Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Tangney for his question and for his fierce advocacy for families in his electorate. Earlier today, legislation to improve and modernise paid parental leave passed this House. The Albanese government has listened to families and has acted. We know that dads and partners want to spend more time with their babies. We know parents want flexibility in how they choose to take leave and transition back to work. And we know the current eligibility rules are unfair to families where the mother is the higher income earner. Our legislation that passed the House today fixes these problems.

From July 2023, 180,000 families each year will benefit from a stronger, more generous scheme, and there's more to come. I will soon be bringing forward more legislation to deliver the biggest expansion to paid parental leave since Labor first established it in 2011. We are doing this responsibly, extending the scheme by two weeks each year from 2024, until we reach six months in 2026. Our government has wasted no time in making sure that we are delivering more flexible and improved paid parental leave.

I am asked about how that compares to those opposite—the decade of policy stagnation when it comes to paid parental leave. To be fair to those opposite, it wasn't just stagnation. They did, to be fair, in the 2015-16 budget, try and rip close to $1 billion out of paid parental leave, accusing 80,000 mothers of being double dippers, saying that they didn't deserve to be supported by their employer as well as the government. This was something that really grated on many women and families around the country. We know that families are trying to spend as much time as they can to ensure that they're still able to afford to pay household bills. This is what our improvements will do.

So, far from accusing parents and mothers of being double dippers, far from trying to rip money out of the Paid Parental Leave scheme, we are fixing it, the result of nine years of the coalition government's inaction, which has dragged Australia's Paid Parental Leave scheme behind the rest of the OECD. It has taken the election of this Labor government to deliver for working families, and that's what we will continue to do.

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