Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This afternoon I'm pleased to place on record Labor's support for the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Flexibility Measures) Bill 2020. It was a Labor government that introduced Australia's first national paid parental leave scheme back in 2011. When we introduced the scheme, unfortunately Australia was one of only two OECD nations that did not have a national scheme of this kind, the United States being the one other nation.

The purpose of this scheme is, as we know, to provide financial support to primary carers of newborn and newly adopted children. We want in our nation to allow carers to take time off work to care for their children after birth or adoption, to enhance the health and development of birth mothers and children, to enable women to continue to participate in the workforce and to have continuity with the workforce, and to promote equality between men and women and the balance between work and family life.

We know how important it is to enable parents to give their children the very best possible start in life and to try to ensure that the decision to have a child does not come with an automatic and hefty personal and family economic cost. It's important that this scheme provides for two payments, both the Paid Parental Leave and the Dad and Partner Pay scheme. It is through Labor's Paid Parental Leave that we signal to employers of our nation that it is absolutely business as usual, that parents can and should take time out of the workforce to care for a child. We also know that in our nation the spread of paid and unpaid labour is still such that women end up doing more of this unpaid labour. Unfortunately this also means that their workforce participation drops and their super balances are lower, and it contributes to the gender pay gap that we still see in our nation's workforce.

I want to home in, in the context of this debate, on some specific flaws in the government's current approach to paid parental leave. In the context of COVID-19 we've seen women disproportionately losing their jobs as sectors have been rapidly but necessarily paused in the interest of public health. Women have been over-represented in forms of low-paid work and insecure work and are disproportionately affected—but not necessarily protected. They haven't had their incomes protected to the same extent as men through JobKeeper. This is unwelcome downward pressure on the participation rate of women in our nation's workforce. We depend, for our wealth and prosperity as a nation, on a higher participation of women in the workforce, particularly as we see our ageing workforce population beginning to retire. So, the trends of COVID push us in the opposite direction.

We know that the paid parental leave goes some way to enabling more women to participate in the workforce, and some way to addressing the gender pay gap, particularly for those on low and middle incomes who have less access to employer funded parental leave. Since 2011, we can see that the scheme now benefits nearly 150,000 parents each year. Nearly half of all mothers benefit from the paid parental leave scheme introduced by Labor. But, unfortunately, here in our nation it is still the case that women workers earn less than men, to the tune of about 14 per cent. Our nation's Treasurer seems to disagree, using question time just last September to suggest that the gender pay gap in our nation has closed. The Prime Minister has previously suggested at an International Women's Day breakfast that women should rise, but not at the expense of others. If the Prime Minister and the Treasurer were serious about closing the gender pay gap, they could have and should have opposed cuts to penalty rates, because it was well known that women—again—would disproportionately bear the brunt of those changes.

In 2019, Labor supported the government's changes to the eligibility rules for the scheme that extended access to the scheme for women who work in dangerous occupations usually occupied by men or who have irregular employment. Those changes took effect from 1 January, but it has to be said that the slow pace at which these changes came about has meant that too many Australian women and their families have missed out on the benefits of paid parental leave. In 2013, the Australian Jockeys Association publicly identified the access problem and called on the Abbott government to fix the legislation. They had to campaign for many years before this was fixed. We hope this change really will encourage women to consider careers in roles historically dominated by men.

One of the important objectives of this legislation today is to give working mothers and families the ability to split their paid parental leave entitlements into blocks of time over a two-year period, enabling periods of work in between. At the moment the scheme only allows paid parental leave to be taken as a continuous 18-week block within the first 12 months after the birth or adoption of a child, and then only when the primary carer has not returned to work since the birth or adoption of the child. Labor is pleased to see that this bill will change paid parental leave rules by splitting the 18 weeks of paid parental leave into a 12-week paid parental leave period and a six-week flexible paid parental leave period. The 12-week period will only be available as a continuous block but will be accessible by the primary carer at any time during the first 12 months, not only immediately after the birth or adoption of a child. The six-week flexible period will be available at any time during the first two years and does not need to be taken as a block. This is really important, because in practice it means families can split their entitlements over a two-year period, with periods of work in between, and, as with the current rules, the primary carer can be changed during this time. I know Australian families will appreciate this kind of flexibility.

It's most likely that the common use of increased flexibility will be parents returning to part-time work and spreading their flexible paid parental leave out over several months. As I highlighted before, we have very serious concerns about the current operation of this scheme under the impact of COVID-19, with the effect on thousands of families likely to be that they are up to $15,000 worse off. We know that women who've recently given birth are eligible to access the scheme, receiving payment of $740.60 per week for up to 18 weeks. But to get this entitlement they must satisfy the work test: they must have worked for 10 of the 13 months prior to the birth or adoption of a child and for at least 330 hours in that 10-month period. We note the importance of the fact that JobKeeper payments have enabled women to maintain that continuity, but many women who are otherwise expecting to be in continuous work—who have banked on and budgeted for paid parental leave—and who would be working for any other reason other than the impact of COVID-19, are now no longer eligible for paid parental leave.

The government has the power to fix this now. We are going to support the Greens amendments that are before the chamber today. But, importantly, we are going to move our own second reading amendment, and, on behalf of the opposition, I move that amendment now:

At the end of the motion, add:

", but the Senate:

(a) notes that the Government has allowed JobKeeper payments to satisfy the paid parental leave (PPL) work test; and

(b) calls on the Government to use the Minister for Families and Social Services’ regulation making power under coronavirus laws to enable women who have lost their job because of the coronavirus to access PPL, if they would otherwise have been eligible had they not lost their job".

The amendment calls on the government to make this fix now. It has the absolute power within the changes that Labor insisted on when we debated the JobKeeper legislation. The government has the flexibility to fix the PPL scheme under the JobKeeper legislation. There is a much more complicated way of fixing it, which is through the Greens amendment, but the key thing is that the government needs to get on and fix this problem. It is not a problem that affects just a handful of Australian families; nearly 180,000 parents received paid parental leave in the 2018-19 financial year. With these changes, the bill does not increase paid parental leave entitlements for Australian families. The changes in this legislation are modest. We hope they will allow more families to share parenting responsibilities in a way that works for them.

Whilst these changes are welcome, and we are very pleased about them, we want to ensure that these benefits go to all families that otherwise would have been eligible for paid parental leave before the impact of COVID-19. It's high time that the government fixed this. They've been able to fix it since the outset of bringing on this legislation—since the outset of the JobKeeper package, where they would have foreseen that there would be a significant number of families impacted by their ineligibility for paid parental leave because they no longer met the work test. The government has in its toolbox the ability to ensure families are not worse off, and it has no excuse for failing to step in.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.

Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of the Morrison government's Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Flexibility Measures) Bill 2020. It will provide more flexibility for Australian working mothers and fathers and their families to access paid parental leave at a really important time in a new child's life. Flexibility in this field is really important to help families, and it's something this government has in mind in every single one of its measures. Self-employed and working families in particular will benefit greatly from these measures. The bill aligns the incentives for working women to keep doing what they're doing to keep the economy going and to build a better future for themselves and for their families.

These amendments will allow the mothers of newborn or adopted children to use an initial 12-week period of paid parental leave before taking up the remaining entitlement of six weeks at any time over the course of two years following the birth or adoption of a child. At present, without this bill having been passed, the parent who takes paid parental leave has to take it in a block of 18 weeks. You can't tailor it to work part time, for instance, or take a block of time that is completely at home and then ease yourself back into work by picking up days on an increasing basis as you get closer towards the end of that 18 weeks worth of time. You can't decide to do occasional blocks of work or decide to do work here and there, either to keep your skills fresh and maintain professional registrations or, if you're self-employed or in small business, to keep relationships with clients alive and keep the work coming through the door. These changes will provide so much more flexibility to allow people to be able to adapt this period of paid parental leave to better fit with their working life.

Nobody's here to say that professional women are the most vulnerable in our community. Of course there are many women who need a hand. But one thing that professional women often say to me, particularly those who are self-employed or have small businesses of their own, is that the inflexibility of the existing arrangements for paid parental leave make it very difficult for them to maintain their businesses and take a period of time in which they are focusing on their family. So, by providing this flexibility, we can help to provide even more ways to improve women's workforce participation. That was one of the outcomes of the Women's Economic Security Package that was released in 2018. It's worth noting that in the pre-COVID period one of the accomplishments of this government was that women's workforce participation rate was at an all-time high. There's been a little slippage during the COVID period, but this government remains committed to doing everything it can to maximise women's ability to make these kinds of contributions to their families and to the broader economy.

These amendments are on top of the government's changes to the work test in the Paid Parental Leave Act in October last year which already made a number of improvements from that block-like status the bill had when it was initially implemented. Once this bill has been approved by parliament, though, as I hope that it will be, parents of children who are born on or after 1 July 2020 will be able to exercise this new and more flexible option. The remaining six weeks of leave will be able to be used flexibly at any time within two years of the date of birth or adoption of a child in blocks that are as small as a day at a time. It means that, should a woman or a parent decide to go back to work and even do a little work before they get to that 18-week period, they won't face the cut-off of the rest of their paid parental leave.

Nearly half of new mothers in Australia access paid parental leave and, of those, it's expected that about 4,000 will choose to adopt these more flexible arrangements. Time will tell, of course, once it's implemented, but it's expected that there will be a number of women in that category—in the order of 4,000. These changes support thousands of working women who cannot afford to leave their business for 18 consecutive weeks. When you're employed in arrangements where you can't, for reasons of project management or continuity for clients, take leave for a period of 18 consecutive weeks, these arrangements allow better collaboration between the demands of the business or the client and the needs of the family. It should be the case that we are willing to work together as parents, as employees, as business owners and as employers to try to make family life and work life gel together as best as is possible.

Currently, if a parent returns to work before they have received their full entitlement of parental leave pay, they just lose eligibility for the remainder of the payment. So I'm really delighted to see this proactive approach from the coalition in supporting expectant parents to do the very best they can, particularly those in small business and in self-employment. We know that lots of women choose to work in small business, particularly as small business owners or in self-employment, so that they can manage the flexible nature that they require for caring for their families. It'll ease the transition back into the workforce for primary care givers, and that is a really wonderful thing.

At the moment, to care for your newborn, taking 18 weeks off in a block is required if you wish to access the entirety of the payment. If you must take it all in one go, it can amount to a pretty significant blow to your ability to continue to provide the support that your business needs. It can really harm a self-employed person's ability to bounce back when they decide to come back to work full time. It's one of the biggest impediments for women in the profession from which I came—that is, for young women at the bar. If we want to see women rise to a position of being equally briefed and equally senior in the legal profession—in the bar—then this will make an enormous difference. I understand they're not the neediest people in our community by any stretch, but, if we want to see women rising to equal levels across the economy, that's just one example of a place where women will benefit greatly from having this flexibility. At the moment, they face the requirement to fully disengage from their business and then build it up from scratch again when they return from leave, not to mention the fact that they have all of their usual business expenses to cover during that time too.

The flexibility will allow women to choose to return to work and, in something that is quite exciting, transfer the remaining part of the paid parental leave to their partner, who can take on the role of primary carer. What I love about this is that it encourages both parents to share the wonderful opportunity that exists to bond with a new child as well as to manage the impact on work life, on careers and on businesses of taking time off. To the extent that, when people talk about a gender pay gap, that gap is attributable to the decision of women to take time off to care for children, anything we do to encourage the more equal sharing of not only that opportunity but also those costs is a way that we can help to make sure that we're giving women real choice and also men real choice about the things that they want to live out in the valleys of their lives. That involves, oftentimes, helping them reach their ambition of spending some time as a primary carer and sharing the impact on work-life with their wife or partner.

Alternatively, of course, women may choose to use their remaining paid parental leave to support their part-time return to work or to gradually increase the amount of work they're doing to help gradually transition their child to the arrangements for going back to work. So you could take three days per week of paid parental leave and choose to work on the other two, or vice versa. Any arrangement would do. The beauty of it is that it can be tailored to the circumstances of the individual. Choice is what we're all about. It shouldn't be the case that governments decide from afar when you can and can't care for your child. It shouldn't be the case that governments tell you, as an employer, what you can and can't do in terms of the arrangement you and an employee might like to make for that person's return to work. Choice and flexibility are about making these challenging times in everyone's lives work for everyone.

I'm really excited to see a greater uptake of leave by secondary carers who might not have had that opportunity to spend quality time with their children. When I had my first child, one of the wonderful things we were able to do as a family was to have my husband take a period of parental leave while I went back to work. It was an enormous blessing for him. It inducted him into a way of parenting that he wouldn't have risen to quite so quickly if it had not been for that period on his own, and it meant that he and our daughter have a beautiful bond that has endured for the entirety of her life. I hope that continues. That great start that comes from a father getting to make a choice to spend some time with their children is something that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Indeed, it should be encouraged. It has been a wonderful thing for our family. While I acknowledge that it isn't something everyone can make work, for those who can and for those who want to have that as a part of the choices their family make, why should bureaucracy stand in the way? Let's make this flexible. Let's make it work for all families and for all families' priorities.

I know how important it is to make it viable for women to return to work after having children, as do all of my colleagues in the Morrison government. Everyone's circumstances are different. You might be employed part-time or full-time; you might be self-employed, which creates lots of complications when it comes to fitting in a period of leave for children; or you might be a small-business owner. We want to make sure that people who are managing all of those responsibilities—and particularly those who don't have the support of an employer in their structures to help them through this time—have the flexibility they need to be able to adapt and change and make it work for their circumstances. So I'm really keen on this bill. I think it's going to very much improve the arrangements for women in this situation.

There are around 300,000 births in Australia every year. Nearly half of all new mothers access paid parental leave. It will be wonderful to see more small-business owners have the opportunity to keep their business alive while bonding with their new child. It will be great to see self-employed women continue to progress in their careers whilst enjoying this joyful time of life. And it will be brilliant to see more fathers and partners who may not be the person who delivered a child nevertheless get the opportunity to form that really tight bond that endures so beautifully throughout life when these special opportunities and the space that is created with this time are seized and dived into head-on.

This is a wonderful bill. I commend it to the Senate. I only hope that even more than the predicted 4,000 women are able to make it a part of the choices they and their husband or partner make when it's time for them to consider the role that rearing children will play in their family.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm proud to have been a member of the Labor government which introduced Australia's paid parental leave scheme. At the time this scheme was introduced, Australia was one of only two OECD countries without a national scheme, the other being the United States. Publicly funded paid parental leave is an important measure to give parents the flexibility they need to engage in the workforce, and it is especially important for women. As the International Labour Organization states on its website:

Expectant and nursing mothers require special protection to prevent harm to their or their infants' health, and they need adequate time to give birth, to recover, and to nurse their children.

…   …   …

Such protection not only ensures a woman's equal access to employment, it also ensures the continuation of often vital income which is necessary for the well-being of her entire family. Safeguarding the health of expectant and nursing mothers and protecting them from job discrimination is a precondition for achieving genuine equality of opportunity and treatment for men and women at work and enabling workers to raise families in conditions of security.

To sum up, parents need to bond with their babies, and mothers need to recover from childbirth, and they should be able to do so without their employment being disadvantaged.

Australia's paid parental leave scheme, introduced by Labor, provides 18 weeks of publicly funded parental leave pay at the minimum wage to the primary carer of a newborn or a newly adopted child. The scheme also provides two weeks of dad and partner pay to the father of the child or a secondary carer. Of the 300,000 children born in Australia each year, the paid parental leave scheme supports the parents of just under 150,000. The Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Flexibility Measures) Bill will change the scheme's rules in a number of ways.

The current scheme requires that 18 weeks of paid parental leave for a primary carer be taken in one continuous block within 12 months of the birth or adoption of their child and before the primary carer returns to work. The bill splits the 18 weeks of public paid parental leave into a 12-week paid parental leave period and a six-week flexible paid parental leave period. The 12-week paid parental leave period must be taken as a continuous block within 12 months of the birth or adoption of the child. The six-week flexible paid parental leave period will be available at any time within the first two years and does not have to be taken continuously. The government expects the bill to encourage greater take-up of paid parental leave by secondary carers by allowing mothers to transfer their entitlements to secondary carers. The changes to the scheme are likely to be used by parents returning to work part time and spreading their flexible paid parental leave period over several months. Unfortunately, under the current scheme, there are thousands of parents who return to work before they've used all of their parental leave entitlement.

Labor supports this bill, and I for one welcome the increased flexibility that it provides to workers, women in particular. There is no doubt that these measure will have a positive impact on women's participation in the workforce, but what the bill does not do is change the overall entitlement to paid parental leave. This is unfortunate because, sadly, Australia continues to lag behind international standards when it comes to the provision of paid parental leave. Australia is one of the lowest ranked countries in the OECD both in terms of the duration of leave and the level of pay provided by our scheme. Our investment in paid parental leave is around a third of the OECD average. In fact, the quantum of the payment which equates to the full-time equivalent of eight weeks of paid leave places us, embarrassingly, 40th out of 41 comparable EU and OECD countries. The measures in the bill, while welcome, are just tinkering around the edges when it comes to improving paid parental leave in Australia. The Department of Social Services only expects around 4,000 parents to take advantage of the flexibility measures in this bill.

Organisations which made submissions to the Senate inquiry into this bill raised a number of concerns and suggested improvements to Australia's paid parental leave scheme. The Australian Council of Trade Unions noted that the proposed reforms will be less effective because of the lack of a right of appeal for workers against the unreasonable refusal of a request for flexible working hours or a request for an extension to unpaid parental leave. A number of submitters called for the period of paid parental leave to be extended to 26 weeks. There were also submitters who noted policy developments in other countries and the private sector which supported a gender-neutral approach to paid parental leave. Such an approach would boost equality for women by supporting a more equal distribution of parenting by encouraging fathers to take more parental leave. The Diversity Council Australia in their submission noted that only one in 20 parents taking primary parental leave are fathers and that 85 per cent of fathers take fewer than four weeks of leave. They also observed that career interruptions accounted for 21 per cent of the 2014 gender pay gap. The ACTU's submission noted that two inquiries—the Productivity Commission's 2009 inquiry and a 2014 review of the current scheme—found numerous benefits—

Scott Ryan (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Senator Bilyk, you will be in continuation when the debate resumes.