first or combine working with child rearing and let someone else look after your children. You can have it all on your own terms.
The US Institute for Family Studies suggests that ‘by spreading the myth that women can “have it all” with no trade-offs, the feminist movement failed to recognise that mothering is full-time, intensely difficult, and meaningful work, especially in a child’s early years. It’s a 24-hour job without sick days or vacation, a constant and intense labour of love.’
It wasn’t easy to be a stay-at-home mother as women’s lib flourished. In the seventies, many women felt the need to apologise for their choice. I often corrected women who told me ‘I’m just a housewife’, telling them no woman is ‘just a housewife’. Such a woman is in charge of the household budget, orders the meat, vegetables and groceries, organises the laundry requirements of the household, provides travel service to school and sports meetings, often carries out numerous school duties, like serving children in the canteen, makes up school and sports cheer squads as required, helps with homework, listens to her children’s issues of the day – the list goes on and on.
Gloria Steinem’s feminism gave women the option to have a brilliant career. (Steinem, an American journalist and political activist, was nationally recognised as a leader and spokesperson for the feminist movement in the late sixties and early seventies.) Work was seen as far more important than motherhood and rearing children – any caregiver could do that. Feminism unintentionally led to a sense of guilt for stay-at-home mothers, who felt pressured to prioritise careers over motherhood.
Cleo, the magazine I created for the Packers, was launched in 1972 for ‘the progressive woman’ whose middle-class life was changing because of the influence of women’s liberation. (In Australia, middle-class women were the group most influenced by women’s liberation.) The basis of a woman’s life in the seventies was her home and family. They were her justification and her full-time job. She had to be a good mother, a good wife and a good homemaker. Her interest in current affairs was minimal. Being happy and ‘normal’ was important. Being able to afford to give the children a good education and enjoy a family holiday, have a little money in the bank, a bigger house and her own car were the things that mattered. It was becoming clear, however, that it wasn’t enough to make some women feel fulfilled. Cleo didn’t criticise women who stayed at home, but there were lots of women who wanted to lead a different sort of life. The thought of getting a job and earning money of their own appealed to them.
In the early seventies, the very mention of women’s liberation sent shockwaves through the Australian community, both women and men. The latter often used to ask if I had burnt my bra. ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ they’d chortle. The arguments about equality frightened people. Changing age-long conditioning was not easy, and change is always a slow process. Cleo therefore took a softer approach to liberation, an attitude that brought criticism from rampaging, street-demonstrating feminists. Ours, I think, was a more sensible and effective way to achieve our objectives.
Most of the hard-line feminists were so engrossed in the problems of loneliness, isolation, lack of identity, career frustration and so on, none of them thought about the changes liberation, if achieved, would cause within a family. Cleo did. We told our readers to make a choice about what they wanted to do with their lives and never to apologise for that choice. We always stressed, though, that a woman, whether or not she had a job which took her outside her home, had a responsibility towards her children. Whatever she did or wanted to do, that responsibility was inescapable. Cleo made feminist ideas popular, often without using the f-word, and it helped influence generations of women (and men), who now take the basic feminist agenda of equal rights for women, in and out of the bedroom, as common sense.
The US Institute for Family Studies believes that now is the right time for the creation of a new feminism, a ‘maternal feminism’ which acknowledges a woman’s right to choose to stay home with her children and be recognised for her achievements or go to work while still prioritising her children. The Institute says the feminist movement did not consider the impact of the call to arms on children, and that we are now seeing generations of children who suffer as a result. For instance, in recent years, there has been a concerning rise in mental health issues among Australian children, with data indicating that approximately one in seven children aged four to seventeen experience a mental illness, with anxiety and ADHD being common.
Motherhood needs a new image, starting from the day a baby is born. Births need to be valued. There is such a push from hospitals to get mothers and babies out of hospital that it seems to me that giving birth is low on most hospitals’ priority list. Many mothers are sent home before their milk comes in. One anonymous midwife told The Sydney Morning Herald there was immense pressure to get women and babies out the door after birth, to free up beds and staff. She said while many women were fine when they returned home, others struggled, and some babies were readmitted to hospital because they were feeding poorly and had lost too much weight. ‘Previously we would have picked up on these things during a longer hospital stay,’ she said. The Australian government has announced funding for the development of a set of national guidelines that will detail recommendations for postnatal care, including length of stay in hospital, timing of discharge, and home support. The government announced this project in 2023. No word yet about when the guidelines will be released. How long does it take to develop guidelines, I wonder.
Mothers are sniped at on all fronts. The term ‘birthing parent’ instead of ‘mother’ was being trialled at three hospitals on Services Australia digital forms for parents to register their child’s birth with Medicare. Fortunately, Labor’s Bill Shorten, as Minister for Government Services, intervened and ordered the removal of the gender-neutral term ‘birthing parent’ from Medicare forms and reinstated ‘mother’.
Even breast milk hasn’t escaped a name change. Researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) published a handbook recommending that staff use ‘gender-inclusive’ parenting language such as changing the term ‘breastfeeding’ to ‘chestfeeding’, ‘mother’s milk’ to ‘human milk’, ‘mother’ to ‘gestational parent’ or ‘birthing parent’, and ‘father’ to ‘non-gestational parent’ or ‘non-birthing parent’. Critics say the handbook is just another effort to erase women.
When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in Australia in 2020 and forced people to work from home, it opened up alternative ways of working for women and most of them loved it. Women could work to a timetable that allowed them to care for their children, even enjoy them, without losing productivity. Working from home was less stressful and more enjoyable; being a mother was more rewarding and pleasurable. I doubt many of these women will ever want to return to five days at the office.
I suspect motherhood is not valued because society often views it as a natural, unpaid job, devaluing the work and sacrifices involved, and this attitude sometimes makes mothers feel undervalued while struggling to balance career and family. Research tells us that these days parenthood is not respected. Neither are children and childhood, and consequently people who care for children, including teachers, are not respected either. Some people fear that children will threaten their freedom and put their job first, saying it provides purpose in their lives. How on earth did we get to this miserable state of affairs? Have we become ‘the selfish society’?
Then there are those who insist that only different sex parents – that is, male and female – should be parents. I don’t agree with that line of thought. There is no evidence that children raised by same-sex parents don’t do well at school and grow into happy, confident adults. One single homosexual dad I know is happily raising ten-year-old twins. ‘I always wanted to be a parent,’ he says. ‘I’m raising my boys to be resilient, to have the work ethic (by watching me) and to respect women.’ Is he concerned that there is no mother figure in their lives? ‘Sometimes I have to be both mother and father,’ he laughs. ‘My mother spends two days a week with them and does some parenting. I want to give my boys the tools for the future.’
I don’t think mothers lose their identity when they have children – an excuse which is proffered by women who are anti-children. Certainly, a new baby demands a mother’s attention, but it’s not forever. It’s a getting-to-know-you time for the baby as well as the mother. While becoming a mother involves significant changes and a shift in priorities, it doesn’t necessarily mean a complete loss of identity. Rather, it’s a process of redefining and integrating motherhood into one’s existing self.
Because of people’s ignorance, mothers are all too often taken for granted and their many qualities – especially those relating to leadership – completely overlooked. Yet a mother is possibly the world’s most powerful and effective leader. Without her expert guidance, her children would flounder. She shapes them and colours their beliefs. Her influence lasts a lifetime.
She constantly offers encouragement and gives them the confidence to tackle the challenges and detours they will encounter throughout their life’s journey. She is a role model for her daughters and sets an example to her sons as well. Her imagination inspires her children. It is through her eyes that their curiosity about the world is stirred.
Many mothers would prefer to raise their children when they’re little instead of putting them into care facilities, but financial pressures and society’s expectations force them into the workforce. Once women had options, but mortgages, school fees, and general cost of living expenses have taken these choices away from them. And no sooner has a woman had a baby than friends will ask, ‘When are you going back to work?’
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Many women now value financial stability and career progression over motherhood. Some abandon being mothers altogether. Younger Australians are concerned about their economic security and that naturally influences their family planning decisions. Australia’s birthrate of 1.5 babies per woman represents an all-time low. It is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family needed to sustain our population.
ANU demographer Liz Allen said the nation’s birthrate is perilously low. ‘We’ve hit rock bottom,’ she says. ‘Once we hit this figure we are basically staring down the barrel of no return, as having so few new babies coming through hampers economic growth, which in turn leads people to have even fewer babies.’
KPMG Australia analysis shows that Australia is in the midst of a baby recession as births across the country fall by 4.6 per cent year on year. The number of births in 2023 was the lowest since 2006, as cost-of-living pressures impact the feasibility of younger Australians having children.
Some concerned politicians are offering solutions, including Queensland Nationals Senator Matt Canavan. He has suggested that couples wanting to buy their first home would have access to a low-interest-rate loan of $100,000 after having a child. If the couple went on to have a second child, 30 per cent of the loan would be wiped, and if they had three children, the loan would be cleared entirely. The senator’s policy would extend to couples in de facto relationships and same-sex couples, and people who become parents via surrogacy or adoption. Would Canavan’s proposition work? I can’t see banks adopting such a scheme.
Australia isn’t the only country experiencing a population decrease. Families are getting smaller globally, including in America, where the average fertility rate has not been above the 2.1 replacement rate since 2007, as well as Italy, India, Japan, Korea and many countries in Europe. The UN’s world population figures published in 2024 predict the world’s population will peak in sixty years and then face an unprecedented decline, which the UN says will have profound social and geopolitical consequences.
Currently two thirds of the global population lives in countries with fertility rates below the replacement rate. The number of older people is continuing to grow and the number of young people is decreasing. Consumers and workers will be older too in a workforce that is shrinking across the developed countries.
Every single member of the OECD is projected to see its working-age population decline between 2030 to 2050, and also to experience a continued rise in old age dependency. People sixty-five and over are living increasingly longer and retirees make up a larger portion of the total population, but there is a plummeting number of tax-paying workers to support the growing numbers of retirees across the OECD.
Prime Minister Albanese and former federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton didn’t mention our country’s low birthrate and falling fertility rates as part of their respective federal election pitches in 2025. For the first time in Australia, older people (over sixty-five) outnumber younger people (under fifteen), due to a combination of low fertility rates and increasing life expectancy. Experts say the best way for Australia to address this challenge is by strategically leveraging immigration, investing in infrastructure, and supporting the workforce through technology and skills development.
