Posted in Australian Politics, Economics, Feminism, Parenting, Work and life on 25 May, 2008 | 6 Comments »
The campaign for paid maternity leave in Australia has gotten renewed vigour following the recent change of government. The government has asked the Productivity Commission to enquire into what should be done.
And there are a lot of blog posts about it. Joshua Gans has written a series from an economic point of view, which culminates [...]
Posted in Blogging, Parenting on 3 May, 2008 | 1 Comment »
It’s been school holidays recently, and I took a week off, just to hang out with the boys. They did a drama course in the mornings, but the rest of the time we lazed around the house not doing very much. Perfect blogging time, you would think, but actually not. I became utterly addicted to [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Feminism, Parenting, Work and life on 11 April, 2008 | 5 Comments »
This week Beaton Consulting released a study on work life balance. Beaton’s main game is as advisors to professional services firms (law firms, accounting firms, etc). Every year they do a mammoth survey of those firms’ clients, to find out who is the best in each category. As a sideline, they tack on a few questions at [...]
Posted in Civil Liberties, Education, Parenting on 31 March, 2008 | 5 Comments »
I’ve written before about how annoying I find the rules about religious education in NSW public schools. In 1880, the NSW government established the Public Instruction Act, which introduced compulsory free education in NSW. In a compromise with the (non catholic) religious schools, the government also took over most of the poor, parish schools. As [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Education, Parenting on 5 March, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Around here, one of the common topics of conversation among the parent community is, “where are you going to send your kids to high school?” We genuinely have no idea. Our options are made much more complex by the fact that all of the six high schools within walking distance of our house (two public, four private) [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Economics, Parenting on 1 March, 2008 | 4 Comments »
When you have a new baby, suddenly you notice them everywhere. Certainly, that’s how I felt with Chatterboy. I assumed that in my formerly childless state, they’d always been there, but I hadn’t noticed them before. But I’ve just been looking at the census statistics for my local area, and it turns out that, like [...]
Posted in Economics, Life, Parenting on 25 February, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The Penguin family (99% Mr Penguin) does a fair bit of volunteering around the place. But we also live in a quite affluent area, where there is a strong sense of entitlement, and willingess to pay for things. It’s interesting to watch the intersection of those two things.
Freakonomics has an interesting chapter about what happens [...]
Posted in Feminism, Parenting, Work and life on 20 February, 2008 | 2 Comments »
When the latest employment statistics were released last week, with the lowest level of unemployment since 1974, there was a bit of commentary about the increase in part tme workers:
“Most of January’s labour market growth was in part-time jobs which grew by 34,600 to 3.043 million while full-time employment slumped by 7,800 to 7.588 million. RBC [...]
Posted in Parenting, Work and life on 6 February, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Salon had a piece recently about a mother identity crisis. A mother-to-be describing her angst at the thought that she might ever purely identify as a mother - she is so much more, and wants to stay that way.
I was very much nodding my head in agreement with the angst expressed (I remember feeling just the same when [...]
Posted in Education, Parenting on 24 January, 2008 | 5 Comments »
The school holidays are nearly over here. Chatterboy goes back to school next Wednesday, and Hungry Boy has his first day at big school next Thursday. So they will both have had five weeks of pretty relaxed holidays - going to the beach, and museums, visiting friends and other bits and pieces, but a lot of [...]
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