Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The magazine Marie Claire did a major article some years ago about parental leave. As has been brought up already in this House, out of some 30 prominent countries mentioned, the only two countries that did not have provision for parental leave were Australia and the United States. The legislation before the House, the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care) Bill 2010, is very detailed and specific on child care. The debate in this place is constantly about child care. The parental leave issue is tailored for working mums. The childcare issue is about working mums. I pay great tribute to Tempe Harvey and her organisation, Kids First Parent Association, for bringing the issue to the attention of Australians such as me. When the Prime Minister announced his parental leave package, I thought it was a very good step in the right direction. When the Leader of the Opposition announced a much more generous arrangement, I thought that was very good too. I got a nasty broadside from this particular group, amongst other people, and deservedly so. I, like everybody else, was trapped into a paradigm of conventional wisdom that led us to believe that it was all about working mothers. I suppose we constantly run across working mothers in this place, but we do not run across non-working mothers.

It was very interesting to have pointed out to me that most mothers in Australia—albeit by a small margin; it is 51 per cent—with a child below the age of five were stay-at-home mums. They have made a very great sacrifice to give their children full-time mother’s care. I do not wish for my remarks to be construed as a criticism of those mothers who, quite literally, have to work. One night, when I pulled up for a burger at a late-night servo, one working mum said to me: ‘Do you realise how tough it is for people like me? I have a six-year-old child and, if I work here at night, I have to pay someone to look after her. If I had a day job, I would have to pay someone to look after her. If I don’t work then I am on a figure which, really, means it’s not possible for me to stay alive. If I break out and have a few smokes during the week then, of course, someone’s got to go hungry and that someone is me.’ I thought that was a fair sort of call.

Successive governments have done nothing to lean upon the banks in Australia who have said yes to every application for home lending, which has driven the cost of homes straight through the roof. The cost of a house in the eighties was twice the average annual earnings; now it is seven times the average annual earnings. This is much greater than in the United States, where the system simply collapsed. It was six times the average annual earnings there, and now it is down to about three times the average annual earnings. The price of a house in Australia is nothing more than the cost of bad government. I had a station property with a few hundred thousand acres, and the value of it was $4 an acre—in a country where, a stone’s throw from any city, you can buy land at $1,000 an acre and people are paying many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The issue is very graphically illustrated, and I refer again to Kids First—because I think we will hear a lot more about them as time goes on. They have a little brochure out that talks about an unwaged mum—a stay-at-home mum—getting $5,000 on the birth of a child and then an annual payment of $3,000. So she gets $3,000 a year for having a child. Under the Rudd government plan, she will get $7,000 and an annual payment of $6,000. Under the opposition’s proposed plan, a woman will get $30,000 on the birth of her child and then an annual payment of $6,000. Is it fair that the mother who is working, who is on average weekly earnings, on an income of $60,000 a year, gets $30,000 when she has a baby and the person who is the stay-at-home mum gets $7,000, Mr Acting Speaker? Is this fair?

See this speech in context