Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing and Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

It comes as no surprise that Labor supports any amendments to paid parental leave that encourage both parents to spend more time with their child in its early childhood, but the member for Barton has moved a sensible second reading amendment to this bill, Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Flexibility Measures) Bill 2020, to also talk about the other things that impact families when they are having new babies. It is a wonderful time of life that should be celebrated, but we do understand that many Australian families are still juggling young children and work and that interaction. We still know that there are many things that the government could and should be doing to encourage both parents to spend more time with their young one and to support them when their family makes a choice. We also know that this government has made repeated cuts to family assistance and programs designed to support families and children, particularly vulnerable families and children in some of the social services program.

We also know that women continue to do a disproportionate share of the home chores and the raising of children and that this creates a significant gender pay gap. That pay gap in Australia today is still around 14 per cent. We know that the gender pay gap in Australia has been consistent for around two decades. There have been some movements attributed to primarily the mining boom, but, essentially, from the ABS statistics recently, women on average in full-time work continue to earn $242.90 less per week than men in similar work. That is in Australia today. After decades and decades of work by the parliament and governments, we are still in this situation. There needs to be more done by the government. The Treasurer and the Prime Minister need to get really serious about this. If they were serious, I wonder why they support the cuts to penalty rates. These impact a lot of women working part time trying to support their families, particularly young families. Penalty rates and the cuts are disproportionately impacting on women who are working in the retail sector. It is harder for families with childcare costs to raise children. We've seen data showing that the government's recent childcare changes and payments have led to a position where out-of-pocket childcare costs continue to rise. We know that for families who are doing the budgets, who are looking at whether it's worth mum doing an extra day at work on that third or fourth day of the week, often it is not worth it, because of the tax and transfer system, because of those childcare bills and because of the way the childcare payment interacts with that.

We have very serious gender inequality when it comes to raising young families in this country. Still far too many women choose to work part time because they feel like they don't have any other option. We see men starting to make some of the choices to take paid parental leave. When I was minister for women, I had a conversation with the CEO of a bank. I remember him proudly telling me how great it was that his company now offered paid parental leave, and that he was going to take six weeks. I said: 'Oh, that's well and good, but tell me what your company's policy is. What is the amount of paid parental leave?' He said, 'It's 12 weeks, but you can't do that in my job.' I said: 'You've just ruled out a whole heap of people who can do that job. I'd be impressed if you took the same paid parental leave as all of your employees are entitled to, because what you're effectively saying is that there are some jobs that can't be done when people take paid parental leave.' I think that is the wrong message to give Australian families today who are struggling to pay their bills and are trying to make choices that are best for their families. We need to have a better system.

We support the changes in this bill. I will run through what this bill does. It allows carers and parents to take time off work to care for their child after the child's birth or adoption, and it provides them much more flexibility in how they do this. So, of course, we support that. We on this side of the House introduced paid parental leave. It was a long time coming. We were the second-last OECD country to have a paid parental leave scheme that covered all parents one way or another. It is income tested for the primary carer. It is a good scheme but there is always room for improvement. We supported the government's last changes to paid parental leave in 2019, which took effect from 1 January 2020, but again these changes were pretty slow in coming. We think that after seven years of being in government those opposite could probably do a little bit more and focus a little bit harder on what else needs to be done to close the gender pay gap, deal with the budgets of families who are bringing up children in this country today and encourage both partners to do more paid parental leave. I don't think that in this country we're going to get an equal outcome for both genders until we get more men spending time at home with their children and doing more housework.

We need to encourage families to make choices, but it's those families that should make those choices; I'm not suggesting government should impose them on people. We need to do everything we can to encourage both parents, regardless of gender, to have that ability and for families to make those decisions that best suit their family when it comes to accessing paid parental leave in Australia. To be in the year 2020 and to still have the gender pay gap that we have, to still have discrepancies in superannuation and retirement incomes, to still have more women, older women particularly, becoming homeless because of some of the systems and to still have families having tough decisions to make because of the childcare payment system is not good enough. We need to do better. The government can and should do better.

See this speech in context