Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Like so many of my colleagues, I rise to support the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (More Support for Working Families) Bill 2023. The measures introduced are intended to bring more equity and flexibility to parental care roles, to increase workforce participation for women and to enhance the health and development of parents and children. I welcomed these changes when they were announced as part of the October 2022-23 budget, and I welcome them again today.

This bill creates a pathway to increase paid parental leave to 26 weeks by 2026. It also increases the number of weeks of paid leave reserved for each parent, so that, by 2026, each parent will have four weeks of use-it-or-lose-it leave. It also extends the eligibility for paid parental leave to include surrogacy arrangements. All these things are good things.

Adequate paid parental leave is essential if we want to support children and carers to get their best start in life and parenting. The month after a baby is born is pretty overwhelming. Paid parental leave gives essential time for birth parents to recover, bond with their baby and learn the new skills needed to parent, but adequate and fair paid parental leave is also essential if we want to give birth parents the best opportunity to continue to be part of our workforce and part of our economy. That means ensuring that partners also have an equitable share of paid parental leave. Chief Executive Women is an organisation that represents women leaders from corporate, public service, academic and not-for-profit sectors. In their submission on the bill, they said:

Paid Parental Leave (PPL) is not a form of welfare. It is a critical lever to enable parent's, particularly women's, workforce participation. It connects parents to the workplace and allows businesses to attract and retain exceptional talent.

The long and the short of it is: we need more partners taking more parental leave if we want more equity in the home and in the workplace. We need more dads doing more of the early primary-caring role. In Australia, despite 92 per cent of employers offering parental leave regardless of the gender of the parent, only 12 per cent of those who take up the offer of primary carer leave are men—only 12 per cent. A major factor, if not the major factor, for the gender pay gap is the unequal division of unpaid caring labour, which includes caring for children. The Australian Institute of Family Studies produced a report which shows that the average number of hours worked by fathers doesn't change significantly after the birth of a child but the number of hours a mother works falls by around two-thirds on average. This is one of the major drivers of the motherhood penalty, which is the 55 per cent reduction in women's earnings once they become mothers. This is not good for an equal society, not good for the economy and, really, not good for mums or for dads.

This is consistent with my own personal experience. I'd been earning a similar income to my husband before our first child. My employer offered decent maternity leave, but his only offered a week. So I took extended time off, returned to work part time and watched my earnings stagnate while his continued to grow. It made sense at the time, financially, but it had longer term consequences for me. Even though we had every intention of sharing the care of our children equally, structural differences embedded traditional gender roles.

The Parenthood, an organisation that represents more than 80,000 parents, carers and supporters nationally, has rightly said:

Ensuring that some paid parental leave is specifically available to dads represents a big step towards a more gender equal society where work and care can be more equitably shared.

This bill goes a small way to try to rectify this issue. In this bill, the reserved period for partners has been extended from 10 days to 20 days, which means that dads spend more time with babies. The likelihood that fathers will share care when their child is three years old is significantly higher if the father shared care in the first nine months after birth. Research by the Grattan Institute shows that shared paid parental leave boosts mothers' earnings and boosts our entire national GDP. Its modelling suggests that increasing the entitlement to 26 weeks, shared between parents, would cost the government some $600 million per year but would add $900 million to GDP per year as well as boost mothers' lifetime earnings by $30,000. Equity Economics has estimated that the cumulative impact of proposed changes to expand paid parental leave could increase GDP by 4.1 per cent, or some $166 billion, by 2050. If Australia could lift female participation in the workforce to that of men, it would increase GDP by 8.7 per cent, or some $353 billion, by 2050.

As many have said before me, I think that we can aim to do better—that we can make future changes to ensure paid parental leave is more equally divided between parents. I hope that this is only the first step and that there will be many more towards that end. But increased engagement by partners, or men, taking paid parental leave is not just about economic gain. Engaged fatherhood is linked to positive outcomes for children, such as higher school achievement, higher self-esteem, fewer behavioural problems and increased stress tolerance.

The organisations that have worked in this space for many years have innovative and forward-thinking ideas about how we can reduce the motherhood penalty. The Business Council of Australia says that a future paid parental leave system should embed design features that promote a more equitable distribution of care in the longer term. They want to see a system that enables and incentivises both parents to share responsibilities for caring, which will help shift traditional cultural and gender norms and see more women participating in the workforce and able to advance in their professions. The Parenthood advocates for a phased approach towards a 52-week paid parental leave scheme paid at a replacement wage rate equally shared between parents. I have also seen suggestions from KPMG for an equality supplement, where bonus paid parental leave weeks are provided if it can be shown that the responsibility for care is shared more equally. The Australian Centre for Future Work recommends extending the 'use it or lose it' component of paid parental leave to eight weeks and bringing parental leave pay up to a full replacement wage level or to the average wage. So many organisations advocate for paid parental leave to include superannuation so that the primary caregiver is not disadvantaged in retirement.

These are some great ideas, some important ideas, that should be considered carefully as the paid parental leave framework continues to evolve. I love this quote from the Productivity Commission:

If untapped women's workforce participation was a massive iron ore deposit, we would have governments falling over themselves to give subsidies to get it out of the ground.

In conclusion, I support this bill for the positive impact it will have children, families and women's workforce participation. I look forward to seeing more reform in this space and to seeing Australia working towards the paid parental leave standards we see in countries such as Sweden and Norway. I'm glad that, as a society, we're starting to recognise the inequality in parental leave and the long-term impact that extended leave can have not only on women and men but on our economy. I hope our sons and daughters and grandchildren will only know a reality where parents share the caregiving load and where all adults who wish to participate fully in the workforce can do so.

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