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Employment Entitlements to Carer’s Leave

This article explores the normative underpinnings of two main sets of minimum employment standards in Australia: parental leave following birth or adoption of a child, and personal/carer’s leave in order to attend to the short-term care needs of a member of the employee’s ‘immediate family’ or ‘household’. The article reveals how these leave arrangements are structured around a set of assumptions about what constitutes a real family. The rules normalise a conservative form of heterosexed nuclear family, especially in relation to the care of babies, where gendered understandings of care (and work) remain strong. Recently, both sets of leave entitlements have been explicitly extended to same-sex couples. This formal equality approach to law reform disrupts the opposite gender marker of the normative relationship, but largely continues the normativity of the two-adult couple and its conservative form of caring practice idealised in law.