Even the phrase pisses me right off. I always hear talk of "working mums" and going back to "work", and I know that they mean paid employment, but the way we phrase things has an impact. And phrasing it that way suggests that staying home with small children isn’t work. I’ve never worked harder in my life and never made a bigger contribution ( in fact, the Australian Bureau of Statistics found in 2014 that unpaid work is this country is worth $434 billion). No, the relationship of mother to child is not a job, but the act of caring for children all day and night certainly is.

As Wong points out in her stand-up, "The whole price you have to pay for staying at home is that you gotta be a mom... You get no 401-K.”

Now, I’m mostly cool with the mum part (my newborn and toddler are asleep as I write this, so I have a slightly rose-tinted view!), but the extraordinary cost is a problem that we have been talking about for decades. The staggering difference between the superannuation balances of retiring men and women is appalling. Women over 50 are the fastest growing group of the homeless. But most of the solutions offered up involve women returning to paid employment as soon as possible, as many hours as possible. And those of us who choose not to are almost victim-blamed (you know the consequences of staying home, so it’s your own fault). But, to be quite frank, the kids being away from a primary carer for all but a couple of hours a day, five days a week, is not what’s right for our family.

Flexible work helps a lot, part-time roles helps everyone, particularly when both mum and dad work part time, and affordable childcare is extremely important, for both employment access and children’s development. But why can’t we recognise the true value of the contribution of stay-at-home parents financially in superannuation?

Michael Rice, CEO of Rice Warner, makes the case for joint superannuation accounts and suggests that this is a logical way of avoiding one partner having significantly more super in retirement simply because they contributed to the family by being in paid employment while their partner contributed by doing the lion’s share of the unpaid work.