Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the Australian Greens to speak on the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Flexibility Measures) Bill 2020. I note at the outset that we will be supporting this bill, although we have amendments which we think would further address pressing issues and we will be supporting amendments from others on the crossbench.

We here in the Greens have always been strong proponents of a just and equal paid parental leave scheme. A strong parental leave scheme would reduce the gender wage gap and it would support long-term economic security for women. It would encourage shared care of children between parents, it would increase the number of women returning to the workforce and it would allow for positive health, wellbeing and bonding between parents and children. This bill provides additional flexibility in how and when leave can be taken, and allows families more options when they're making decisions about how to balance work and parental responsibilities. We support that.

However, so much more needs to be done to facilitate gender equality, to value the currently unpaid care work that is, sadly, still performed disproportionately by women and to maximise the flexibility that parents have to determine the care arrangements for their children. We will be supporting amendments proposed by Centre Alliance which address one aspect of the gendered nature of this issue, which I will discuss shortly, but we'll also be proposing amendments in the committee stage to ensure that parents who have lost work or who have had their hours reduced and are not otherwise eligible for JobKeeper because of COVID-19 are protected. So I'm pleased to hear that Labor will be supporting those amendments. I understand many on the cross bench will also, so we will wait and see whether the government sees reason on this matter.

Raising a family is not cheap. Many families have done their calculations for their household budget based on how they can stretch it to accommodate one or both parents taking leave based on what they know they're entitled to under the paid parental leave scheme. Now, as folk probably know, to be eligible for the paid parental leave scheme a person has to satisfy a work test, demonstrating that they've worked 10 of the last 13 months prior to the birth or adoption of a child and at least 330 hours in that period. The government moved to ensure that a period on JobKeeper would count towards that work test, and that was a very welcome move which we acknowledge, but there are large numbers of families who've lost their job or had their hours reduced as a result of COVID and who are not eligible for JobKeeper. In addition to the immediate economic impacts of being stood down or having hours cut, for families expecting a baby this loss may make them ineligible for paid parental leave or what's called dad and partner pay. When they're doing their various difficult calculations about how to make ends meet once the baby arrives, these families can find themselves as much as $14,812 worse off than they'd expected to be.

Our amendments seek to give security to those families. The amendments would allow the work test to be amended where an otherwise eligible parent has lost their job or had their hours reduced as a direct result of an emergency circumstance, which we declare to include COVID-19. It would then also give the government the power to declare emergencies in the event of a future pandemic or natural disaster that that person retains their eligibility for paid parental leave. In effect, it means that if you're not eligible for JobKeeper, which would otherwise keep your PPL eligibility through no fault of your own because of COVID, you should still have your PPL eligibility asserted and recognised, and that support which you had every reason to expect and probably banked on and budgeted four should still flow to you. There are already arrangements in place for a similar situation when an employer goes bust, so those similar sorts of administrative arrangements could be utilised in this instance. These amendments are limited to parents who would have been eligible prior to COVID-19, so there are no budget implications for the PPL scheme, and it seeks to provide parents with the support that they had legitimately expected to receive before the pandemic, which of course is a situation entirely outside their control.

I want to move now to some amendments proposed by the crossbench when the Senate community affairs committee reviewed this bill. Senator Siewert highlighted that the current act discriminates against families where the mother earns more than her partner. Paid parental leave is available where a birth mother's income is less than $150,000, irrespective of her partner's income, but paid parental leave entitlements can be transferred to a partner whose income is less than $150,000. In practice, this means that where a mother earns, for example, $55,000 and her partner earns $155,000, that family will be eligible, but, in contrast, if it's the mother who's earning $155,000 and the partner earning $55,000, that family is not eligible for paid parental leave. As a family, their collective income is the same, but their options to navigate parental leave and shared care arrangements are very different. It shouldn't be that way, so we support the amendments proposed by Centre Alliance to remove that discrepancy.

This bill is a positive step in giving families more flexibility to balance their work and home life and to make arrangements that work for them and their circumstances, but so much more needs to be done. On the payment rate, Australia's paid parental leave rate is one of the lowest in the OECD. For many parents, the rate of parental leave payments is well below their normal wage, forcing difficult decisions about how long they can afford to take leave for. Ideally, paid parental leave should serve as a fair wage replacement for the duration of the leave up to a reasonable cap. The World Health Organization has consistently recommended that paid parental leave be extended to six months. We agree. It's essential that parents have financial support during this critical period of childhood development.

In terms of the gender balance of the care, supporting parents should also be given at least four weeks leave and workplaces should implement flexible arrangements and actively encourage fathers to take leave. In Australia, sadly, fewer than five per cent of new dads take parental leave beyond the two weeks of dad and partner pay on top of their annual leave. There was a survey that the Human Rights Commission did in 2014 which found that three-quarters of male partners would have liked to have taken additional leave following the birth of their child, but they resisted doing so, because of gender norms, a loss of income and, sadly, a lack of other male role models taking extended parental leave. So, as a first step towards addressing those gendered stereotypes, dad and partner payments, as they're currently called, could be renamed to 'supporting parent payments'. Australia should also look to examples overseas of initiatives that have been implemented to improve the uptake of leave by fathers. Iceland, Sweden, Portugal and Norway have policies that have meant that about 40 per cent of fathers are making extended use of paid parental leave schemes. This is a positive step that Australia should be examining.

Of course, on superannuation, in 2016, the Senate inquiry into economic security for women—which I was part of—recommended that the superannuation guarantee be extended to paid parental leave. It's not rocket science: you just put super on PPL payments. At the time, the government 'noted' the recommendation, and I believe various members of the government supported that suggestion at the time, but there hasn't been any action to address that. Now, recent data from Industry Super Australia shows that the average 25-year-old woman in Australia has 9.1 per cent less in her super balance than her male counterpart, but, by the time she turns 39, that gap has already grown to 24.6 per cent. And I'm sure we all know the figures at the end of someone's working life: on average, a woman has a superannuation balance of about half that of her male counterpart. A huge contributor to this discrepancy and this inequitable disparity is the periods of parental leave that are taken predominantly by women during these periods. A number of submissions to the federal government's Retirement Income Review by banks, state governments, unions, and various women's groups and other representative bodies have likewise called for super to be paid on paid parental leave payments. It is not good enough for the government to simply 'note' those recommendations. It is time to finally act on them. We need to pay super on PPL and help tackle the disproportionate gendered impacts on people's super balances at the end of their working lives.

Last is childcare, which is slightly topical at the minute, isn't it? Lack of access to affordable and flexible childcare remains, as I hope everybody knows, one of the biggest barriers to female workforce participation. Of course it's predominantly women, sadly, that this affects. The importance of childcare has been highlighted time and time again during the current COVID crisis. The Greens firmly believe that any parental leave scheme must be supported by free, universal childcare which gives parents the flexibility to return to work in a way that works best for their family and in a way which, of course, provides early childhood education to their little ones. But instead we see that the free childcare which many, many parents have been enjoying in these last few months is going to be ended on 12 July. And, of course, JobKeeper for childcare workers—incidentally, 90 per cent of whom are women—is likewise going to be ended early. Of all the industries being singled out to make changes for JobKeeper, you would not pick the childcare workers, who are not only deserving in the work they do but facilitating so many other parents to return to work. It makes absolutely no sense that this government is now adversely targeting the childcare sector.

Whilst we're talking about economic stimulus, we see that, so far, proposals for the economic recovery from the global pandemic are for male-dominated industries. Even though we know that 55 per cent of people who've lost their jobs during this pandemic have been women, there's still no plan for women. There's still no plan to address how women are going to be supported back into the workforce. And, in fact, cutting free childcare and changing the JobKeeper rules for childcare workers will further limit women's participation in the paid workforce. So the 1950s called, and they want their Prime Minister back.

The Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Flexibility Measures) Bill 2020 is at least a positive move, which we support. But, as I've outlined, there are so many more very simple, very equitable measures which could be taken by this government, and the women of Australia beg you to do so.