Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What an extraordinary presentation, from a woman of all people, and I will go to some of those absurdities espoused, notions like: 'Wouldn't it be terrible if a woman who was getting full paid parental leave took her other child, perhaps a toddler, out of the creche or childcare centre? That would be terrible for the business of the childcare centre.' How extraordinary. Wouldn't it be better for that woman to be able to have both her children home in a period of paid parental leave? So I think we need a lot of heavy thinking about how we have such an extraordinary representation from the Labor Party to try and defend what was a very mean paid parental leave introduced with no superannuation consideration. Don't they understand that women are most likely to be in poverty in their older age because they have had gaps in their employment while they went away to bear their children? Continuous superannuation is critical for women to be able to remain independent in their older age. Here we have a Labor government at the time saying, 'No, women don't need super. Men do but not women.' Therefore their very mean, cheapskate paid parental leave scheme paid only the minimum wage to all women, even those who were already receiving much higher returns in paid parental leave because they were in the Public Service or in the defence forces or in the insurance or banking sector. Apparently it was going to be somehow enough for all women to be only paid the equivalent of the minimum wage, with no superannuation and for a miserable 18 weeks.

It was one of the most shameful pieces of Labor Party policy. I remember the poor unionists hiding their heads in shame, particularly those giants of women amongst the Labor union movement who had fought for years for a paid parental scheme. They were in corners in Parliament House saying, 'How are we going to defend this? What can we do? Perhaps it is best if we say nothing and hope they will fix it as fast as possible.' The good news is that the coalition has fixed the problem of cheapskate, inadequate paid parental leave that Labor gave us. I have to say that this amendment is in itself purely administrative and not much to do with the overall policy, so I will not deal with it straightaway. I think it is very important to remind ourselves that, if a woman expects to have her full salary paid when she leaves the workforce to have a child, she may then be accused of somehow being grasping, asking for too much, expecting something gold-plated, when that is exactly what a man expects and gets if he takes recreation leave, sick leave or long service leave. Why should a woman who is bringing forward the new generation of Australians be expected to accept much less as an industrial standard than what has been enjoyed by the general population of the workforce most of this century, and certainly since the 1970s?

This is an extraordinary situation where we see the Labor Party, who like to beat their chest and say it is all for workers and all for women, and when you look at the reality of their policies it is actually the reverse. They do everything they can to make sure that the oppressed and underpaid continue in that circumstance. So we had this extraordinary reaction when the now Prime Minister announced there would be full income replacement paid to women for six months for paid parental leave, not the miserable minimum wage for just three months, and the scream from the Labor sisterhood went up. I found it extraordinary, and this presentation we have just had from the other side of the chamber reinforces how low some of them can go in abandoning women who are members of their party and expected a lot more, a lot better.

This particular amendment just deals with the administrative burden on business where the paid parental leave legislation required them as bigger businesses to administer the parental leave themselves. From 1 July 2014 employees will be paid directly by the Department of Human Services unless an employer opts in to provide parental leave paid to its employees and an employee agrees for their employer to pay them. The previous speaker became quite excited about the fact that she thought the numbers were wrong. I think that is quite irrelevant. The point is that, if you can have the minimum of additional red tape and administrative burden on our small and larger businesses, isn't that a good thing? It has to be a good thing. Centrelink is set up with its computer-aided systems to be able to deal with this payment in an efficient and effective way, and I say: what a good idea.

Unfortunately, under Labor there was so much red tape and additional burden of administration that numbers of our small businesses literally went under. They could not cope with the form filling, the duplicated rubbish that was requested of them day after day, particularly in the aged-care sector, where women who had entered that workforce wanting to use their skills of empathy and care in their relations every day with their elderly residents instead found themselves filling in forms, more and more and more paperwork. Often they were not of English-speaking backgrounds, so we had great carers leaving the aged-care workforce because Labor killed them with the burden of red tape. We are not going to perpetuate that nonsense and you will be aware, Deputy Speaker, that one of our main aims in this government is to slash the administrative burden, the rubbish red tape that was added to the legislation under Labor's watch.

Let us get back to paid parental leave itself. I find it extraordinary—and I think most of us have received these emails, or perhaps it is mostly women members who do. We get these emails, sadly from older women, saying, 'I didn't get paid parental leave. I coped. Why can't they? This is really silly.' I say to those women, 'Good on you, but you didn't have electricity in the 1950s either and maybe you didn't have a telephone in those early days, and we do not simply say, you didn't have it so in the 21st century the rest of the human population can't.' I think that is a nonsense argument but you get it fairly regularly in emails.

When I ring these older women and talk to them for only a couple of minutes, I find they soon start to tell me about their granddaughters and the difficulties they have in trying to work full time because they need two incomes to keep up with their mortgage payments, to pay for their car and to perhaps pay for their kids school fees. They feel sorry for the burdens that working women now have to bear and how they are trying to do it all—have the babies, raise the children, look after the disabled, look after elderly parents and parents-in-law, and still have a career that is fulfilling and where they can reach their full potential. Those conversations with older women usually end up with us both in furious agreement that, yes, paid parental leave is not only important but necessary for women in the 21st century.

I was amazed when the previous Labor speaker said that she has been out consulting, or someone in the Labor Party has been out consulting, and women have said no, they would rather focus on child care and superannuation. I can understand the superannuation issue. Labor refused to give superannuation to women taking parental leave. I imagine those consultations were a furphy and perhaps nothing happened at all. But to suggest that women out there are saying, 'We want child care sorted not paid parental leave,' is absolute rubbish. What women are saying to me, including my two daughters who between them have six children, is this: 'We need both. We have to have efficient, cost-effective, adequate and flexible child care, but we also have to have adequate time off when we have our babies, at least six months, on our replacement salaries so that we can bond with our babies, breastfeed our babies and have our youngest out of child care for that six months so we can form a proper family when those newborns come into the household.' Of course, you can also have a father participate in this Paid Parental Leave Scheme if they wish. I just find that what Labor is suggesting is absurd—that either you support child care or you give mothers adequate paid parental leave. What a rubbish argument. Would you ever suggest that men in the workforce can either have full pay for sick leave or trade off their long service leave? It just would not happen. Why is it that women are supposed to cop all of this?

I am not proud of the fact that Australia was one of the last countries in the OECD, along with the United States of America, to have a statutory paid parental leave system. It was a very long time coming in Australia. If you thought we had women who had to go back to work the day after they had their babies, that in fact was not the case, because the private sector and the Public Service moved to fill the gap because we did not have a statutory paid parental leave scheme. But before Labor introduced its mean and lousy 'no superannuation, only three months' scheme, we had women who were lucky enough to be in the Public Service being offered paid parental leave on full pay. Likewise, women in the defence forces in any higher paid positions were offered full pay replacement during their parental leave. It was just bad luck, according to Labor, that if you were a part-time worker or in a lower paid industry like accommodation, cafes, restaurants or retail you just missed out, that it was just tough. I will give you the statistics.

In 2005, 76 per cent of women employed in the public sector in their last main job while pregnant used full-pay, paid maternity leave compared with just 27 per cent of women employees in the private sector; 80 per cent of women whose last main job while pregnant was in government administration defence and 68 per cent of those in education used full pay, paid maternity leave. And there were much higher levels in the finance and insurance industry. However, the industries with the lowest proportion of female employees with paid parental leave were accommodation, cafes and restaurants and there only 14 per cent of women got paid parental leave and in retail it was only 21 per cent. Instead of Labor looking at those statistics and saying, 'That's not fair. Those poorly paid women and those part-time women should have had decent paid parental leave as well,' Labor had every woman in the workforce reduced to a minimum wage for only three months as a paid parental leave entitlement and no superannuation. How extraordinary. No wonder union women hung their heads in shame and hoped it would very quickly morph into a better scheme. Sadly, it did not and it is up to the coalition to put a decent scheme on the table.

The coalition's Paid Parental Leave Scheme provides that women receive the entitlement, as men receive in their various work entitlements, of the equivalent of their wage for incomes up to $100,000 for up to 26 weeks. I am very sad to say only about two per cent of the Australian women in the workforce earn more than $100,000, but at least up to that level women will be paid a full replacement salary. They will also receive their superannuation. So they are not going to have this gap, this stop/start business that Labor was more than happy to endorse.

Women will have a better chance of having an independent older age. The reality for women in Australia is that they are more likely to be alone in older age through divorce, being widowed or never having married. Fewer women now are marrying or permanently partnering. We know that at least 30 per cent of women over 30 now will not be marrying. There will be more who will need to independently pay for their old age. We know women are going to have a long older age after retirement. A girl born today will live on average to 100 years.

For Labor to have been happy to deny women superannuation payments while they take leave to nurture their newborn I find disgusting and unconscionable. I do not know how the women in the Labor Party can sit in this chamber and make speeches saying that it is all okay. I do not know how they can get excited about whether the cost-benefit analysis or whatever all adds up. I am sure it does, but I am amazed that that is the focus of their attention and not the fact that under Labor's scheme people would not get their full wage even though their mortgage reflected their full wage, along with a partner's wage, and would only get 18 weeks and would not get access to super. What an extraordinary scheme, for a country like Australia which happens to take some pride in the idea of equity and a fair go.

Of course I strongly support this amendment. I also ask all of those out there who keep sending me emails or suggesting to me: 'How dare a woman want full pay when she takes parental leave! How dare they consider getting superannuation!' to stop and think about the incredible sacrifices women do make when they choose to have a child during their career—to think about the extra work they take on: raising children, managing a career, and looking after their partners and lots of others in the community as well. I salute the women of Australia. I think they do a magnificent job. And I really want to see our coalition paid parental leave scheme start as soon as possible.

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