Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to take one of my last opportunities to speak in this place, in my last few days here, to talk about paid parental leave. I had been anticipating that I would have the chance to do this when we moved amendments to the former government's Paid Parental Leave scheme, for which amendments there is currently legislation before the House. This legislation will simply amend the current scheme, under which the payments made to people on Paid Parental Leave will be made by the Family Assistance Office, not by the individual employers themselves. It was typical of the former government that they found yet another cost to impose on business by making them pay for the administration of the government's Paid Parental Leave.

This legislation has yet to come before us, but I will not have the opportunity to speak on it so I want today to put on record my very strong support for the coalition's Paid Parental Leave policy. This is a policy that we have taken to two elections. The scheme that we are proposing would pay up to $50,000 for six months to women who have left the workforce to have children. I have already made the mistake I have criticised so many others for by talking about the Paid Parental Leave scheme being for women—it is not for women; it is for parents. We need to be clear about the fact that it is paid parental leave, not paid maternity leave. The scheme will pay, as a minimum, the minimum wage for six months, up to $50,000. The critical difference between the scheme the government is proposing and Labor's scheme is that our scheme includes superannuation. I would hope it is well known that older women tend to be amongst the poorest in our community, partly because they work in lower paid jobs, they have broken careers so that they can have children and they work part time more often than men. It is a very serious problem, and our Paid Parental Leave scheme will go some way towards redressing the imbalance.

I would like to mention some statistics for superannuation held by women. The average Australian woman retires with less than half the superannuation of her male counterpart. The mean super balance for women at retirement is $112,000, compared to $190,000 for men. The gender pay gap keeps women's superannuation balances low. Women working full-time currently earn, on average, 17½ per cent less than men working full-time. Women live an average of five years longer than men, and therefore need more rather than less superannuation if their savings are to last the distance during their retirement. Even now, women tend to retire a few years earlier than men—yet another reason why women need more superannuation than men. A female on average salary who takes a six-year career break retires with about $77,000 less super than a male counterpart. Currently, very few retired women have any super left. Research done by the Institute of Superannuation Trustees in 2011 showed that more than half of the retired women who took a lump sum payment did not have any super left after two years. Only six per cent of retired women had any super after 10 years. We need to find ways to improve super. One of those ways, as I have said, is to include it within the Paid Parental Leave scheme, which is a very important change proposed by our government.

I would like to expand on why I see the Paid Parental Leave scheme as being so important—and important irrespective of the economy. I would argue that the Paid Parental Leave scheme is not a net impost on the economy—in fact, it is a net positive for the economy. It will encourage women to go back to work and it will give women greater savings to retire with. Hopefully in the years to come our Paid Parental Leave scheme will bring us to the point where both men and women take paid parental leave. It is obvious, and I think we can point to instances in Europe, that, if men and women in the workforce both have broken careers, if both work part time, then it is accepted that both will want to have time off to go to school concerts and pick kids up from child care and we will change the way our workforce functions. Men will not be preferenced over women, because they would no longer be seen as being the more stable employee who will be there at seven in the morning until nine at night. Men will be accepted as needing the same sorts of allowances for their family life as women when they have young children.

I was struck by a recent article in The Australian headed 'Wednesday a daddy day for German leader.' The Vice Chancellor of Germany, Herr Sigmar Gabriel, has announced that he will be taking Wednesday afternoons off so he can collect his two-year-old daughter from child care and spend the afternoon with her. While this was uncommon enough to rank as a major story in the newspapers not only in Germany but also here, it is a major step forward from where we are in Australia. I can just imagine what would happen if the Prime Minister were to announce that he was going to take Wednesday afternoons off to spend with children—there would be an amazing amount of shock and outrage at that.

Until we can move to that sort of system where it is anticipated that mothers and fathers will have time out of the workforce and their careers affected, we are not going to get to the stage of having equality within the workplace, or economic equality for older women as they move into their retirement. In 2011, CEDA—the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia, which is hardly seen as a radical or left-wing group—published Women in Leadership: Looking below the surface. This publication reported there is an unconscious bias towards women in leadership. They point out that there is a need for organisations to understand this unconscious bias and how they can go about equipping themselves to challenge it and to find new models of thinking.

This is the area I was alluding to when I spoke about the subtle sexism that I believe exists not only in corporate organisations but also within Parliament House. Women are underutilised in our corporate organisations, especially at senior levels, and a reflection of that is their average wage rates being what they are. We need to think hard about how we are going to address the problems that we have in this area, and it comes down to many things that we need to understand. CEDA talks about understanding the nuances in the culture that exist 'under the surface', and they make the point that this can be a challenging and threatening experience for organisations, because we are in fact asking people to change the way they think and perhaps even the way they go about their work practices.

Hopefully, using an evidence-based approach will reduce the likelihood of defensiveness and blame, and it brings up issues that are often uncomfortable for an organisation to face. We need to get that happening first and we need to think about what the cultural norms are within organisations. It could come down to things as simple as scheduling meetings between 9:30 am and 2:30 pm so that people who are working part-time with school-age children have the opportunity to go to that meeting without having to make other plans or feeling that they are not pulling their weight—or being seen by colleagues as not pulling their weight—because they cannot make it to a meeting.

We also need to challenge the organisational norms. Many women talk about what they see as 'the imposter syndrome'—women who feel out of place in leadership roles because they do not share the culture of some of the men in the place with regard to what gets talked about and what is seen as important. We need to do so much work in this area to get to the stage of dealing with the unseen barriers of the unconscious bias that exists.

While I think the government's paid parental leave scheme is a good policy on its own standing, I also see it as the first step towards ensuring that we end up with a situation where both men's and women's work patterns will include taking leave, working part-time and in some cases forgoing promotions, as women often do for the sake of their families. Then we will have a system where people will understand what parity really means and we will develop this within the organisational culture of Australia. I hope I do not need to point out that not only is this a better system for children and for women but it is also a better system for men. When men have the opportunity to fully be part of their families, we end up with a better community.

I also wanted to briefly mention some of the ABS data, which shows that women's superannuation is in fact increasing—we are getting there. The number of women who have superannuation has increased from 42 per cent in 1993 to 66 per cent in 2007, but that growth has been very modest for lower income earners. In some cases, women in the bottom 25 per cent of earnings have no superannuation at all, so there is also the argument that we should allow superannuation to be paid on incomes of less than $450 a month, especially over shorter periods of time, as that is the earning capacity of women who are out of the workforce looking after children.

The ABS data, which unfortunately is only available for 2009-10 superannuation balances, shows that men in the 45-54 age group have two-and-a-half times more superannuation than women in the same age group. For the 55 to 64 age group, men have three times more super than women. So the need to assist older women to quickly develop their super—and to develop a system which allows long term for some significant improvement in the super of younger women—is critical.

I want to end by saying that I would be devastated if we were not able to put the government's new Paid Parental Leave scheme into action. I expect at least the Greens, whose policy this is, to support it.