Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bonner very much for her question. As she knows, last Thursday legislation was passed through this parliament to deliver Australia’s first paid parental leave scheme. Australian families have been waiting decades for paid parental leave, and the wait is now finally over. It is this government that will deliver paid parental leave to Australian families on 1 January next year. Our scheme is going to be fair to families and fair to business, and it will be low-income women in particular who will be the biggest winners. These are the women who are working as cashiers, working as hairdressers or working as food attendants, all of them most unlikely to have had paid parental leave in the past.

Many of these women also work in regional areas of Australia, and they will now get paid parental leave for the first time. Our scheme is fair to those working mums in regional areas who are going to get the same level of paid parental leave as the high-income earners in the city. Of course, we know that for 12 years those opposite refused to deliver paid parental leave, and this Leader of the Opposition said that paid parental leave would happen over his dead body. I just have to let the Leader of the Opposition know that it is finally happening, and someone had better call the undertaker!

The Leader of the Opposition is now saying that he is in favour of paid parental leave, and he has dreamt up a new scheme. But this scheme that he has recently dreamt up is going to deliver a triple whammy, especially in regional Australia. He is going to deliver a new tax that is going to hurt business in regional Australia, there are going to be higher grocery prices for families in regional Australia and he is also going to deliver an unfair scheme that will see higher income earners in the city get up to $75,000 as a part of his scheme.

We have recently discovered that the Nationals were not consulted when the opposition leader decided on this new scheme. This is what the Leader of the National Party, Mr Truss, had to say just last week:

We’ve expressed some reservations about elements of the scheme. We have expressed some concerns about the size of some of the payments.

Others, like Nationals senator Fiona Nash, have been even more forthcoming. She has been out there, sighted in a Win News package that was played all around regional Australia on Friday, welcoming the government’s scheme and its benefits for regional Australians and regional families. So we see more and more cracks emerging in this so-called coalition. On paid parental leave we see the Nationals walking away from the Leader of the Opposition. They know, just like families know, that this Leader of the Opposition cannot be trusted on paid parental leave. It is only this government that can deliver paid parental leave to the families in Australia.