Maternity leave tax on women without plans for children a "Human Right"

What about: "Sex discrimination commissioner advocates lower wages and poorer conditions for women of child-bearing age"? Or perhaps "sex discrimination commissioner wants to make it harder for women of child-bearing age to find work"? That's what I read when I saw this article. The Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, wants maternity leave recognised as a "Human-Right" and for mothers to initially get 14 weeks of paid maternity leave. She eventually wants the maternity leave increased to 48 weeks.

This paid maternity leave can be funded in two ways, by forcing employers to provide paid maternity leave or through taxation. In the first case, employer financed maternity leave; anyone who understands any economics whatsoever will realise that obligating employers to provide these benefits is a sure way to increase discriminatory hiring and firing practices.

In the second case, getting tax-payers to fund other people's life-style choices is, in my opinion, morally questionable. Even in this latter case, the employer is presumably obligated to keep the job open for the new mother on her return after almost a year of leave. This will still create an, albeit lesser but no less real, incentive for employers to discriminate against women of child-bearing age.

Why not let people plan their own lives and make their own decisions? A free market economy already offers employers far more incentives than the government ever could not to discriminate against different groups in the community. Efforts by the government that have the stated goal of reducing discrimination usually have the perverse consequence that they actually increase levels of discrimination (or at the very best shift that same level of discrimination into other practices).