Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

With great pride and enthusiasm I support this bill, the Paid Parental Leave Amendment Bill 2014, which takes a burden off small businesses in my electorate, thousands of small businesses that, no matter how much they wish to support paid parental leave in this country, have been burdened completely unreasonably by the previous government's attempts to make life even more complex for them.

Paid parental leave is something that, like any economic intervention to support our workforce, should be brokered through government and should be paid direct to the employer as other entitlements are. In this case what we see with this bill is an ability for employers to pay only where there has been an election to do so and where the employee wishes that payment to be made directly from the employer. This opens up for small businesses in my electorate the opportunity not to have an additional red-tape burden placed upon them, which has been a recurring message over the six years of the previous government.

In this great chamber we should be able to stand shoulder to shoulder, regardless of the party we are members of, and say we are united for gender equality and united in seeing labour market participation for women. We should be united around ensuring we have female contributions to our economy, both nationally and globally. We should be united in seeing that the informal and unpaid work done by women should be paid at least at a fair wage and that those who are getting paid a minimum wage should have every opportunity to be paid a wage that eliminates the gender gap. Of course, that is not the case if the highest value you place upon a woman who takes time off to have a child is the minimum wage. By holding to that ridiculous proposition one actually increases the wage gap for women. We need to make sure that gap is closed, not opened any further.

I think it is the view of everyone in this chamber that women should be able to rise to senior positions in their professions and occupations with minimal hindrance. Most typically that occurs with interruptions for having children. We know that the transition since the seventies has been from a single-income family and household to, in most cases now, at least a 1.2- if not dual-income household. The real world now is that second adults are joining the workforce simply to be able to afford what one income could do three generations ago.

It is an economic argument that all of the OECD has woken up to. All of the OECD admit that their calculations for parental leave should not be based on the minimum wage. In fact, there may be only one other economy in the world that does that. Every other economy has understood the importance of women earning a replacement wage that equates to what they were earning while at work when they take time off to be a parent. The last thing we want is small business to be burdened with the additional impost of having to run an administrative program that is effectively nationwide and that, effectively, should be brokered by the government that is funding it.

We know that, even as recently as last week, the APEC Women and the Economy Forum strongly reaffirmed this importance at a meeting in Beijing from 21 to 23 May of eight of our 10 largest trading partners. The APEC ministers, heads of delegations and senior officials identified that limits on female workforce participation represents at least an $89 billion challenge every year amongst APEC members. Australia is not an insignificant part of that. We know that in countries like Japan at least nine per cent of GDP is held back because of low female workforce participation. In the US it is around five per cent and in Australia estimates as recently as early this year indicate that just getting our female workforce participation up to OECD average levels could represent a boost in excess of $10 billion. These are huge figures compared to the cost of providing paid parental leave. Yes, funding paid parental leave fairly and equitably actually pays for itself, pays that dividend back to the GDP through participation.

There are of course three elements to this debate. The first one is the economic, which I will go through in great detail. The second one is the entitlement side of the debate. The third and probably most colourful has been that the paragon, the party that argued for decades that they were shining light for workplace entitlements, suddenly found it utterly impossible to pay a woman what she is worth and found that the minimum wage was good enough for no other reason than that the other side of politics came up with the idea. That is right, the Labor Party has appallingly placed the burden on small business to broker this dreadful arrangement and at the same time will deny the huge majority of working women earning more than the minimum wage a fair replacement wage when they are raising a child.

The greatest challenge we have for closing the gender pay divide is ensuring the continuity of employment for women in Australia. The propensity to return to work after having a child is directly linked to retaining a payment that stops if you do not go back to work. It is one thing to leave work and have no payment or to leave work and have some part payment, but under a system that pays you your replacement wage that continues from before you had a child it is the realisation after six months that the payment is about to stop unless you go back to work that has the extraordinary pull effect to bring highly trained, qualified, talented women back to the workforce. And a minimum wage system simply cannot achieve that. Paying a woman a minimum wage is a cheap way out that does not bring women back to the workforce. I am sure that everyone on the other side of the chamber feels that, deep in their hearts, but simply because it is not their idea they are unable to support it.

There was one of those rare moments in Australian politics where the Greens, when debating the way Greens do for means testing, argued that maybe the cut-off should be a little lower. But the Labor Party did not argue that. They descended into even more disappointing depths until they reached the nadir of their argument by, during the election campaign, referring to millionaires getting the Prime Minister's paid parental payments and the administrative burden of small business having to do it.

I thought it would be interesting to ask my community if there were any millionaires out there, in their late 20s, having children. Were there any millionaires out there deciding to have a baby? We went looking for them but could not find any. Where are those elusive, ephemeral millionaires who are having children? Somehow they did not turn up anywhere that I was looking. I was only looking in an outer-metropolitan marginal seat; perhaps they are living somewhere else. Perhaps all those millionaires having children are in Labor seats. It is an outrageous, egregious abuse of public payments to see $50,000 being paid to a woman—a woman who would earn $50,000 anyway in that time—to come back to work and keep earning $50,000 after having a child! What a gross injustice that was, according to Labor.

The fact is that nearly every other OECD economy does it just that way. But do not let any facts from the rest of the OECD spoil a great argument or a great smokescreen. Put it on the record: every one of the members of parliament sitting on these rows on this side of the chamber believes that women in the workforce, just as they get their annual leave and their sick leave, should get paid parental leave at wage replacement. Everyone on this side believes that.

Let Hansard record the Labor Party's appalling position on what women are worth in the workforce. Believe me, if we take the burden off small business having to administer the payment—as this bill does today—and if we pay women precisely what they are worth, or what they earn prior to having a child, for the six-month period while the WHO recommends they should be bonding with their children, and then pay them to return to work, the continuity of career will mean that, for the first time, this nation can hope to reduce the gap in superannuation earnings between men and women at the ends of their careers.

That is not a small issue. We have had the Labor Party go on and on about superannuation savings for women. They recognise that they have $87,000 less superannuation to their name by the end of their working lives. The main reason for that is the interruptions to their working lives while they have children. So why would we not support women in every possible way to return to the labour force? We want the brightest and most productive minds coming back to help with the skills shortage. We are, effectively, a high capital-low labour ratio economy. We need every person we can get to reduce the need to import labour.

Here is a federal opposition nickel-and-diming Australian women and saying that no matter what they earn women are not worth a cent more than the minimum wage. I do not mind a completely open, clear, transparent debate about whether a program can be means tested. I am no great fan of means testing, but I welcome the opportunity to have that debate. But, no, that is not what was pushed by those on the other side of the chamber; it was just the preposterous argument that this money was being cleaned out by millionaires. We had not met any; we had not seen any. None has ever put her hand up and identified herself—no, no, no. Most of those high-income-earning women work in the large corporations, where they are already getting paid parental leave. There is no real change; instead of getting it from the company direct, the company pays the extra 1.5 per cent to the government, who pays it to the woman anyway. There are no millionaires, there, scooping up money they do not get already. So, they are working for large corporations or they are working in the offices of judges, parliamentarians and other high-paid public officials—they are senior public servants. I do not know too many millionaires there, either, to be honest, but they have public parental leave arrangements at—wait for it!—wage replacement.

Then we heard the preposterous reason for trying to burden small business with this unnecessary imposition. The realisation was that people in the public sector were able to double dip under Labor's scheme. Good, hard-working people in the private sector were lucky enough to get some low-level, minimum wage arrangement by Labor. But what did Labor do when they were in government? They said that if you were in an enterprise bargained paid parental scheme—such as the staff in this building are in—you could take that payment and then, over and above that, go ahead and take a second lot of paid parental leave at the minimum wage. So, even right now we have staff in our own offices taking paid parental leave not once but twice for the same child, under the Labor scheme. How does that stand up for equity? It is double-dipping—two lots of paid parental leave. It is great if you can get it but it is not fair if you cannot access it.

So for the great party of fairness we see double standards again. I do not mind having a debate about paid parental leave and how much working women deserve. I have no doubt that someone on the minimum wage will earn the minimum wage while they are on parental leave. So let there be that incentive. Let people seek out the best possible jobs, knowing that they will get wage replacement if they are to have a child. And let the scheme be administered not by the small business but by government.

The point of today's bill is that employing a woman should never be a risk. Employing a woman should never be something to be avoided. The whole point of this is that small business can say there is already a significant interruption in employing someone who takes parental leave, but they are prepared to brook that because they know that there will be wage replacement funded predominantly by large corporations and delivered by government. And the administrative burden does not fall on them.

Concocting a minimum wage scheme that is run by small business would have to be done by a party that has never run a small business. It would have to be done by a party where no-one has ever worked in a small business. And it would have to be done by a party that thinks a working woman is only worth the minimum wage. Frankly, I find it embarrassing in the 21st century to share the chamber with such an old-fashioned view. Women are worth more than that.

I think anyone who deals in the community with women returning to work after having a child would appreciate two things. One is wage replacement for the obvious reason that you can maintain those household commitments that are not easy to change. You cannot just downsize your house for six months while you are having a child: 'Because I'm being paid the minimum wage, I'll just take a bedroom off the house and reduce the mortgage!' How preposterous!

Secondly, the Labor dream of emancipation of working women was to not pay them superannuation under paid parental leave! Where did that come from? No superannuation while you are taking your paid parental leave. What does that mean—that while you are having children you don't need any superannuation? What a preposterous argument. Small business to wear the burden; no superannuation; and then, finally, as if there was any evidence of expert advice on that side of the chamber, out came the minimum wage but just for 18 weeks. That is all you get. After 18 weeks it all runs out. How on earth have they worked this out on the Labor Party's side of politics? Now working women are worth only 18 weeks, despite WHO recommendations to the contrary, at the minimum wage; no superannuation; let small business where the burden; and, if you have an enterprise bargaining agreement in government, you can double dip.

I thought there were smart people in politics and I certainly hope there are smart minds putting together policy. You could not have concocted a more distorted and a more vengeful approach than paying a working woman less than she deserves and less than she earns. I am ashamed that that policy exists. I feel very, very strongly that small business should not wear that burden. I support this bill strongly.

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