Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

Of course I support the member for Deakin and his amendment to the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (More Support for Working Families) Bill 2023. Certainly I know the coalition has thought long and hard about this, as we do about every bill. That is why the member for Deakin's amendment needs to be adopted. I know that we all want to support working families. We do. Families are the backbone and the building blocks of our nation. Whether it's in a small business, a medium business or a large business, we want people to have the ability to work, to look after their children, to contribute to the economy—it all works in cycle; it all works in tandem.

Whilst the coalition will support this bill, more needs to be done to make sure that small businesses aren't burdened by exhaustive red tape. I do earnestly and honestly worry about the impositions placed on small business by this government—the industrial relations impositions and the difficulty of trading in what already are difficult times. The ability to not only attract new customers but retain the customers you have is an age-old question for small business. Cutting through some of that red tape is so important. We used to have red tape days when we were in government. To be fair, they indeed reduced some of the onerous, unnecessary responsibility on small businesses particularly, who are already under a mountain of pressure and bureaucracy just to keep their doors open.

The coalition calls on the Labor government to amend this bill to ensure paid parental leave payments are paid directly to the employee. To start a business in the present day is a challenging task. There was a story in the Daily Telegraph just last week about 80 businesses failing every week, and many of those were in the construction sector. This is a huge burden to bear, particularly as we have a housing crisis. This is such an onerous responsibility on builders, who are weighed down by federal law, weighed down by state law and weighed down by local councils. This story in the Telegraph, headed 'It's a big business bust', mentioned that more than 80 New South Wales businesses are failing every week. In the very first paragraph, it said that this was a jump of nearly 40 per cent in a year. Paid parental leave is important. Making sure workers are paid the right amount for their labours is absolutely necessary—no question—but, when you have businesses failing at the rate that John Rolfe's article indicates, it is a concern.

I approached a businessman in my electorate, a home builder by the name of Wayne Carter, and he indicated his concern. He said that a heavy percentage of where the building industry is on its knees—they're my words, not his—has been 'caused by the government-backed fringe requirements to increases to BASIX levels along with changes to the National Construction Code, adding extra costs to a build'. We've had many discussions in the past, and red tape is one of those things which he has mentioned regularly and consistently when talking about how difficult it is to keep the doors open. Already established businesses have a better chance to adapt, as changes to them are incremental, but when you start a business the years and years of red tape built up and built in often proves to be an insurmountable obstacle. It crushes innovation and it prevents what could potentially be great businesses from ever having a chance to evolve.

Government should be seeking to ensure it is as easy as possible for our best and brightest to start businesses. Young people, not-so-young people, metropolitan people, remote people, city people—it doesn't matter. We need to provide the building blocks, the foundation, the starting point—call it what you like—to encourage businesses to take out that first loan, to try to attract that first customer. That is so vital.

The Motor Trades Association of Australia, a peak body for many small and medium-sized businesses in the car trade, held a survey on the matter of red tape stifling competition in the market. Interestingly, this survey found that 96.1 per cent of respondents would prefer Services Australia to pay paid parental leave directly.

If we want to support families and aspiring parents, we must also address what many would argue is an even bigger issue, and that is the affordability and availability of child care. I talk about this in relation to child care because it is a huge issue in regional, rural and remote electorates. It's one thing to have affordable child care—fantastic—but it also needs to be available child care. Unless you have that childcare centre in a rural area, it doesn't matter how cheap, how inexpensive, it is. They have to conform to all the necessary regulations, naturally, but availability is a massive issue.

According to an ACCC report, childcare fees outpaced inflation with increases of between 20 and 32 per cent. For families on low incomes, the news gets even worse, with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission finding that the lowest-income households spend up to 21 per cent of their household income on child care. So when you think that is nearly a quarter and then you put on top of that rent or, indeed, paying off a home mortgage and then you put on top of that grocery bills, in rural, regional and particularly remote Australia, you put on top of that the price of fuel going up and up and up—I don't see it coming down anytime soon. I had a letter from a constituent just yesterday complaining about the high price of fuel in West Wyalong—It all amounts to more and more and more pressure on the household budget, and that is particularly so in regional Australia.

In regional Australia, I know the member for Page, the shadow minister for trade at the table and the member for Wide Bay understand all too well because we are in touch with our constituents. They tell us about the difficulty of finding childcare places. They tell us about the difficulty of cost of living, and that is not to say there were not pressures when we were in government, but we addressed them. The cost-of-living has gone through the roof under those opposite, who, to my way of thinking, are not doing enough to address these issues. And it is not just my way of thinking; it is Mr and Mrs Average. It is people who regularly send me emails, regularly stop me in the street, regularly see me at all sorts of social and sporting events. I know they are seeing the member for Page because we talk. I know they are telling the member for Wide Bay because we talk about these things regularly, because we care and we do care. We care about child care. We care about paid parental leave. We care about the rising costs that people are trying as best they can to meet and to combat.

According to the Care 4 Kids website, the average daily childcare rate in Wagga Wagga is $133 before subsidies. In Parkes, the average is even higher—$151. That said, there are many families—innumerable, you could almost argue—who can't even get their child or children into child care because there are simply no places. I talked earlier about availability. Affordability is just as important in this particular debate when you, as I said, factor in Labor's cost-of-living crisis, and it is Labor's because it is on Labor's watch. It is Labor's responsibility to address the cost-of-living crisis and they are not; they are talking about everything but. We are seeing childcare costs and the cost of paying off a home or even getting into the market getting out of reach of so many. You can understand why some couples, sadly, are hesitant to even start families because they want the best for their child, as any parent would and should, but they are delaying it and that also creates difficulties later on. They simply can't afford it in the present dire circumstances.

More needs to be done to support Australian families who are raising kids to ensure we remain a society built upon strong families and not to discourage those aspiring to have children. We can look across the globe to see what can happen if we don't support families enough. In some countries, the birth rate is well below replacement and that is a concern. It is a concern for Western civilisation. Indeed, in Japan, things have become so desperate that families are being offered a million yen to move out of Tokyo in order to reverse population decline and to enjoy a more comfortable life in rural municipalities.

I have to say that there's nothing wrong with living in rural municipalities. We found that during COVID, when many people chose to leave the big bright city lights and move to regional Australia where there were more freedoms. It was a safer place to live when the global pandemic was at its worse. Indeed, it was open. People could move about freely without being largely kept to their local government areas, which was the case in Sydney and other capital cities. They're still suffering PTSD from the lockdowns in Melbourne, quite frankly. And Western Australia just shut itself off from the rest of the country.

But we addressed the global pandemic very, very well. I pay credit to the then Prime Minister and member for Cook, Scott Morrison, and the then Treasurer and former member for Kooyong, Josh Frydenberg, for what they did to keep this country safe and people in jobs and even alive in those terrible times.

As I say, paid parental leave is important. It's a necessary and good part of modern living, to the point where parents can go out and work—and not just women. It is a whole new world in which we live, and we want to encourage women and men to be able to have a good work-life balance and to be paid paid parental leave. But we also want to make sure that we encourage businesses to be able to afford to offer every right workplace condition in this day and age. What we don't want to see is businesses particularly not employing women as a result of any onerous thing that is put in place, because we want to encourage women in the workforce. I was proud of the fact that, while we were in government, the incentives we put in place led to a number of women in employment, and that is fantastic. There was a record number of jobs for women who were mothers and men who were fathers. We want to support this paid parental leave amendment bill. We want to support the provisions within it, but I very much support the amendments put forward by the member for Deakin.

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