Daily Lessons from Life 15 September 2010 - $126m of maternity leave benefits paid last year

"$126m of maternity leave benefits paid last year - Wed, Sep 15, 2010 AsiaOne

The Government paid $65 million in maternity leave benefits in financial year (FY) 2008 and $126 million in FY2009, Minister for Community, Youth and Sports Dr Vivian Balakrishnan revealed in Parliament today.

He was responding to questions from MP for Jurong GRC Halimah Yacob on the total amount of Government-paid maternity leave reimbursed over the last two years, and the number of women who benefited from the scheme.

She also asked whether the Ministry will consider loosening the criteria for eligibility so that more women can benefit from the enhanced maternity benefits."

The lack of babies is one of the most vexing and troublesome challenges that the world class government of Singapore could not properly tackled despite the most brilliant brains in the whole history of Singapore political leaders!

From this exchange it is clear that it is not just about the maternity leave benefits since it is an absolutely big amount, this S$126m in FY2009. A big leap from FY2008 of S$65m.

On another front, there was the DPM Teo's dialogue with about 80 women where he mentioned Singaporeans should not wait for the 'perfect life' to happen before having children. They should go for a little bit of messiness in their life and have children when the ladies are in the right fertility period! It seems that the participants pointed instead to employers' not family friendly enough as well work/life balance challenges.

Lessons for me are:

1. it is not just about incentives. Especially those one-time type as the recipient can calculate the cost of raising a child to adulthood of 21 or 25 years old, assuming the kid makes it to university study is much higher that what the government can provide! It is about emotion and passion to make babies. Of course, being in a stressful and uncertain situation, most preferred not to have children as that's the conclusion of rationality!;

2. one of the readers wrote about his family decision to have a baby and the type of challenges his wife and him faced deserved a better hearing from the government officials who really want to solve this challenge. It is more than just the tax and fiscal incentives. The DPM's exhortation of 'don't wait for perfect life' to have baby simply does not address the root causes;

3. it is clear that unless the government is willing to put the money where its mouth is, it will need to prepare to fund a generation of babies born between now and the next 3 years to induce to baby boom with UNPRECEDENTED incentives! From baby to university fully paid for!! Budget that and see how much it will cost us and if our trillion of reserve can afford to create this one-time boom or not. This is called 'out of the box' and breakthrough ideas. Crazy? May be. One thing for sure, those INCREMENTAL incentives proposed in the past 5 years do not work!

So, Singaporeans, be emotional and passionate and just do it. Let rationality aside until 9 or 10 months after ... :-)