Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Hansard source

We are a longstanding leader in gender equality. Everyone knows that Australia was one of the first countries to introduce votes for women. Today we should be proud that we have a Deputy Prime Minister who is a woman, a Deputy Leader of the Opposition who is a woman, a female Governor-General and three women on the High Court. We also have the highest representation of women ever in our parliament today, and that is certainly something that all members, I am sure, would be proud of. But of course we should be proud but not complacent. We still have a long way to go. There is still much work to be done. As the member opposite mentioned, we continue to have a gender pay gap. I am sure all of us still agree that women experience violence in much too great numbers.

We believe as a government that we need to support practical measures that give women options, allowing them and encouraging them to make the right choices for them in their stage of life, in their circumstances. We have returned fairness and flexibility to Australia’s workplaces, including for the first time a right to request flexible and part-time work for parents. It is important that these conditions are available to men as well as women because we know that, without a better sharing of the joys and responsibilities of domestic life, women will not be able to achieve professionally all they deserve to achieve. We have made it much easier for parents to afford to return to work by increasing the child care tax rebate to 50 per cent of out-of-pocket expenses and making those payments quarterly instead of annually.

For the first time, we have introduced a paid parental leave scheme, which will commence in January next year—a scheme that allows women to remain connected to the workforce while easing the financial burdens of taking time off to care for very young babies. The government’s scheme is a fully funded scheme, a scheme that particularly supports financial security for the lowest paid women, and it contrasts very sharply with the scheme that the Leader of the Opposition floated yesterday. It is well worth asking why, in 12 years of government, the previous government never introduced paid parental leave, leaving us and the United States to be the only two developed countries that have never had paid parental leave schemes. At the same time, they introduced workplace laws that made it much, much harder for parents to balance their work and caring responsibilities. They reduced penalty rates. They got rid of unfair dismissal provisions. They introduced AWAs, which we know were phenomenally bad for working women.

Of course, it is also worth asking why the Leader of the Opposition said that paid parental leave would be introduced ‘over this government’s dead body’ when he had the opportunity to do it. It is worth commenting that the broken promise on taxes has meant that no business group in the country supports this proposal, particularly as they are struggling to emerge from the global financial crisis. It is not clear yet whether this is opposition policy or not. It is not clear whether this is another thought bubble or whether we now have a commitment from the opposition that this policy will be introduced. But what I can tell you is that there are women in the community now who are planning to have children next year who need certainty. They are planning their family finances now. They are trying to work out how the mortgage will be paid next year. They need certainty that the opposition will back the government’s scheme and pass the government’s scheme so payments can commence in January next year. Heather Ridout said of this scheme, ‘It is the sort of policy’—

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