The Prime Minister has shown his true colours, again… As reported in The Australian, Anthony Albanese agrees with an economist who talked up ‘the importance of getting more women and mothers into the workforce’. The starting point for this goal is implementing ‘cheaper childcare’. And the reason for this structural initiative? Increased productivity.

There we have it. Let’s make families weaker to make the government’s bottom line look better. Let’s put more children at risk from radicalised school environments by spending less time with their parents as a societal tradeoff for the government’s mismanaged approach to energy. Let’s decrease the inherent value we place on being involved in children’s lives so that the government can have more unfettered input into the minds and hearts of the young.

Am I just an old man having a fantasy about the ‘good old days’? No, many economists reviewing the social impacts of these kinds of centralist policies attest to the impact of strategies that weaken families. And as Thomas Sowell and others have observed across this century, the ones who are most vulnerable to the negative impacts of centralist family policies are the poor – and particularly the women and children amongst the poor.

Another example of long-term impact came to light at the recent ARC conference in the UK. A British MP told the audience of consistent reports by teachers of children coming to Kinder (not prep) and not being toilet trained. Greg Sheridan’s comment was:

Has a Western society, swathed in historically unprecedented affluence, failed even in the most elementary tasks of passing on civilisation? … The traditional family, the virtue and joy of having children, received the kind of heavyweight intellectual support [at this conference] that has been almost completely absent, virtually a thought crime, in Western political discourse for decades.

I remember back to those earlier decades – the days when in Australia, we could receive some tax benefit if our pay was supporting more than one dependent, including supporting a parent at home with the children. That was a help if those parents did not both want to do paid work, but instead have one care for their children. Children could and did thrive without going to daycare centres and without going to prep. Our international results were holding up well.

But now? Now we have a more socialist, anti-Judaeo-Christian curriculum at preschools, schools, and universities – all built on the premise that children should be separated from their parents. This is made possible by mums and dads paying more taxes that fund the subsidies for childcare, which means the cost of living rises. In addition, it reduces real productivity, while pretending to do the opposite (while also supposedly ‘saving the planet’ by paying for more expensive energy).

Is it fair to place this at our current Prime Minister’s feet? I believe so. Part of his election campaign appeal was his childhood narrative of being brought up by a single mother in public housing. The family sentiments played upon during the campaign train have not translated to Labor Party policy or respect for families suffering through a politically-created financial crisis.

Our Prime Minister shows no structural commitment to the sanctity of the family. The Labor Party remains silent as state governments become agents of death through late-term abortions and early-term death. Labor supports schools in every state forcing ideology onto children despite pretending to remain neutral. The Albanese government has made no effort to intervene as parents, including single mothers in public housing, lose their authority over the sexual development of their child in the area of so-called affirmation.

Day upon day, Labor across the nation, with its ministers, creates the false of ‘climate disaster’ from which they promise to rescue everyone while breaking other promises. Supply goes down, prices go up. Childcare is no different. When these children become adults, too many many not want to have children of their own.

The Labor Party’s anti-family stance is consistent with the Prime Minister’s deafness during the referendum. He followed his ideals and not the social reality of what Edmund Bourke called the ‘little platoons of civil society’. But why would politicians work against promoting families? Warren Mundine describes it clearly:

Family is the foundation stone of all societies. … If you want to destroy or control a society, then the first place to attack is the family. … the push to erase the concept of family … is about substituting the values laid down by families with values laid down by governments and bureaucrats.

Compare this with another leader – that of Hungary. Katalin Novák is openly pro-family. As Greg Sheridan noted in his interview with her, her main commitments are summarised as ‘the Hungarian commitment to human freedom, the need to bolster families and encourage more children, and Budapest’s desire to remain, culturally, a country in the Christian tradition’.

Might we hope for a Katalin in this country? I, for one, will.