Bent Babies and Closed Borders: Paid Maternity Leave, Ideal Families and the Australian Population Project

Abstract

This article examines recent public debate in Australia around the question of paid maternity leave with specific reference to the way this policy has been mooted as a possible key to reversing or stabilizing Australia's declining birth-rate. The paid maternity leave debate is read against a set of debates that have unfolded concurrently but generally have been treated separately: those concerning access to assisted reproductive technologies, gay marriage, border protection, and mandatory detention. What unites these debates is tension over who constitutes “proper’ families, “correct’ mothers and the “right” (white) babies. We are interested in the way these debates not only give expression to shared anxieties about race, (reproductive) biology and nation, but in fact depend upon one another in their efforts to re-constitute familiar hierarchies of meaning and merit in the realms of motherhood and family, which are then materialised in the current Australian federal government's policies on family, welfare, work and immigration.