James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the second reading of the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (More Support for Working Families) Bill 2023. As our lead speaker, Mr Sukkar, has pointed out, we, the coalition, have an amendment here because we have some small business concerns, but obviously, in principle, we strongly support an expansion of paid parental leave. In fact, it's worth noting that we attempted to introduce a 26-week paid parental leave scheme—a scheme that we took to the 2010 and 2013 elections. We, of course, won the 2013 election, but we weren't in a position to implement that paid parental leave scheme, which would have gone up to $150,000 of paid leave for the 26-week period. That, of course, was vehemently opposed by those opposite—including by the Greens, not in the chamber at the moment. So we're pleased to see this development and we're pleased to support it in principle.

Obviously, the coalition is very much a party that wants to look for all sorts of opportunities to make it easier to get the work-life balance right, to support people starting or expanding families and to have as limited an impact as possible on the careers and incomes of the average household because of that.

It's certainly a different world to decades gone by, when we had very stereotyped attitudes and, therefore, very stereotyped policies when it came to the way in which families were expected—virtually required, because of the systems and attitudes of the past—to structure the family unit in a very specific way. I'm very grateful that those days, those years and those decades, if not centuries—even millennia—are well and truly behind us and that we're now in a modern era where we strongly support parents having the decision-making process well in their hands to start a family or expand a family and also to support their career and have the legislated protections and entitlements that they should have to fairly and reasonably expect to not have to sacrifice one for the other.

Obviously, an increase to 26 weeks simply improves even further the support that should be in place. It has clearly got the flexibility that it should have amongst parents et cetera, and people make their own individual decisions when they have children about how they wish to balance and/or structure their leave from the workforce. We know that there are other very important provisions in the Fair Work Act and in our industrial relations system to guarantee leave rights when it comes to leave for maternity purposes and for parental purposes—we now use that more appropriate term. Increasing to 26 weeks is an extension of the important support that should be in place.

But we do have concerns about the burden that the government—not the people accessing the leave—mandates upon business, particularly small business, and that is the crux of what we are seeking to have addressed through the amendments to this legislation that we foreshadowed. As it stands, there is a burden, a requirement, on business to administer a scheme that very much should be administered by the government department, much like any other government payment system is administered. We hear these concepts or arguments that a connection is maintained between an employer and an employee if the employer has the burden of administering the government's payment of the paid parental leave instead of the government. I think this is a complete nonsense.

Firstly, I think that, in the modern world, there are very good enduring connections between an employer and employee, remembering, of course, that this is a circumstance where someone is taking leave from a role that they will be returning to. So there are very simple, straightforward and obvious connections that are maintained between an employer and an employee. The connection that we're told is vitally important here is an administrative, processing and transactional requirement of a business to put money into someone's bank account. The suggestion that that is some kind of enhanced connection and interaction between their employer and them, as an employee, while they are on leave is patently ridiculous.

But what we also know and what we hear from many of the industry groups that represent small business—because we think it's small business that need to have this burden lifted from them and removed from them—is that large companies with big payroll departments are fine. They probably don't really need any dramatic additional resources to undertake the processing of paid parental leave transactions when they've got a payroll department and a complex payroll system. These are not overly consequential additional payroll department burdens for a large company with all that capacity that's largely in place to administer a scheme like this without undue additional burden.

But smaller businesses, businesses of less than 20 employees, would absolutely have to—and we hear very good examples from the consultation very directly that they indeed do, beyond question—have all these additional burdens on what can be very small resourcing towards payroll. If you're a small business with a few employees, you don't have any form of permanent, full-time payroll capability. These days we all know that software systems can provide a lot of assistance, but nonetheless, when it comes to payroll and the obligations on a business, there's a risk of significant penalties if they don't get it right—things like making sure they're paying the appropriate amount of super under the superannuation guarantee. Of course, when businesses have a legal burden on them that they need to comply with, they make sure that they do, but they also incur a cost in doing so. In the case of paid parental leave, we have an enormous government department with responsibility for the scheme. Why can't we have that department administering and transacting the scheme directly with the person receiving the government entitlement, rather than involving the small business that the person works for, putting the burden on them to administer the scheme?

It's very difficult to do business. There's a lot of stress and a lot of risk. We on this side of the House champion the people that go out there and take a risk to start a business. We have nothing against people who have jobs, which includes everyone in this chamber, but we particularly love the people who create new jobs in our economy. We want those news jobs to be coming from new businesses. We want to support the creation of new businesses and we want to support small businesses becoming medium-sized businesses or big businesses. We want a big, thriving private sector, and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to run their businesses.

As a parliament, we have an opportunity to do something to achieve a worthy goal that we should all have: helping people who are out there taking a risk to grow our economy and paying the taxes that governments like ours spend. Supporting these amendments is something we could do to make a positive change, reducing an administrative burden on businesses so they have one less thing to worry about. The arguments against that seem pretty weak, compared to the argument for it, which is helping businesses focus on running and growing their business for our economy.

We urge the government to look favourably upon these sensible suggestions. If they're not comfortable with relying solely on our arguments and word, they can simply look at the industry groups that represent the small businesses that are calling for this. Take them at face value and start saying, 'We want to help businesses and take an unnecessary burden of government off them wherever we have the opportunity to do so.' It's not an overly significant request for businesses to ask the government to administer its own scheme. That's not an unreasonable ask of the small-business community, given the enormity that is the Commonwealth Government of Australia.

We hope that the government will look favourably upon the amendments. I certainly support them. I would like to see this bill pass through the House expeditiously—hopefully in amended form—because it's a very important opportunity to support people. As I've outlined, we support the Paid Parental Leave scheme but there's a way to make it better, and I commend that improved version to the House.

See this speech in context