Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Pocock for the question and I acknowledge her deep expertise in this area. As the preamble to the question implied, this was discussed at the Jobs and Skills Summit. There is a lot of support for extending the paid parental leave system in Australia. Of course, it was a scheme that was put in place by a former Labor government, because it's Labor governments that do these big things and that answer these big policy challenges. Whilst I'm not here to announce any extension of the PPL scheme, as Minister for Women it's something that I am looking at closely, if and when we can make room in the budget for it. We're also dealing with significant deficits across the forward estimates. We have a trillion dollars of debt, which, as I said in my last question, is getting more costly to manage. There is no shortage of very good ideas that the government would like to fund if we had the capacity to do so.

Last week I announced the Women's Economic Equality Taskforce, chaired by Sam Mostyn, which has a fantastic group of 13 women. They will be providing advice to government, and I have no doubt that PPL and improvements to the PPL scheme will be a part of the work that they do. The former minister responsible for implementing the PPL scheme, Jenny Macklin, is also on that task force, and it came up at the first meeting. I think there is agreement about the fact that we need to improve our PPL scheme, but the budget is under real stress and I have to manage those challenges as well.