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

We have more than 8,000 underway at the moment. Thanks very much for asking. What an extraordinary question.

It is great to have this opportunity to talk about paid parental leave. I went to see Alice in Wonderland with the kids on the weekend, and it feels like I am still there. The only thing that is missing here is the 3-D glasses. We had the Red Queen, the member for Indi, talking earlier about big business and how appalling big business is and how they should be punished with greater taxes. It is like everything has turned upside down. And just then we had the member for North Sydney, the shadow Treasurer. The character he probably reminded me of most was the Cheshire Cat, because he would sort of start off on one train of thought over here and then disappear suddenly and turn up here on the National Broadband Network or on something else—I do not even remember where he went.

He went through the discussion of whether the Prime Minister was a fiscal conservative. We certainly know who is not a fiscal conservative. We know that the shadow Treasurer is not a fiscal conservative. We know that the shadow finance minister is not a fiscal conservative. We know most of all that the Leader of the Opposition is not a fiscal conservative, because every time a thought pops into his head he makes some half-hearted announcement, some uncosted, unfunded announcement that sometime in the future, perhaps, they are going to levy something—I do not know whether we are describing it as a ‘temporary levy’ now or as a ‘new tax’. Is it a temporary levy? Oh, it is a tax, because the shadow finance minister said it was a tax today. They are going to levy that sometime in the future. We are not sure when. There is no start date for this. There are people out there now considering whether they will have a family next year. They do not know whether they will benefit from this policy that has been floated by the opposition. We know that they are not fiscal conservatives.

It was extraordinary to hear the shadow Treasurer talk about the structural inequalities in the Australian workplace. Wow! Where did those inequalities come from? After 12 years in government, yes, there have been structural inequalities in the Australian workplace. There have been structural inequalities in the Australian workplace for years, as the shadow Treasurer said. He very conveniently neglected to say how many years he was talking about. The other extraordinary thing the shadow Treasurer said in his disjointed comments was that this is a scheme that pays for itself because of increased workforce participation. I reckon that there have been women in the Australian community for decades saying that paid parental leave will pay for itself because of increased productivity over time. They were saying it every single day of the previous 12 years of the coalition government. They were knocking on John Howard’s door, they were knocking on Tony Abbott’s door, they were knocking on Joe Hockey’s door, they were knocking on Barnaby Joyce’s door, they were probably even knocking on Sharman Stone’s door and they were saying, ‘It is an outrage that Australia is one of only two developed countries in the whole of the Western world that has no paid parental leave scheme.’ Women and men in the Australian community have been saying for years that it is wrong socially, it is wrong for babies, it is wrong for mothers, it is wrong for families and—guess what—it is wrong for the Australian economy and for the Australian workplace not to have this benefit available to families.

And what did Labor do? On coming to government we said immediately that we would provide this paid parental leave scheme. We asked the Productivity Commission to examine the best way of doing this to allow maximum benefit for babies, for families, for mothers and fathers, and for business. The Productivity Commission undertook extensive consultation right across the country. They talked to business leaders, community members and families about what they need in their lives, and they came up with a very sensible proposal. It was a proposal that this government was prepared to back with a fully funded, fully costed scheme that would, absolutely guaranteed, be introduced from January next year—unless, of course, the opposition vote against it. We do not know yet whether they are going to vote for the paid parental leave scheme that they know is a commitment of this Labor government.

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