Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise today to speak on the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (More Support for Working Families) Bill. The Community Affairs Legislation Committee, which I chair, completed our inquiry into this bill in recent weeks. On behalf of all the members of the committee—and I acknowledge those here today and who have already spoken on this bill—I want to thank the witnesses who contributed to our inquiry and all those who made submissions in support of our work.

Paid parental leave is the proudest of Labor legacies. It was introduced by the Gillard government in 2011. I was working in this building when it was brought in, and I saw firsthand the impact this scheme had, not just on the women who would be immediately able to access it but on young women, like myself at the time, who, because of paid parental leave, were able to recalibrate their career trajectories, rethink the industries that they could work in and relook at the pathways they could take because this important pathway would be in place. For women in low-paid or insecure work especially, it has been transformational. It was and remains a policy reform which made history in this country for mothers and fathers, for their children and for their employees. It is a truly game-changing Labor reform.

In the decade since we brought that in, paid parental leave lay neglected until the first tranche of our paid parental leave reforms was legislated at the start of last year. Those changes gave more families access to the payment and more flexibility in how they could take leave and encouraged the sharing of care—critical reforms that worked to change culture and change the support available for both mum and dad in those critical early months.

Now, with this bill, we get to go even further in this massive journey of reform. Here, we are laying the pathway for our expansion of paid parental leave to 26 weeks—an investment of half a billion dollars to the scheme by 2026, representing the largest investment in paid parental leave since its introduction in 2011. This bill encourages fathers and partners to play a more active role in the care of children, a role they want to take. It supports the maternal health of mothers, and it supports the health of their babies. It supports women's workforce participation. It reflects our commitment to improve the lives of working families, to support better outcomes for children and to advance economic equality for women. As I said before, this bill expands the paid parental leave pay maximum entitlement from 20 weeks to 26 weeks by 1 July 2026. Reflecting the advice of the Women's Economic Equality Taskforce, it increases the reserved 'use it or lose it' period for each parent from two weeks to four weeks by 1 July 2026 and increases the concurrency limit from two weeks to four weeks by 1 July 2025.

These reforms are critical—critical for families, critical for women, critical for fathers and critical for our economy. This expansion will provide additional support to families and additional support to mums after childbirth, supporting them and their children's wellbeing while also encouraging dads and their partners to take more leave to spend more time in those crucial and critical early weeks, not just for that child but for that family and for their partner as well. I know that these changes will make a tremendous difference to families in my home state of South Australia as they make all those judgements and all those decisions about their little ones' lives—how much time they can spend at home, what that first year looks like for their families, what those few weeks and months in those early days look like for their families, how much time they can spend together as a family, and how much support they can offer each other. Nationally, over 180,000 families will benefit from these changes.

I cannot overemphasise how much this means. As we all know, parenthood is a wonderful, beautiful, miraculous, life-changing gift. It is the joy, meaning and purpose of my life, as it is for any parent. But that doesn't mean it's easy for either mum or dad. And, crucially, in the weeks and months after the birth of a child, it can be incredibly hard. Many mothers have said to me that it's harder than the birth itself, and I would share that view. The need for care and support doesn't stop when a woman leaves the birthing suite, especially for those women who have experienced loss, trauma or the mental and health impacts that we know can come with bringing a new child into the world. Those needs can be acute, and the right supports are essential to have a healthy mother, a healthy child and a healthy family.

That's why it matters so much to make sure that women have the space, the time and the financial support to have those early weeks and months with their children. But that's also why it matters that we do everything we can to change the culture to encourage more dads to be involved and present. It's not just a baby who needs caring for in those first few weeks and months; often it's mum, and it's also often dad. This is as much about the mental health, the physical health and the wellbeing of children and families as it is about economic participation. It truly is going to make a massive difference in the lives of South Australian families.

As we debate this bill in the chamber, I want to draw the attention of my colleagues to what our inquiry found. The participants who submitted to our inquiry all broadly supported and welcomed the intent of this bill to expand paid parental leave. We know that in Australia women have similar levels of labour force participation to men until they have children. And then what happens? Collectively, women fall behind. They never catch up. As a committee, we heard from many submitters on the importance and urgency of parental leave reforms, particularly when it comes to women's workforce participation and gender equality. While the reforms received widespread support from submitters to the inquiry, the committee did hear suggestions to go further, and I acknowledge those suggestions. I want to emphasise that we are on a pathway of reform that started a decade ago that was massive and nation changing. There are reforms in front of us that are nation changing too. I want our ambition to remain high here, as I do across the spectrum of women's health, maternal health and women's economic participation.

It is really important to acknowledge and reflect on the fact that this scheme is designed as a minimum entitlement. It's meant to complement employer provided leave. We want to change the system. This is part of that. We want more employers jumping in here, providing extra support where they can, because there's a benefit for them. There's an acute benefit for them if they provide generous schemes which allow them to retain their exceptional female talent and bring them back into the workforce in a well-supported way. That is a critical component of it. It's also really important that business remains involved in the administration of the scheme. This is the part of the scheme I think it is important to preserve. Particularly, Services Australia should continue the role it's playing and small businesses should continue the role that they are playing. This bill doesn't change the role of an employer in administering the scheme.

The majority of submitters who commented on the administration of the scheme argued that the employer's role in administering it should remain unchanged and that paid parental leave should continue to be administered by employers, including small businesses. We know that employers play an important role in the administration of this scheme. It was in fact a key part of its design. When it was designed, the Productivity Commission said at its inception, and I quote, 'It's to normalise parental leave in the workplace, like any other kind of leave that the worker will take in their working life—something that we're all entitled to and can all access if we need to.' We heard from submitters like the SDA, who noted that changing the role of employers directly contradicts the objectives that the payment be viewed as a workplace payment rather than a welfare payment. The Equality Rights Alliance also emphasised the importance of maintaining the current administration arrangement by specifying that shifting it:

… may undermine the goal of normalising PPL and encouraging employers to develop their own schemes … Administering PPL centrally through government could result in small and medium businesses viewing PPL as the business of government only.

That is something we do not want. The overall evidence to our committee demonstrated that any administrative burden on employers is outweighed by the substantial benefits to employees and employers alike. For small businesses, it enables them to compete on a more even playing field with medium and larger businesses. That's a fundamentally good thing if you're a small business in Australia.

We also heard that Services Australia provides a range of resources and support to help employers understand their obligations under the scheme. As a government, we want this to be easy for small businesses. We want this scheme to work for everyone. The work on that can continue in government. The work can continue as we legislate this bill, I hope, this week. But having that role for business in the administration of the scheme was part of its design, and it's part of what's going to make it work. It's part of what's going to lead to the broad cultural and societal economic changes we need to embed the idea that paid parental leave is valuable not just to the women and dads who take it and their children but for the economy and our productivity as a whole. We have to think about that in the design of the scheme. We have to think about that in the way we reform the scheme, because we're not just introducing new policy here, we're seeking to change behaviours and cultures which persist and pervade. I think it's a really important part of the scheme, which should stay.

I whole-heartedly commend this bill to the Senate. This is a significant reform, which will have an incredible impact on the lives of mums, dads and children in my state. It'll have a big impact on the way our economy and businesses in our community all work together to advance women's economic participation and to take care of each other and take care of our most precious Australians in those critical early weeks, months and years. I know what it meant to me as a young woman when this was put on the table in 2011—how it changed the way I thought about my future, how it changed the way I thought about my career, what I could do, what I could achieve, what my economic future and security looked like. It did that in 2011. It changed a generation of young women's approach to their workplace, careers and families. With this reform, we take that a step further. A whole new generation of women gets to reimagine that in a way which they haven't always been able to before.

We do these reforms; we spark change. Hopefully, by doing these reforms right, we change a broader culture, which will enable more to happen—more generous schemes across the private sector and more participation from dads in the early care of their babies and the early and critical care of their partners. I think they're tremendous reforms. They are part of a broader, critical package of work we must do not just to advance women's economic participation but also to support women's health objectives at that time of life, which, while beautiful, miraculous, and perfect as it may be, can also just be bloody, bloody tough. This will help them. This will make a difference there. And it's not just good for those women; it is good for their precious babies and their families. We know that when all of those things are working well—when women, their children and their partners feel supported—our whole country benefits from that. I commend the bills in their current form to this chamber.