The Flawed Calculus of Care
Comparing Special Leave and Bereavement in Australia
In my last article, “When Grief Is Not Grief,” I wrestled with my own understanding of grief literacy. I concluded that my unwillingness to accept the blurring of loss into a vast spectrum of experiences—i.e., the formal concept of Non-Death Loss—means by its true definition my grief literacy is incomplete. I admitted that I cannot accept that losing a job, for example, shares the same language as burying your child. This isn’t a failure of empathy; it is a recognition of the peak of human suffering. While some might dismiss this as mere semantics, I believe the battle over the word ‘grief’ is not just for academics. It carries a genuine, measurable cost in the real world. That cost is paid in policy, legislation, and organisational rule. These are the very mechanisms designed to protect and support individual members of society through moments of catastrophe. When we force one word to become a large and ever-growing umbrella for experiences ranging from profound devastation to significant but temporary upset, we make it impossible for the law to respond appropriately.
Compassion and Empathy
“When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Harold S. Kushner is an example of a deeply empathic book that is skilfully nuanced. The reader is led through complex human reactions and emotions to terrible events. The author was a Rabbi and had lost a teenage son to a rare genetic disorder. You can feel his humanity and understanding of the human condition on every page. I imagine if Kushner were an employer or ran a large organisation, he would set the gold standard in employee welfare. Unfortunately, our large bureaucracies are not led by people with the author’s background. They are run by bureaucrats who must interpret legislation and policy and apply it to large groups of people.
This is not a critique of the bureaucratic class, as successful societies need people who follow and implement the collective’s rules. They must demonstrate compassion for human suffering through the application of policy and procedure, and it cannot be done through counselling souls. It is achieved through allocating leave, creating new organisational roles, and balancing budgets. In their world, justice or caring will have to be expressed numerically, and this is part of the reason why the following disparity appears so egregious.
A Previous Example
In my previous article, “Individual Grief And The Workplace,” I highlighted a numerical disparity that came to light during the Australian Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023. An Indigenous Australian woman could potentially be granted 10 days of paid leave for domestic assault, 5 days of special leave to cope with the distress of the referendum process, yet only receive a mandated minimum of 2 days of leave for the death of her child.
DV, Bereavement Leave and Grey Areas
I have never met anyone who does not think that a woman should get 10 days leave after a domestic violence (DV) incident. I used the word woman because, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) latest survey shows, DV assaults invariably involve a male assaulting a female. Outside of this scenario, there are shades of grey in how it is perceived by the broader society.
I will say it this way: if I presented to my employer reporting a DV incident that involved my much smaller wife assaulting me, most large employers would grant me special leave for ten days. They are legally obliged to, but my line managers may not feel this is as justified as other cases. Bureaucracies must follow processes to avoid legal ramifications. It is not for them to quantify the moral worth of a case if it meets certain criteria.
The two-day paid bereavement leave is what employers can offer to their employees if a family member dies, as this is stated in the legislation. A good manager may choose to utilise a few bureaucratic tricks to afford their employee more time, but there are limits to this. Not all family deaths are the same. A 17-year-old boy losing his father is worse than when I did at age 47. Everyone knows this in an organisation, and I would want the 17-year-old to be given more support than me as an employee.
When it comes to child loss, it is universally recognised for the devastation on a family. Beyond the emotional impact, there are the practicalities of supporting siblings and spouses. There can also be drawn-out coronial inquiries that demand legal attention and commitments long after the death occurs. The two-day allocation does not cover any of the above, and there is a need to review this legislation.
Why this and not that?
The provision of special paid leave for Indigenous employees following the “No” vote in the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum did not originate from new legislation but rather from administrative policy and discretionary decisions made by major employers. It was reported that the Queensland Government Public Sector Commissioner issued guidance advising agencies that they could approve up to five days of special paid leave for First Nations staff experiencing psychological distress or grief stemming from the referendum result. This was implemented by drawing on existing special leave or miscellaneous leave directives that allow for paid time off in “exceptional circumstances,” primarily to ensure psychological safety, support well-being, and allow employees to return to Country (tradional homelands) or access community support after the deeply significant and distressing national outcome.
It begs the question: why can’t all this administrative effort and energy be galvanised by government agencies when their employees’ children die? We see an issue gaining immediate traction while the systemic tragedy of child loss remains neglected. For context, the Indigenous child death mortality rate is 2.5 times the rate of non-Indigenous children—a persistent and devastating national crisis that fails to trigger the same rapid policy response. Why this disparity? In the current social media age, the ‘perceived’ attention on a matter drives organisations to quickly react, which is something that they have never been designed to do. At their very core, they are conservative with a small ‘c’. Large bureaucracies can pull issues into their orbit that once incorporated become very difficult to remove. If our legislation and governance bodies behave this way, there becomes a process of embedding new injustices into systemic change designed to do the complete opposite.
If a person asks: why is my child’s death only worth one-fifth of a DV assault and less than half of the upset of losing a referendum? Organisations, intending to show corporate responsibility, have inadvertently created a policy that assigns far less importance to a life-shattering loss.
This example demonstrates how the well-meaning expansion of compassion and empathy into policy-making can become misaligned with its intent. Whether driven by the need to virtue signal or simply a reaction to increasing public awareness on a myriad of topics, the motivation often leads to hasty and ill-thought-out changes to laws. These changes, made without precise linguistic and legal differentiation, actively devalue the absolute peak of human suffering. Ultimately, our collective limitations in the language we utilise to discuss loss and trauma are leading to failures of justice.
Moving Beyond all of this
I am currently involved in speaking to politicians about amending legislation to better support families in the workplace after a child loss, specifically regarding bereavement leave. I would like an outcome that incorporates the well-meaning compassion of the Grief Literacy movement with the reality of large organisations’ ability to deliver fair outcomes. While increasing the number of mandated days for bereavement leave has a high moral face value, I recognise that other areas of legislation, such as entitlements relating to flexible work or time off for coronial enquiries, can potentially have a much broader and more substantive impact on a family’s care and stability. That said, my position remains firm: if I am expected to support a colleague whose dog has died with a day off—a principle central to expanded Grief Literacy—then I demand parents who have lost a child receive exponentially more. Until legislation reflects this fundamental hierarchy of human pain, my personal standard for Grief Literacy must, by necessity, remain stubbornly low.