Flexibility in the workplace has been in the news again over the last few weeks. As we wrote in our last newsletter, since 2010 Australian workers have the right to ask for flexible working options as long as they have worked with the company in a consistent capacity for more than 12 months.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has committed to boosting the number of public servants working remotely up from 4 per cent to 12 per cent by 2020, but the Australian Council of Trade Unions president Ged Kearney said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, that working from home was not necessarily a "panacea" for those wanting flexible working hours - particularly mothers.

"For a lot of women, work is about leaving that care and responsibility and having a different focus," she said. "It can be very difficult to juggle both from home… people can end up more stressed."

She said those working for an employer who wanted to work from home needed to take into consideration a raft of factors, including who bears the cost of the home office, adequate support from and access to superiors, and issues around occupational health and safety and compensation for work-related injury.

While flexible working seems like a great option, it’s not always as simple as that. No matter how flexible your employer or working arrangement, the cost of child care, child care options, availability and hours of operation are still the main barriers to women returning to and staying in work.

So as Kate Ashmor, president of the Australian Women Lawyers Association said in the following post on Women’s Agenda, child care reform is the real key for keeping women in the workforce.

Childcare reform is the real key for women
Australian women are a cluey lot. We're the most educated among our female peers in the OCED and we comprise well over 50% of the graduates from Australian universities. Millions of us run our own businesses and deftly manage our families and households. We're articulate, resourceful and clever.

That's why the government's announcement of a plan to assist us negotiate flexible work hours, without enforceability and without any corresponding childcare reform, is an exercise in patronising politics.

Employers are prudent: they don't want to lose their best staff, especially those who they've trained and invested in, and who possess valuable corporate knowledge and client relationships. The cost of attrition is enormously high in many professions, sometimes the annual salary of the departing employee when recruitment costs, training and opportunity costs are all factored in. It's much cheaper for employers to keep staff after they have children.

This leads to common sense arrangements, such as starting work later on certain days in order to drop children at childcare or school, or leaving work earlier on other days to pick them up. Technology has a valuable role to play, with staff able to log on at home after the kids are in bed. As long as clients' expectations are looked after, there is often no reason for employers to care how and where the work is done, as long as it's done. That's why these common sense arrangements are already occurring, without any intervention from the government.

This is not the time to be hitting businesses on the head with another regulatory stick. They have enough red tape to deal with. Instead of playing patronising politics, let's address the real cause behind families struggling with part-time working arrangements: childcare.

Flexible, affordable and accessible childcare is the key to women being able to return to work after childbirth. Yet childcare costs have increased by almost triple the annual inflation rate over the last few years, while the demand for long day care places is higher than ever. And the lack of flexible childcare, such as after-school care and centres open beyond 6pm, means that many parents who want to and need to work longer hours or on certain days, can't. Australians are increasingly becoming parents later in life, therefore grandparents are not necessarily around or capable of providing supplementary childcare. Many Australians are immigrants whose families live in distant lands. Professional childcare is the only way these families can return to work.

We know that as a nation we need more children in order to create enough taxpayers to support us in retirement - the Intergenerational Report makes for ominous reading on this issue! And we know we need to increase our productivity in order to improve our nation's economic growth. While Australian women are the most educated in the OECD, their workplace participation rate is among the lowest. What a wasted investment! Flexible, affordable and accessible childcare is the key to unlocking our economy's future prosperity.

Enough with the ruses and patronising distractions. If the political parties are serious about winning over Australian women at this year's federal election, they must provide us with visionary childcare reform proposals. Our national interest is counting on it.

This article first appeared on Women's Agenda.

KATE ASHMOR works part-time as a lawyer for the Victorian Government. She is the mum of a toddler and President of Australian Women Lawyers.