Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I applaud the government for introducing the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Improvements for Families and Gender Equality) Bill 2022, and I would like to acknowledge former Senator Stirling Griff for raising this issue during his time in the Senate. In his speech on 11 June back in 2020, the then senator said:

There is inequity between two families on the same combined income: they would be eligible if the man were the higher income earner but not eligible if the woman were the higher income earner, which is just unfair. The current rules just don't reflect the realities of modern parenting, with more dads staying at home to care for children. The number of stay-at-home fathers has grown to 80,000 in 2016, based on the latest census data. It is time to move away from models that assume children will be cared for by a primary carer who is the mother. Modern parents don't define themselves in this way, and it's time the legislation doesn't either.

That was back in 2020.

In July last year I received an email from a constituent, and I'd like to read it out here. It said: 'Dear Ms Sharkie, I'm an emergency department doctor. My income hovers just over the threshold for the paid parental leave. My partner is a gin distiller. His projected income this year is around $45,000. I'm currently seven months pregnant with our first child and as such have been looking into paid parental leave. The current entitlement would not be enough to support our family. So our hope was for my partner to use the parental leave and I would go back to work. I have to admit, I have been shocked by how sexist the system remains, even in 2022. If our genders were swapped we would be entitled almost without question. However, because the income threshold is based on the income of the mother/female, our application has been rejected, despite the fact that my partner was going to be the one using the vast majority of the leave. I am shocked to see such a system still exists in 2022—a system that is still based on the fact that "a woman stays home and the man or father goes to work".'

It's quite rare for a policy to deliver significant social as well as economic gains, but this one delivers both. Australia has higher rates of female workforce participation than in many OECD countries, yet women are far more likely to work part-time than women in other advanced economies, and the main reason they work part-time is to care for children.

This bill, which encourages a more equitable sharing of unpaid care between parents, gives mothers more opportunity to engage in paid work, with clear, positive outcomes for women, families and the economy. For some families, the traditional model, of the male breadwinner and the female carer and second income earner, works well, but for many others it doesn't. Many women reported a desire to participate in more paid work, while many fathers would like to spend more time at home with their children but feel unable to, due to barriers that prevent shifts in traditional work patterns. These traditional family roles and work patterns undermine women's economic security, through reduced pay and lower lifetime earnings. Every woman who is the family's main breadwinner prior to babies arriving is statistically far more likely to drop their work hours than their male partner. Unfortunately, this leads to a pattern that persists well after the children are no longer in care.

But this bill can deliver so much more than economic gains. Overseas studies show that policies allowing fathers to be more engaged in their children's early years have lasting impacts on fathers and their children, and that when men are given greater opportunity to spend time with their children in those early years they tend to have stronger relationships and greater life satisfaction—in essence, they are happier. Children, in turn, benefit from increased time spent with their father as well as from the diversity of their interactions in their early years.

That same constituent contacted my office recently and wrote:

With our current 5 month old my partner wanted to spend as much time at home with him as possible and was hoping to take parental leave when I returned to work. I love my job as an Emergency Doctor but would have much preferred my child to have the opportunity to spend time with his Dad when I am at work rather than at daycare.

Because I earn about the threshold my partner has been denied the chance to spend this precious time with our child. I feel angry that it's 2023 and a father is only able to access the leave on their own merit if the mother is considered incapacitated. This is grossly unfair to all of the fathers currently playing an active role in their childrens upbringings and almost exclusively affects families where women are the main income earners.

With the change in legislation we are hoping if we are lucky enough to have another child then he will be able to take the full parental leave time to spend being a hands on father to our children.

This bill will encourage more dads to take up paid parental leave, leading to more equitable family roles becoming normalised, thus releasing both men and women from heavily gendered norms that have previously been so prevalent in Australian society. I commend this bill to the House.

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