Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise to support the member for Ballarat’s motion before the House tonight, and I have followed with interest the member for Murray’s comments. I should indicate that I was a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment and Workplace Relations that brought down the Making it fair report, a report on pay equity and associated issues related to increasing female participation in the workforce. I say to the member for Murray: I find the opposition’s new-found enthusiasm for dealing with these issues of great interest and somewhat amusing in the context that we saw, for 12 years, that so little was done on the things that the members of the opposition now complain we are not doing enough on.

In the evidence that we took during the Making it fair inquiry, it was quite clear that one of the outstanding issues over years in Australia that had not been addressed—if we want to make OECD comparisons—was the lack of a paid parental leave scheme. It was something that, when they were in government, the opposition clearly had very little interest in; in fact they often expressed an active lack of interest in introducing a paid parental leave scheme. I am pleased to see that the member for Murray is so passionate about it. I did not hear her being quite so passionate on that issue when the coalition had the government benches and I did not hear her insisting on a scheme that is in fact even bigger—

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