There was a rather contentious opinion piece on news.com.au last week called [the] "Folly of Paid Maternity Leave". As you may guess, the author, Mirko Bagaric, was not a huge fan of paying mothers to leave work and have babies, and said that, "... paid maternity leave will result in an increase in the birth rate. But this would be morally and socially undesirable."
Naturally, it was not very popular with the readers, and I noticed one commenter held up the Scandinavian system as a shining example of a country which had high fertility rates as well as "the highest ratio of females in leadership positions and the highest percentage of women in the workplace". A lot of people like to bring up the Scandinavians, and there certainly are a lot of good things you can say about their government's policies.
A few years ago, I worked in a little town in Denmark for several weeks (with some side trips to Copenhagen, which was a few hours drive away), and indeed, the people there seemed quite prosperous and happy.
There were modern windmills everywhere generating alternative power (and NOT blotting the landscape, by the way, in fact it was rather nice to see them as you whizzed past on the road).
The trains and train stations were immaculate. Copenhagen had just unveiled its new underground railway, and the engineers had been thoughtful enough to include repeaters in the station construction, so that you could still get clear mobile signals while underground, unlike some places (cough*PERTH*cough).
Many of the long-distance trains had ports above each seat for you to plug in your headphones and listen to the radio. The office I worked in had exercise bars and little diagrams in the bathrooms showing employees how to stretch their backs on them*.
There was more to this fairytale list. (Please note that this list was compiled from speaking to Danes more than four years ago, at a time when my main diet was hot chocolate and pastries - curse those Danish chefs and their light-as-air pastry! - so circumstances may have changed, or I may have had too much sugar at the time and misunderstood. I have managed to find links for some of points below, so it looks like my memory wasn't too impaired by glucose overindulgence.)
- Tertiary education in Denmark is free. (We had that, once upon a time.)
- The government subsidises student housing, so uni students get to live in apartments in the middle of Copenhagen for very little rent.
- Students receive a monthly stipend from the government.
- Mothers receive up to 6 months maternity leave, and under certain conditions, white collar workers can get (up to) an additional 5 months leave at half-pay. (Links to the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.)
- Parents who have children under 8 years of age can take uninterrupted leave of 13 to 26 weeks for childcare. During this time, their jobs are kept for them and count towards their length of service, and they can also receive up to 70% of the maximum unemployment benefit. (From Denmark - Parental Leave, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.)
But, and this is a very, very big BUT:
- Income tax ranges from 45% to 60%. That is not a typo.
- Sales tax and GST applies to just about everything and starts from 25%.
- Road tax is based on car weight and engine size, penalising all those four wheel drives and giant utes (I quite like this idea).
I could go on, but the words "tax" will feature quite a bit, and it is the start of the work week, so I shan't depress you more.
So the grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but it's a damn sight more expensive too.
If there are any Danes or Scandinavians who would like to correct me, or add their points of view, Hej! and please feel free to send in a comment.
* Despite all these marvels, I could not find a decent Chinese (or South East Asian) restaurant, and was crawling up the walls after about two weeks, but that was my problem. I did, however, find some very nice curry-flavoured peanuts and spare ribs to tide me over this difficult time.