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, andContinue Reading
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 slumpedContinue Reading
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 andContinue Reading
This week, in the post, I got a cheque for $50 from Morris Iemma, Premier of NSW, which included a cheesy message reminding me that he is the father of four children. It was the back-to-school allowance for Chatterboy (I get Hungry Boy’s in a month’s time after he’s actually started Kindergarten).Continue Reading
Paul Frijters at Club Troppo has a post up about maternity leave – a disucssion of the recent policy announcement from the Greens and the Democrats to guarantee 14 weeks of maternity leave (at minimum wage) and the pros and cons from an economic perspective. I commented there that IContinue Reading
There’s an interesting article in a recent Economist about some McKinsey research on improving school performance. I couldn’t find the original McKinsey research (presumably they charge governments a lot of money for it), but even the bits summarised in the Economist are different from most of what you will read aboutContinue Reading
Last month, when releasing the census with great fanfare, Peter Costello once again took credit for the recent slight rise in the birth rate. For the record, Australia’s fertility rate increased to 1.81 births per woman in 2005, up from 1.77 the year before. The replacement rate (the average number ofContinue Reading
There’s a great opinion piece (from Lenore Taylor) in the AFR this weekend about the school vouchers that were snuck into the budget this year. Briefly, $475 million has been budgeted to provide $700 tutoring vouchers to the parents of children who fail national reading and maths tests. The articleContinue Reading
Corporate Woman in the AFR this week had a disappointed commentary on the Federal Budget. The column was calling for a bit more compulsion from the government around flexible working hours – pointing out that business needs to become more friendly towards women/carers who are working, rather than government using the taxContinue Reading
Since Wednesday, Chatterboy has been in Royal North Shore Hospital being treated for pneumonia. On Friday, when he’d turned the corner, the doctors admitted to us that they had been quite worried about him on Thursday, when nothing seemed to be working, and he was lying there, listlessly, on oxygen,Continue Reading
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