Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We have buckets of research about the benefits of paid parental leave. Very robust, solid longitudinal studies tell us about the broad range of benefits of best practice parental leave schemes both in Australia and around the world. There are huge benefits for babies, very significant benefits for the life chances of children and enormous benefits to mothers. It assists breastfeeding. It's also very clear that the benefits are there for labour supply and the economy. Australia is a very rich country. We choose to spend public money on submarines—$368 billion. We choose to spend billions on subsidies for fossil fuel companies and tax cuts for the rich. We can choose to support parents, particularly mothers, who often end up taking the biggest financial hit when they raise a child. We can afford to have Rolls-Royce standard paid parental leave in this country.

The Greens are proposing a government paid parental leave scheme of 52 weeks at minimum wage, with employers to top the scheme up to match full-wage replacement. To fall short of this puts new parents in a financially difficult position. It lets down our working families, it ignores the distribution of inadequate and unfairly distributed parental care on families, and it disadvantages women. It's a big engine in the war against inequality, and we need to deal with it.

I chaired the Select Committee on Work and Care, where we heard definitive evidence from stakeholders about the consequences of our inadequate Paid Parental Leave scheme. Our existing scheme promotes and entrenches prevailing stereotypic gender roles: mothers as primary carers; fathers as primary earners. Women account for 88 per cent of all primary carers taking leave, and men only account for 12 per cent. Less than 50 per cent of the largest employers in Australia offer any paid parental leave. We are really dragging the chain here. There's a huge gender division in the distribution of paid and unpaid work in our economy, which necessarily undermines equality between men and women. Caring patterns are established in the first year of a child's life, and they persist over that life, so the underutilisation of parental leave amongst fathers bakes in the gender division of labour in households for years to come.

The skewed distribution of care work leads to reduced women's workforce participation, and time out of the workforce hinders women's career progression, contributing to the dominance of men in more senior roles and the concentration of women in low-paid, part-time and insecure work, and we've seen very extensive evidence of that gender pay gap this week in our public discussion about the gender pay gap. It's so wide in so many of Australia's workplaces and is partly explained by inadequate supports for working carers, most of whom are women.

Labour market segregation and the gendered distribution of care work in Australian households are key factors driving that gender pay gap and the superannuation gap in Australia. The government were patting themselves on the back last week for a gender pay gap of 12 per cent—the lowest on record—occurring on their watch, relating specifically to full-time ordinary earnings, but we should not be celebrating. Let's not forget that the gender pay gap is calculated using just those full-time wages and that part-time wages data is way wider—still 19 per cent. That means that, on average, women are earning over $18,000 less per year than men. Over a whole working life, this is equivalent to women earning $1 million less. The inadequacies of Australia's current paid parental leave system are part of what's behind the problem of this inequity, which we must deal with.

The release of WGEA's gender wage gap data that we saw this week revealed the economywide scale and significance of this problem. Transparency has shed an important light on economic and seniority disparities for women in some of the biggest companies in Australia. The construction, professional services and banking industries recorded some of the worst gender pay gaps, and some in the consulting industry—an industry I'm currently looking at through various inquiries—unsurprisingly have much higher gaps than the average. McKinsey has a median gap between men and women for total pay of 38 per cent, and Boston Consulting Group's gap is 35 per cent, while Bain's is 31 per cent. This is shameful. It's shameful that these companies, which do business with our public sector and receive contracts, are the places where these gaps are unacceptably wide.

After decades of talk about what needs to be done, the action is insufficient. The big four are not amongst the worst offenders, but that is explained in part by the fact that we don't have a total workforce assessment of the gender pay gap in the big four. Partners are not employees. They're very highly paid and they're disproportionately men, and that will shift those figures when we get an overall picture, which we must have. We need the full picture of what's going on in those big four. They've got thousands of partners earning very big dollars, and we need to have a much more forensic examination.

The Greens are calling for business structures to be required to report their data on pay gaps between men and women to illuminate that gap and also to look at the impact of paid parental leave changes. Women deserve fairer paid parental leave. It improves their economic security. It reduces the gender pay gap and increases the likelihood that mothers will return to work after having children. The community sector has long been calling for an expansion of paid parental leave. Delivering a fairer scheme is a no-brainer that benefits everyone: parents, children and the economy.

We know this is possible because lots of countries are already doing it. Countries, including Finland, Germany, Norway, Iceland and many countries around the world, have more equitable and effective paid parental leave schemes. Norway has 49 weeks of parental leave—15 weeks exclusively for one carer and another 15 weeks exclusively for the other, with the remaining 16 weeks to be shared. The experience in other countries puts beyond doubt that more equitable parenting leave, coupled with free child care of high quality, improves women's workforce participation and helps shape the long-term sharing of care work, with really important positive outcomes for our kids.

Another important lesson from international paid parental leave schemes is the importance of reserving a component on a 'use it or lose it' basis for the second carer. We've seen time and again in Scandinavian countries how this provision causes a huge jump in the number of those second parents taking leave and, then, in consequence, over the life of those young kids, a fairer sharing of the care in those households. This is sustained for more than a decade after that experience of being the parent, usually the father, at home, really seeing what it's like to care and building close, strong relationships with those little kids. The reintroduction of a 'use it or lose it' provision in this bill to encourage shared parenting is a very welcome change. We heard powerful evidence in the Select Committee on Work and Care, which I chaired, about the importance of doing things better. Where there is a more equitable take-up of parental leave, women have better paid employment outcomes and children receive better support in the earliest stages of life. It's win-win-win. This is not to mention the improved maternal health and the quality of parental relationships during a time when these things are often strained.

Research from Parenthood found that, if we legislated 12 months of paid parental leave at full pay, with a significant portion of it shared, this would lead to a GDP increase of $116 billion, or 2.9 per cent, by 2025, largely due to the higher rates of female participation and productivity that would result from spending less time out of the labour market. It would also result in an increase in breastfeeding rates of 4.6 per cent and associated long-term increases in labour productivity. Some will point to the cost of delivering adequate paid parental leave, but they ignore that return on investment, and underinvestment in care means labour shortages, gender inequality and more stress for workers, especially for women. We know that if Australian men had babies we would have Rolls-Royce paid parental leave, and the budget would be no hindrance.

Last year, even the government's own Women's Economic Equality Taskforce recommended expanding paid parental leave to 52 weeks and paying superannuation on paid parental leave—and isn't that overdue? That must be in the next budget. They also recommended eventually paying paid parental leave at a replacement wage. The ACTU supports finding that pathway to 52 weeks, and so many community organisations also support it. The Greens will continue to call for reforms that expand support for new parents and address the gender inequity of current childcare patterns in Australia. We are fighting for government paid parental leave to be expanded to 52 weeks, giving parents that full year together between them to nurture and provide for the needs of their kids. We're calling on businesses to top up the government's scheme to bring the rate of pay up to the full replacement rate and for it to be mandatory for superannuation to be paid during parental leave.

This will bring us up to the global standard. It'll deliver justice for parents, better outcomes for our economy and a better start for our kids. We're a wealthy country. We can afford to look after mothers, parents and our kids well, and we can afford to get the administrative mechanisms of paid parental leave right. Forty-one per cent of Australian workers work in small business. It is important that they not be encumbered with new administrative responsibilities at the very moment when their families are under the greatest stress and pressure. There is so much administration you have to deal with when you have a baby. There is so much change in your life. We need small businesses to be part of this system for the continuity of employment and the payment of wages to those workers so that they can be confident of a connection to their employer and their boss and so that their boss can be confident of a connection to them. We need to increase the length of leave, we need to make sure it's administratively sensible, and we need to have it work for the kids of the future.