Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Employment (Senator Abetz) and the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) to questions without notice asked by Senators Moore and Cameron today relating to paid parental leave.

Today we heard again about the extraordinarily broad church that the government has, and the LNP, to allow individual members to make comment, to be concerned and to have different opinions. We heard that in great detail, particularly from Senator Abetz, when he went into detail about the numbers of times that he agreed with particular senators—in this case, Senator Macdonald—but actually made the case in a much wider area. An integral part of the way that the LNP operates is that individual members can disagree or agree on certain elements of policy and principle. The point that we are getting in consistent questions over the last couple of weeks is around the fact that individual members of the LNP have different views around the paid parental scheme, and many have made it very public through the media and through discussions in the community.

We asked questions of Senator Cormann about the AiG. If industry and business groups have been raising specific concerns about the proposed paid parental scheme, then a simple question that we asked—a very simple question—was: who then supports it? Who agrees with the paid parental scheme that we believe is going to be put before the Australian parliament? We have not seen it yet. We keep hearing about what is going to be in it, but we believe there is a proposal coming forward. In terms of today's straw poll, we had two brave hands come up, which I know cannot be recorded in Hansard. We asked a direct question and for once there was a direct answer from the government, which we seem to have some trouble getting through question time. Two brave senators raised their hands. One, of course—and we have to admire it—was Senator Boswell's. Actually, until this stage I had not heard of any great support of the Prime Minister's proposed paid parental scheme from Senator Boswell, but today we had it in this chamber. His hand was briefly raised to say that he is a strong supporter of the paid parental scheme.

The point, consistently, is that this is a proposal that has been talked about and, as Senator Cormann said today in parliament, has been taken to the people throughout two elections. It has been taken to the people but obviously not to all the members of the LNP caucus, because consistently within the LNP caucus there are people who are raising concerns about how it will work, about how much it is going to cost, about the timing—a whole range of issues about how this new paid parental scheme is going to work.

One of the problems of actually being involved in this discussion around paid parental leave for a very long time is that I remember the debates we had and I remember the Senate inquiry we had around paid parental leave schemes when we introduced the one that is active now. The paid parental scheme which we introduced as a government has recently had yet another one of the standard reviews which points out how many people in the community have received and worked with the current paid parental scheme. I remember considerable concerns being raised by members of the then opposition about how this particular payment should fit into the system. Senator Cormann today strongly questioned whether the scheme is a workplace scheme or a welfare scheme. There is no doubt in our minds that this paid parental scheme for working families, for fathers and for mothers, is a work entitlement. It is not a welfare payment. Yet seemingly one of the core aspects of the paid parental scheme being talked about now and into the future is the need to have the payment of this paid parental scheme through Centrelink. I have some issues there in terms of the logic of that argument.

Certainly the core aspect of the discussions we have been having is to find out who actually supports this scheme in the way it has been presented. We have had discussions with the community. We have had discussions around the areas of people who are currently using the scheme. We have even tried to get information out of the department around what work has been done, through the Senate estimates process. We did not have a lot of success in finding out exactly with whom these consultations have taken place. We are still unsure about the details of this scheme and the way it will operate. The amount of money is still under discussion. We believe $50,000 is now the cap. Nonetheless, our question remains. (Time expired)