Five Reasons to Support Income Splitting

Income Splitting is a policy which allows parents to split their household income so that they pay less tax overall. It means that families which choose to have one parent at home caring for their children will have that worked recognised as being socially useful.

It sends an important signal that parenting is valued.

In brief there are five key reasons to support income splitting. They are:

1. It sends a signal via tax policy that parenting is recognised as valuable. Currently many policies such as subsidisation of child care for parents in paid employment, parental leave for full time employees, and the discrimination against working parents compared to self-employed parents regarding tax treatment, all combine to slant the playing field towards getting parents out of the home and into the workforce. Parents Choice believes that policies to encourage people back to work should not be at the expense of those parents who want to spend time at home with their children - especially during the crucial early years of a child's development.

2. It empowers parents and helps strengthen families. It allows parents to choose whether they will have one parent at home full time for a number of years or whether some other work pattern suits them best. Either way parents should make these decisions without government policies pushing them both into the workplace. It should be a parents choice.

3. It builds social capital. Having a greater number of parents choosing to parent fulltime means more opportunities for voluntary and charitable organisations to benefit from having bright, capable and often highly-educated people able and willing to volunteer to work part time in the community or in charitable or religious organisations - all of which is likely to build social capital - the glue that holds society together. Prof. Robert Putnam (author of "Bowling Alone") has provided substantial evidence on the benefits of boosting social capital in a community.

4. It boosts the economy. Income splitting holds the promise of helping strengthen families, strengthen communities and boost social capital. The cost of weak families, communities and the erosion of social capital is all too apparent when one looks at the social, economic and emotional cost of family breakdown, juvenile delinquency, vandalism, gang-related activity, crime, distrust and division. If we can go to the core of the social causes of such breakdown then the economic cost savings in police, social work, court time, and broader strengthening of social capital is potentially immense. In any case most economists now agree that the real solution to better economic performance is not in higher labour rate participation or longer working hours but in higher productivity. New Zealand already has one of the highest participation rates in the OECD. The solution is in working smarter not forcing more and more parents to get into the workforce or for those already there to have to spend even more hours at the office.

5. It places the wellbeing of children at the centre of economic and social policies. Good economic and social policies need to ensure that parents and children are kept "front and centre" when designing a sound policy framework. To ignore the development stage of the next generation of human capital is foolish in the extreme. People remain our greatest asset. We need to ensure that all children get off to a good start in life - through both their home life and school life. Income splitting says that the relationship between a parent and child is very important, at least as important as that between an employer and employee, and that our laws should recognise this and allow parents to spend more time with their families.

Its time for New Zealanders to join Parents Choice and show their support for income splitting in the 2008 election year. Now is the time to show your support. Email us today: parentschoice08@gmail.com

Embracing the Digital World

This week I attended the Digital Future Summit in Auckland. This was a gathering of over 500 leaders from telecommunications, IT, education, youth, iwi, and government. One of the most interesting aspects for parents was a presentation by Barry Vercoe, professor of Music and Media Arts And Sciences at Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

Barry grew up in Paeroa before embarking on a very successful career in the USA. Together with Professor Nicholas Necroponte he helped form the internationally respected One laptop per child programme led by MIT. In brief the programme enables access to the Internet so that creativity and innovation are encouraged rather than stifled. He discussed ways in which laptops costing no more than $100 were made available to schoolchildren in the Solomon Islands. An e-learning community is then built by networking the laptops together.

We saw the responses and enthusiasm for learning as kids got to have their own laptop and to explore the Internet for themselves. In today's world we all need to be familiar with digital technology if we are going to have a say and have a role to play. We need to ensure that there are no pockets of New Zealand where children are left on the wrong side of the digital divide through lack of income or because they happen to live in the wrong part of the country.

Parents can draw real support from access to broadband and good information about parenting resources. Parents also need to be aware of the some of the risks associated with the Internet. Hectors World and other work by groups like Netsafe are all part of the pack of resources with which parents need to be empowered if we are to equip our children with the tools necessary to prosper in the 21st century while at the same time minimising risks from harmful elements in the Internet world. For more details on the summit itself refer to http://www.digitalsummit.org.nz/.

Parenting Counts

[This blog was first published as a letter to the editor of the Dominion Post newspaper 17 November 2007]


James Weir (DomPost November 10th) assumes that any parent given the choice would opt for squeezing more paid working hours into an already busy schedule.

Fortunately not all parents focus purely on the monetary costs of having children. If the so-called “vanishing women” (and a few Dad’s) have opted to invest more time with their kids then that is a legitimate choice. Part time work can fit well with school pick ups and drop-offs.

Economists and policymakers need to realise that many parents see time invested with children as important. Some parents make a legitimate and positive choice to stay at home while their children are young – despite the economic and social costs of doing so in today’s politically correct culture. Others choose to return to work earlier. It’s time to stop the judgmental social engineering which sees parents as economic units of production to be extracted from the home and coaxed out into the labour market. Caring for children is a productive investment.