Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Improvements for Families and Gender Equality) Bill 2022, which will amend the Paid Parental Leave Act 2010. This bill modernises the paid parental leave scheme, which began over a decade ago and which, in its current form, provides 18 weeks leave for parents taking leave and a dedicated period of two weeks leave for dad and partner pay. This scheme benefits between 250,000 and 300,000 parents a year. This bill will combine the 18 weeks and the two weeks of DAPP, forming a single payment of 20 weeks that can be shared between parents, although two weeks will still be reserved for each parent on a 'use it or lose it' basis. But, if there is only one parent, that parent can, if eligible, claim the full 20 weeks.

The bill also removes the somewhat giddying reference to primary, secondary and tertiary claimants, recognising that carers are not constrained to biological parents. As a ferociously proud step-parent—or in the minds of my stepchildren, sometimes just ferocious—this is indeed a most welcome evolution for my kind. The bill also removes the requirement that mothers make a claim for PPL. Fathers or other parents may make the claim, and the awkward arrangement that mothers must apply and then choose whether to share the paid leave with the father is also gone. The bill introduces a family income limit of $350,000, indexed from 1 July 2024, recognising that, in some families, the mother earns more than the father or other partner with caring duties and certainly more than the existing $156,000 limit. It also means a single parent will be assessed against the family threshold of $350,000. It is worth reiterating at the outset, as the member for Deakin did yesterday in his second reading contribution on this bill, that the coalition supports it. It picks up many of the amendments which the coalition proposed back in March 2022. Overall, it creates a much more flexible scheme, as had been conceived in the coalition's proposed amendments in the Enhanced Paid Parental Leave package of reforms.

There are, however, some things that this legislation cannot address, which is attitudes towards parents and particularly men—fathers and carers—who take leave to look after their children. Like many in this place, I had the precious opportunity over the summer break to plough into books and reading, and one of them was the cracking read, TheWife Drought by my friend Annabel Crabb, published back in 2014. TheWife Drought is indeed a wonderful read, contemplating both the individual, social and economic benefits and the broader societal pros and cons of stay-at-home partners and parents. The tougher the job, it seems, the greater the benefit to the worker of having a partner who can spend more time at home looking after children, managing the chores and logistics of the household, ensuring there is food in the fridge, booking the summer holidays, ensuring that homework is done and handed in, that parent teacher nights are signed up for and that books, stationery and new shoes are ordered in time for the new school year. I'm sorry: I have digressed into a personal guilt list.

Crabb's book starts in its early pages with the story of a fictitious 'Jane' and 'Jeff' and uses them to explain the ongoing pay gap between men and women in like roles. As Crabb explains in her book:

If she works for 40 years, Jane is likely—if things go according to the average experience—to earn a lifetime total of $2.49 million. But if you take a second graduate and call him 'Jeff' and give him exactly the same qualifications as Jane and bless him with the same degree of averageness, he ends his forty-year career with a lifetime total of $3.78 million.

Crabb kindly does the maths for us, explaining that that amounts to a $1 million penalty for just being a woman. Crabb then goes on to examine the economic hit of having children, at least for mothers. I quote from page 97, although who knows what page it is when you are reading it on a Kindle:

Children change things for both men and women. In Australia, an average 25 year old man can expect to earn a lifetime total of $2 million over a forty-year working life, if he doesn't have children. If he does have children, however, this figure is bumped up to $2.5 million.

For women, though, parenthood exerts the opposite effect. A childless woman can actually expect to earn just about as much as her childless male counterpart—$1.9 million over the course of her forty years at work. But if she has babies, that total dips to just $1.3 million. She will earn $600,000 less than a childless woman, and a full $1.2 million less than a father.

I suspect some things have not changed terribly much since 2014, when some 60 per cent of families had a father working full time and a mother working part time, and only three per cent of families had a mother working full time and a father working part time—although this may not be true, or at least as true, anymore. There may have been a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the much-altered way it made us live our lives, especially those of us in Melbourne, who endured one of the longest lockdowns in the world, with more than 260 days in our fat pants and ugg boots, working from the kitchen table. Over the COVID years, anecdote would tell you, household chores were more evenly shared. Both parents were home more often than not, albeit that, in some cases, working in the laundry meant using the ironing board as a stand-up desk, with the door closed to noisy homeschooling.

It seems not just to be anecdotal. In its submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee on this bill, the Australian Human Rights Commission noted that 13 per cent of all paid primary carers leave was taken by men. While that doesn't sound like much, it's a doubling of the mere six per cent recorded in 2020. Maybe, just maybe, the pandemic taught us to share the load, both in terms of parenting and, I suspect, in terms of maintaining the household. I have already been onto Annabel about writing The Wife Drought, Pandemic Edition.

Other submissions to the Senate inquiry which is currently on foot highlight the potential economic gain to the nation of getting more women into the workforce, or indeed more men into making the school lunches. The Australian Human Rights Commission argues, in its submission:

Rebalancing work and care responsibilities between partners would result in a reduction in the gender pay gap, higher GDP through increased female work participation, and would ultimately lift economic welfare.

That potential GDP dividend is significant. Deloitte argued, in its Breaking the norm report, that an additional $128 billion would be added to the Australian economy by adding 451,000 additional full-time employees. Chief Executive Women, in their submission to the Senate legislation committee, estimated that halving the workforce participation gap between men and women would represent an additional 500,000 full-time skilled workers with post-school qualifications. CEW also estimate that increasing women's working hours by two per cent alone would add $11 billion to Australia's GDP.

My suspicion in this space is that, when we talk about paid parental leave and family responsibilities, we need to talk about men as much and as often as we talk about women. We need to encourage, normalise and celebrate men taking up the tasks of parenting and, in some cases, indeed, the lion's share. In political discourse, we need to stop saying 'women' and 'paid parental leave' in the same sentence all the time. I know it's important—it's very important—but it's important for men too, and, above all else, it's important for their children to know their fathers.

So it's not just paid parental leave we must facilitate but also flexible working hours, in the hope that it makes it easier for both men and women to share parenting and household responsibilities. No, I don't suggest everyone should be at home, beamed into the office from the ironing board, but we do know, from studies elsewhere, that allowing employees some flexibility about where and when they work makes them both more productive and more useful at home.

An expectation of more flexible work might also go to reversing the somewhat bizarre trend identified in Crabb's book, one which, I suspect, rings a bell in the mind of every woman in this building, and certainly in this chamber. Annabel found:

… when a woman earns more than two thirds of the total household income, she starts to increase her unpaid work at home.

Let me say that again in another way. If a woman takes on a part-time job, she tends to decrease her work in the home, albeit marginally. But, if she starts to earn significantly more income than her partner, she will actually do more unpaid work at home. Anyone who has read of Maggie Thatcher's infamous cooked dinners for her cabinet or Simone Veil's insistence that she always made tea for her husband at home knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Again, in her hilarious treatise on Australian family life, Crabb refers us to a study by Janeen Baxter interpreting the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, known to most of us in this place as the HILDA Survey. The study found:

One explanation is that we have such a strong male breadwinner culture in Australia that in those households women are, if you like, re-asserting their gender identity by picking up some of the housework that's left over.

Let us all, not just here but beyond these walls, in the private sector and elsewhere, think beyond the boundaries of this bill to what we can do to create and sustain a more gender-equal nation, not just in parenting, earning, cleaning up or being accountable. To be fair, for today, this is a good start.

See this speech in context