Access to parental leave in Australia: evidence from Negotiating the Life Course

Although unpaid parental leave has been available to most Australian employees for more than a decade, and public sector legislation and company policies provide at least some employees with an entitlement to paid parental leave, there is as yet little information available on accessibility, take-up rates or the extent to which current leave provisions meet the needs of parents. In this paper, data from the Negotiating the Life Course survey are used to examine the first of these issues: accessibility. Variations in perceptions of access to paid and unpaid parental leave are examined in bivariate and multivariate analyses, which emphasise marked divisions in the Australian labour market between permanent and casual status. The data also suggest that access to unpaid parental leave is more variable than might be expected from a reading of formal legislative provisions, and raise questions over the accessibility of paid parental leave to those who need it most-employees with young children.

Co-opting conservation: Migrant resource control and access to national park management in the Philippine uplands

The history of political and economic inequality in forest villages can shape how and why resource use conflicts arise during the evolution of national parks management. In the Philippine uplands, indigenous peoples and migrant settlers co-exist, compete over land and forest resources, and shape how managers preserve forests through national parks. This article examines how migrants have claimed lands and changed production and exchange relations among the indigenous Tagbanua to build on and benefit from otherwise coercive park management on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Migrant control over productive resources has influenced who, within each group, could sustain agriculture in the face of the state's dominant conservation narrative - valorizing migrant paddy rice and criminalizing Tagbanua swiddens. Upon settling, migrant farmers used new political and economic strengths to tap into provincial political networks in order to be hired at a national park. As a result, they were able to steer management to support paddy rice at the expense of swidden cultivation. While state conservation policy shapes how national parks impact upon local resource access and use, older political economic inequalities in forest villages build on such policies to influence how management affects the livelihoods of poor households.