Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker, thank you very much for the opportunity to make a contribution on this legislation. I do so today both as a member of parliament who represents an electorate of thousands of families and thousands of women who will be directly affected by the provisions of this legislation but also as a young mother and someone in this House who is probably going to be more affected by decisions about paid parental leave than most. It is in both of those capacities that I will be pleased to vote against the legislation that is before us. For those watching at home and up in the gallery, I will explain the impact of this particular piece of bill that is before us. This legislation is an element of the paid parental leave scheme that many of you have read so much about in the newspaper. The particular decision for us today is that which will move the responsibility for administering paid parental leave from the employer over to Centrelink.

There are two issues that I want to talk about today. The first is a very practical one: the impact of passing this legislation will mean that thousands of Australian men and women who are taking parental leave will have to deal with Centrelink instead of their employer in administrative questions and issues associated with PPL payments. It means waiting in queues and dealing with robotic phone systems and overall creating a system that is less user-friendly and more bureaucratic for the people that the scheme is designed to benefit. The second and much more fundamental issue with the bill before us today is that it has the effect of severing an important link between the employer and the employee while the mother, or the father in some instances, is off on parental leave. The reason that is important is that it runs so contrary to all the rhetoric we hear from the Abbott government about the importance of paid parental leave.

One of the central arguments that has been put forward by those on the other side of the House is that the increase to the Paid Parental Leave Scheme, the very generous Paid Parental Leave Scheme, will help improve female workforce participation. It will help mums get back into the workforce after having kids. If that is the purpose of this scheme, why then sever this critical link between mum and her workplace? Why then are we saying, through the law to employers, that the woman and her entitlement to paid parental leave is actually the government's responsibility not the employer's responsibility, which is supposed to be the central element of this scheme?

I will return to the issue of female workforce participation, but before I do that it is important to understand a little about Labor's scheme as a contrast to the one that we have before us. When Labor came into government, 55 per cent of Australian women had no paid maternity leave. It is a bit hard to believe today and we have obviously come so far in this debate. Today, 95 per cent of Australian women have access to paid maternity leave. It is one of the reforms that the last Labor government put in place that I think we can actually all be incredibly proud of. The scheme provided 18 weeks support at the minimum wage. Critically, it was the same for all mums. It recognised that having a baby or adopting a child does not get easier when you have less money. Many would argue that it comes with more challenges because you simply have fewer resources in the household to meet the issues that hit you every day in the first few months of having a child—less money for nappies, less money for baby clothes, less money for child care when the new mum or dad need a break. The scheme was not specifically designed for low-income mums; it was designed for all Australian women and in some cases men. But, in practice, we found that higher income women tend to have more power in the Labor market and hence were able to access paid parental leave through their workplaces. What we saw was that the median income of women accessing Labor's scheme was around $45,000 a year. So there was a really important equity element to that scheme—it was available to everyone; it gave everyone their fair share.

Another really important part of the scheme was that it was genuinely designed to keep women connected to their workplaces. This is absolutely crucial because it is an important part of meeting that goal of making workforce participation by women in Australia more equal. This is a critical challenge that faces our parliament over the coming years. Getting women to engage more equally in workplaces around Australia has an incredibly important economic element to it. Many in this place would know that the Grattan Institute has estimated that if women in Australia had the same workforce participation rate as women in Canada, our GDP would be about $25 billion higher by 2020. But there are massive gains to be made for women and that is why this is an area of particular passion for me. Many of us in this House would already be aware of these figures, but I will repeat them because they are so relevant. Women in Australia retire with about 40 per cent less superannuation than men. They face a gender pay gap of 17.5 per cent. They hold just 10 per cent of senior management positions in ASX 200 companies. Women in Australia are much more likely to be living in situations of poverty than men. We know that more equal engagement with the workplace is part of the solution to these problems. There are other benefits too.

It is important that we have our workforce in Australia as large as possible because, as we know, we have an ageing population and more workers will help us manage that. But there are also benefits for children. You would think that increasing female workforce participation would mean a significant increase to the flexibility, the quality and the affordability of child care. We know that if we provide great early-learning environments for our young people, we give them the best start to help see them through primary, secondary and hopefully on to tertiary study.

Both parties of course are aware that this is an issue for slightly different reasons. Both sides of politics are quite passionate about finding solutions. But we see that the current government have taken a very peculiar approach to dealing with the issue of helping women back into fulfilling professional roles. The first element is that they are attempting to put in place this massively generous scheme that will provide women with huge amounts of support for the first six months of the child's life. The second element is that this last budget has taken away lots of provisions that support women at home, seemingly in an attempt to bully women back to work by taking away payments for families and for single parents. Then we have a range of issues around the funding of child care, which I will detail in a few moments.

I believe that these approaches completely miss the mark. I talk to lots of mums as much as I can about what is holding them back in various different instances in going back into work. One of the biggest issues that mums talk to me about are the challenges that they face just transitioning back to work. It is often not after their first child that they face these challenges but when they have taken time off with their second child. They face a lot of issues finding roles that have the flexibility that they need to balance family life and professional life. Pregnancy discrimination is a huge problem in Australia that is very rarely discussed. We know that about one in five Australian mums experience pregnancy discrimination. Some studies estimate it at a lot more than that. Pregnancy discrimination last year was the No. 1 industrial issue raised by the Fair Work Ombudsman. Pregnancy discrimination was the most complained about industrial issue ahead of every other industrial problem that we hear about in this country. This is why the government should be doing everything it can to strengthen the links between employers and employees when parents are taking time off around having children. We need to make it clear to employers that it is part of their role to collaborate to help parents and especially to help women to make a smooth transition back into work. It is good for women, it is good for our workplaces and it is good for Australia.

That brings us back to this legislation which, as I have mentioned, will sever that critical link between the workplace and the mum or the dad who is taking time off. Since the beginning of Labor's scheme, payments were administered by employers. Removing that provision is a significant step backwards for Australian women. It is part of a scheme that most Australians, certainly most economists, believe is a significant step backwards for participation in the workforce by women. International evidence, and, of course, just common sense, suggests that the longer women step away from work, the more work they take on at home and the harder it is for them to get back into a fulfilling role. That is why I think this paid parental leave policy has the potential to entrench, not break down, gender divisions at home and at work.

So if the solution before us is not the right one, then what should we do? When you talk to women about what it is that they would like help with, when thinking about managing the difficulties of having a family and a work life, you get a pretty straight answer from them. What they tell you is that, if we want them to reach their potential at work, what really matters is not the first six months of a child's life; it is the many years that follow, where child care has to be juggled in the majority of Australian families where both parents work.

It is only when you start to make comparisons between child care and this Paid Parental Leave Scheme that is before us that the huge expense of this scheme comes to light. The cost of this scheme is $5 billion a year. That is hard to imagine for most people, who do not deal with those sums of money every day. Just consider that, last financial year, the federal government spent $4.7 billion on childcare supports. So we are actually going to be devoting more money to the first six months, to this scheme, than for women and all of the support that they would like for their children further down the line.

While we see this being implemented, there are elements of child care that are under attack. In the last budget, we saw some kindy funding removed, so that kids in my electorate of Hotham will only get 10 hours of kindy per week—one third less than the 15 hours enjoyed by their older brothers and sisters. Funding has been cut to the Community Support Program, which helps small family day care operators that provide child care to 80,000 Australian families. We know that the eligibility thresholds for childcare support have been frozen, which means that families who were previously eligible for support may not be eligible next year.

So the conclusion to all this is that the legislation before us, and the part that it plays in this broader Paid Parental Leave Scheme, is a huge policy faux pas. Even if it were good policy to implement a scheme like this one, it is madness to think that now would be the time to do it when we have had, in recent weeks, a budget handed down which has seen attacks on pensions; the removal of benefits, which will see many young people in Australia become homeless; the dismantling of our Medicare system; and changes to payments that will see the poorest in our society pay the most, not just as a percentage of their income but in actual dollar figures. Yet this scheme will see millionaires paid $50,000 to have a baby.

It is not the right priority for the budget. It is certainly not the right priority for women, to put all of our focus on the first six months when women tell us that what they really want help with are the years that follow. While we are doing all this, we create a scheme that severs, not strengthens, the ties between employers and employees. I must say that, even though I do think this policy is extremely contradictory, I am not all that surprised, because this is a government where a man who has a long history of anti-feminist views has appointed himself the minister for women, and where, amongst a raft of very talented backbenchers, only one woman could be found for the cabinet. So I think, given the context here, it is not really surprising that this government has got this area of policy so fantastically wrong. And I will be very pleased to vote against it when the time comes.

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