Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The other day I caught my husband flicking through the photos from our children's early years; images from play dates, local parks, kinder gym and music classes. He fell silent and then said, 'I wish I had the opportunity to do this with them.' It struck me that, when my children were born, it was I who scaled back on work, and in those early months spent time at home looking after them. Paid parental leave was not an option for me back then. But then my husband's words brought home the sense of loss he felt for a time that will never return. I take for granted the time I had with my babies, but it was no bed of roses. I would have loved to have had my husband share some of that carer load. But, alas, he was locked out, an indication of how far we need to go in challenging gendered roles: the mother as the homemaker and the father as the breadwinner.

The cost of not challenging social norms means that we further entrench gender inequality as women fall further behind and fathers are denied the opportunity to spend time with their children. Having guided many patients through end-of-life care, I can assure you that on our deathbeds there is no nostalgia for working long hours or having spent time in pointless meetings, but we do assess the quality of our nearest and dearest relationships.

There is much to do in challenging these cultural norms that discourage men from spending time with their newborns. A survey of 842 men conducted by an Australian recruitment agency, Hays, in 2019 indicated that 54 per cent of Australian men believe that new fathers don't take the full parental leave they are entitled to, because of the hit to their finances, while 34 per cent fear being perceived as less committed to their job. However, 80 per cent of men believe that shared parental leave and shared child-rearing responsibility would help breakdown unconscious bias and improve gender diversity—a resounding endorsement for modernising our Paid Parental Leave scheme. We know that many more men want to take time off from work following the birth of their child, based on data from the private sector. Deloitte introduced similar leave entitlements for mothers and fathers in 2015 and saw an increase in the uptake of paid parental leave among fathers from 20 to 40 per cent.

It is telling that 'the fatherhood penalty' is not in our lexicon. In fact, I never want to hear the words 'penalty' and 'parent' associated in the same sentence. According to Treasury, women reduce their hours of paid work by 35 per cent over the first five years following the birth of a child. In contrast, fathers experience only a transient decline in paid work during the first month of parenthood, before resuming previous levels. It's a fatherhood blip rather than a penalty. The downstream effects on women are insidious. Decisions made in the earliest time of a child's life lock in patterns of parenting for years, if not decades, to come. An Australian woman does more caring and twice as much household work even a decade after the birth of her first child. In other words, having children worsens the gendered division of work at home, which persists for years to come, serving neither the mother nor the father's wellbeing.

Australia has one of the least generous parental leave schemes in the OECD, both in terms of rate of pay and the amount of time allocated. Fathers, in particular, receive very little dedicated leave, and their take-up of the scheme is very poor. Currently, the primary carer, who is usually the mother, is eligible for 18 weeks of paid parental leave at minimum wage in addition to any employer scheme. The secondary carer leave, called 'dad and partner pay' provides two weeks at minimum wage, and cannot be taken alongside paid leave from an employer. So, many fathers currently face a substantial pay cut should they take up the scheme in its current form. In addition, 12 weeks of the 18 must be taken as a block, discouraging the shared taking of leave between parents.

It's a cruel irony that the scheme is called 'paid parental leave' when almost all the primary parental leave recipients are, in fact, mothers. In 2017-18, less than 0.5 per cent of parents using the scheme were men—the second-lowest in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. A Grattan Institute report from 2021 indicates that three in four men are passing up the right to PPL because it's probably not worth the hassle. International experience shows that when targeted dad-leave schemes are introduced take-up is actually very good. Uptake was 80 per cent among fathers in 2018 in Quebec, compared to 28 per cent when the scheme was introduced. More-evolved Australian businesses have realised that equal paid parental leave schemes are good for the bottom line because they help to retain the talent. PwC reported a reduction in the proportion of their staff who've resigned while on paid parental leave from 6.4 per cent in 2017, before a more flexible option was introduced, to 3.3 per cent in 2021.

Improving paid parental leave dovetails with our desire to make gender inequality extinct. Paid parental leave was a key reform raised at the Jobs and Skills Summit by business, parents and their advocates. The Albanese government has listened. This amendment is the most significant reform to the PPL scheme since its establishment by Labor in 2011 under Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The changes to commence on 1 July this year are the first stage of reforms that will lead to the scheme's expansion to 26 weeks by 2026. Approximately 180,000 parents in Australia, and 960 in Higgins, will benefit from this scheme this year. Our bill will expand access to the scheme and provide more flexibility to families.

The key changes include combining the two existing payments into a single 20-week scheme, eliminating mother and dad components—no more gendered titles like 'primary carer'; we're getting rid of those. This will make it easier for families to access the payments and decide who will claim paid leave first. We will expand access by introducing a $350,000 family income test which families can be assessed under if they exceed the individual income test, which currently sits at $156,000. This change to income thresholds will open the scheme up for more families. We are also allowing parents to choose how they take their leave days. Until now, a 12-week block had to be taken, but these changes now mean that paid leave may be as small as one day at a time, with periods of work in between, so parents will have flexibility. The reformed PPL scheme will reserve a dedicated use-it-or-lose-it portion for each parent in order to incentivise uptake. This will be two weeks for each parent, but it will be reviewed as the scheme increases from its current 20 weeks to 26 weeks in 2026.

Fathers and partners will be able to access PPL at the same time as any employer funded parental leave scheme, which is currently not the case. Currently, many fathers would have to take a pay cut and drop to the minimum wage in order to access paid leave. We are allowing them, like mothers, to now access employer and government schemes were employer schemes exist, which currently affects about 50 per cent of all businesses. We want that to increase. We hope that we see an increase in businesses bringing in their own in-house PPL schemes. It's a great way to attract and retain talent.

Early involvement of dads sets up a virtuous cycle of care and a more equal division of housework, and it helps build confidence in fathers' parenting skills from soothing baby to changing nappies, bathtime and bed. All are skills, and all can be learned with practice, free from the pressures of work. A healthy bond from birth also sets fathers up for greater engagement in developmental activities like reading and playtime later on in life. I want to break those social norms that box in men as breadwinners and women as homemakers—in fact, I want to smash them. The modern family in Higgins, with both parents working, demands flexibility and an opportunity to do things a little better than their parents' generation. I commend this bill to the House.

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