Green entitlement
Louise Roberts writes at news.com.au:
HERE’S a way to test your capacity for self-delusion.
If your child is too ill to go to school today, do you take her on a business trip at the taxpayer’s expense? A moral bind surely, even if it is within the so-called company rules.
But if you’re a warrior for Single Motherhood, that excuses everything.
You can attend, with a sick child in tow, an overnight jaunt to see a few whales and shuck oysters because you are simply doing your job.
In other words, tick, another problem solved in the tyranny of life known as Single Motherhood.
That is, of course, if you’re blindly entitled like the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young.
The Senator has this week been condemned nationwide for using a reported $3874.24 of taxpayers’ money to go whale watching with her daughter Kora last September in the Great Australian Bight.
Incredible. Taxpayer funded whale watching!
There was no alternative childcare available, it was not her fault so be quiet, haters. No regrets either at a decision that has subsequently been lambasted as a poor one.
But her world is not the world inhabited by the typical single mother raising a child bereft of a financial or care-contributing parent in the home.
In that alternate universe, there is usually a plan B such as a carer’s day or the decision to work from home while a sick child is cosy and recovering in bed.
The Senator gets paid $200,000 a year but couldn’t get someone to look after her sick daughter for the day.
Hanson-Young decided to fight fire with fire, telling Sky News: “Well the truth is… that I didn’t have a choice at the time.
“And you always weight up these things in terms of balance between the commitments of your job as a senator or indeed the demands on myself as a parent and a mum.
“So of course I don’t regret it.
“What I regret is the idea that there’s some grumpy old white men who have been deciding what is best for my family in the last 24 hours and I tell you what — I’m not going to be lectured to by some grumpy old men about how to be a mother or indeed what is best for my family.”
If a male Senator took a child whale watching on the taxpayer’s dime, I’d say they’d be equally criticised.