Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I will just respond to Senator Fielding’s argument. Clearly the government does not support his proposition, because fundamentally we are introducing a parental leave scheme. It is a scheme designed to provide parental leave for those in the workforce. I will come to some broader points in a moment, but Senator Fielding says we should amend it to be something other than that. He makes an argument about the relativity between those in the workforce and those outside the workforce when they are about to have a child. I will come to those comparable issues. That is a reasonable point to make in terms of a public policy debate about how various persons are treated under broad public policy, but this is a debate about a parental leave scheme and fundamentally Senator Fielding’s amendments undermine the whole objective of the bill and the parental leave scheme.

The scheme is designed to provide financial support to parents in the paid workforce so they can take sufficient time off work for the exclusive care of children while in the longer term helping to maintain and further encourage women’s labour force attachment. We think it is good for families, good for business and good for the economy. Most women participate in the labour force and most women want to maintain that attachment. Industry groups and others have been very supportive of us introducing the scheme. It is about achieving better outcomes for parents in the paid workforce but does not skew assistance to working mothers at the expense of non-working mothers. I think Senator Fielding looks to use an emotive argument but, as I said, if you look at the scheme you will see it is about parental leave. It is about achieving that objective—for the first time providing the right to parental leave for those in the workforce. That is what this legislation is about. Senator Fielding’s amendments seek to undermine that. He seeks to undermine that on the basis of a comparison about how persons not in the workforce are treated. I would therefore urge him, if he wants to run that argument, to look at the totality of how those persons are treated. Their treatment is not solely contained in this bill. Families who are not in the workforce are entitled to FTBB. So their package of social support is not just the parental leave system but also family tax benefit B. To be fair, if Senator Fielding wants to make a comparison, he has to put in the whole package. It is not what this bill is about.

I would argue that fundamentally Senator Fielding’s amendments seek to undermine the whole purpose of the bill, but the argument he uses to do that is not sustainable. It is based on an argument that women outside the workforce are worse off, and that is just not true. If you take into account their family tax benefit B, in totality they will receive more assistance on average than those women who are in the workforce, because this financial year an eligible mother who has not worked prior to the birth of a baby will receive the $5,185 tax-free baby bonus and up to $3,829 in tax-free FTBB—a total of $9,014 in government support free of tax. A mother receiving the taxable PPL, paid parental leave, will obtain the equivalent of the baby bonus and an average net additional gain of $2,000. If the mother has income over $23,800 she will not receive any FTBB.

So the argument that Senator Fielding makes fundamentally undermines the whole objective of the bill and seeks to introduce wider issues. But his argument in support of the wider issues is not true. It is just not true. The total assistance for those families comes from other measures in addition to this bill. While you have to look at each individual circumstance to work out what each family or woman might get out of the system—depending on when they were working, how long they have been off work, their family income and all those things—the fundamental argument Senator Fielding seeks to advance ignores the FTBB arrangements. That is just not right. If you are talking about total financial assistance to a woman for the care of a child and the taxpayer support for that, you have to look at the whole package. On average, non-working women will get more support than those who are in the workforce.

This bill is about achieving what this parliament has supported in theory for many years but which no-one has ever done—that is, introduce paid parental leave. That is something that has been established in most Western democracies for many years and has been highly successful as a means of supporting particularly women but parents more generally and supporting good connection to the workforce while allowing people time to care for their child. It is a family-friendly measure. It is a family supporting measure. But, as I say, the argument that somehow non-working mothers will receive less support from the government is not right.