Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Despite some requests after last night’s adjournment to go down the path again of household hints and after the urgency debate in the Senate, today I will focus on Tony Abbott’s wonderful social policy adventure. I certainly have no intention to become a regular commentator on household matters but this is a very important policy issue. It is important not only because of the issue itself but because this is the issue with which Tony Abbott has chosen to lead with his chin over and above all other serious national policy issues. He has chosen what I characterise as this wonderful social policy adventure because, when you look at the detail of it, as indeed did Senator Barnaby Joyce, it is very difficult to take seriously.

I thought Tony Abbott was keen to characterise himself as a deep social thinker, but I seriously doubt he has made any detailed examination of the Productivity Commission report in this matter because his position since his attempt to launch a policy position on International Women’s Day has flip-flopped all over the place. He seems not to comprehend the seriousness of this as a policy issue and the angst being generated by the public at large. Indeed, because of a couple of headlines today, I suspect the Greens also do not have a full sense of the concern being generated by the public at large.

Why has paid parental leave become the issue of the day? We were told by Julie Bishop that it was poll driven and that the Liberal Party had concerns about the results they were getting from women under the age of 45 about their support for the Liberal Party or their support for its leader. I was surprised when I heard that from Julie Bishop because the Liberal Party had been very keen to suggest that it was a Labor Party myth, that women were quite fond of Tony Abbott and that it was a myth to suggest that there were any concerns with polling support for the Liberal Party. Apart from the polls which seem to concern the Liberal Party, I thought it might be interesting to look at the polls about the support for the different paid parental leave schemes. One report from Essential Media, which was part of today’s clips, had the concerning headline that came out of, I suspect, some Green backgrounding, ‘Parental leave needs to be six months to pass’ and the article said:

An Essential Media poll released yesterday found 40 per cent of voters backed the government’s scheme and 24 per cent backed Mr Abbott’s. Another 27 per cent liked neither.

So, despite the high-profile attention that Mr Abbott has carried on this issue and the very, very bold scheme, he is attracting only 24 per cent support.

Opposition Senator:

That’s not bad.

Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The senator suggests, ‘That’s not bad.’ The question is: who might that 24 per cent be and what might really be the secret agenda here? We have heard from many areas and in many reports about Tony Abbott that he usually carries that secret agenda. In thinking about this today, I think I have found the answer. The public reticence in responding to this policy has hit the nail on the head. The public concern has highlighted this particular issue and their concerns about the equity of the scheme being proposed.

We heard from Senator Abetz today when he said that the tax should be on big business because they will be the ones who will ultimately see the benefits. As I walked past Senator Coonan’s office today I got a look for the first time at some information on this and the detail on her window did not say that it is going to be a temporary tax. I suspect that the real agenda is that the opposition will introduce this as a temporary levy. They will then allow big business, who generally have been the ones to start improving parental leave entitlements, to absorb what they are already paying so that they no longer pay that, and then they will translate it into a taxpayer funded scheme. This seems to be the real agenda.

When I thought about this further, I thought: could I possibly ever imagine Tony Abbott providing these policy principles into some other areas of social policy? So I thought of another example; personal leave, I think, was the best one. Could Tony Abbott ever propose in the future to shift employers’ costs of funding personal leave entitlements onto the taxpayer? If it is going to save employers and particularly big business, perhaps that is what he might propose. Certainly under the previous government they sought, in some instances, to allow businesses to shift their sick leave responsibilities onto the government. They sought to allow businesses to trade-off workers’ sick leave entitlements in their negotiations so that when they did actually fall sick and needed income support they had to fall back on social security.

When Tony Abbott talks to big business and says, ‘I really do think you’ve got to cop this tax,’ what is he going to say? Is he going to say, ‘Look you’ve just got to take it on the chin for me. You’ve got to support the Liberal Party because of all of these other issues,’ or is there really a secret agenda? Are the low-income, part-time working women whom I have dealt with through my career going to be funding those on significantly higher incomes through their tax? That is why 40 per cent of voters automatically know which scheme they support. They do not believe that the taxpayer should be funding these types of benefits for very-high-income earning people. One mother does not feel she should be getting only the minimum wage from the government as opposed to another mother who would be able to get $75,000 for her period of care. I am sorry, but that is a very hard argument to convince anyone of.

The other reason, of course, why most people do not accept this charade is the experience they have had with Work Choices and the opposition leader’s more recent proposals about what they do with unfair dismissal and with penalty rates. Let us use that as an example. Is Mr Abbott proposing that these new payments will incorporate shift allowances and penalty rates? Will the taxpayer fund those payments? We just do not know because there has been no detailed consideration of any of these issues. Even the opposition’s current material does not report the recent backflips.

I am going to be very interested to see what the most recent backflip will be in relation to workers’ existing entitlements. If workers had negotiated 12 weeks of paid parental leave in their enterprise agreements and made other offsets on a productivity basis and were then told, ‘No, taxpayers are going to pay that now and we don’t have to do it anymore,’ are workers going to have an opportunity to reclaim the hard-lost benefits they traded for these conditions? I do not think so. I do not think the opposition have thought about any of these matters. I think a very naive, ill-informed view about how you can progress on some of these social and industrial policy issues has been part of Tony Abbott’s wonderful social policy adventure.

The disquieting thing is that the Greens have gotten on board. We had, along with many other concerned women’s groups, gotten the opposition to the position of conceding that at the end of the day they would not leave ‘nothing’ and that on 1 January we would at least have the scheme that the government proposed. But, no, that is not good enough. Today, we have a different backflip. We have these headlines concerning people that parental leave needs to be six months or it will not pass. This is just completely irresponsible. I hope that the opposition has not joined with the Greens in this message. I hope that the Leader of the Opposition—indeed, also the spokesperson on the status of women—will reaffirm the comment he made late last week that at the end of the day we will have a scheme up and ready to operate from 1 July this year.