Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006. The opposition has put forward a second reading amendment that condemns the government for its poor performance in securing Australia’s long-term economic fundamentals. We have heard lots of debate in this House over recent months about the lack of investment in skills, our declining investment in education, the appalling inaction over our crumbling infrastructure and our poor trade performance. But today I would like to address the government’s failure to build the fundamentals on which families—whether they be singles or couples, with or without children, or retirees—build their future. We have had considerable debate about the issues surrounding the fundamentals: the ability to move in and out of the workforce with ease, family-friendly workplaces, an industrial relations process that supports family-friendly workplaces, the need for child care, access to quality education for both parents and children, appropriate support for people trying to return to the workplace, the ability for a family to build assets over its life and support for those who care for disabled or infirm relatives.

I am sad to say that the government has failed overwhelmingly in building these fundamentals for families, and in the budget last year and in these new appropriation bills we see nothing that will alleviate the situation that families find themselves in at the moment. We need families to do what families want to do. We need them to build their future, save for a rainy day, save for their retirement, have children and raise and educate those children well. We need them to build all those community networks, through schools and workplaces, that provide additional capacity for our communities to cope with stress and trauma.

Getting the fundamentals right for our family units, whatever those family units might look like, is as essential to our long-term strength as a nation as getting the fundamentals of the economy right. When families fail or when we fail families, all of us, not just the families, pay the cost. We the taxpayer become the de facto family. We support family members through retirement. We support them through periods of unemployment. We all pay additional health costs and crime costs if children are not well supported in their upbringing. We provide unemployment benefits. We also pay through insecurity and angst about the future.

It is timely to look at the needs of families this week as we discuss in the main chamber of the House the issue of RU486, which, once again, raises the debate on abortion. I do not believe it is ever appropriate for us to talk about the decisions that women make not to have children without talking about how we can make it easier for women to decide to have children and about the pressures that are placed on women and families that lead to those decisions.

So let us look at some of the fundamentals. One issue that immediately comes to mind and is raised in my electorate over and over again—and, I assume, is raised in every electorate—is that of child care. It is one of the biggest issues for families and it is causing the most difficult times for women trying to return to the workplace. Child-care costs have risen to five times higher than the consumer price index in the last financial year alone and over 50 per cent since 2000. Parents’ choice to care for their own children and not participate in the paid labour force deserves respect, but so does a parent’s choice to mix paid work with their caring responsibilities. Most families these days would say they have no option—that mixing the raising of children with work is a necessity for both parents. Figures released recently by the Australian Bureau of Statistics demonstrate this. There are more than 250,000 women who want to work but are unable to do so because of a lack of affordable child care. Yet the government response to this has been very poor. There was the introduction of a rebate which was available to those who can afford child care in the first place but it provides no assistance whatsoever to the poorly-paid women who cannot afford it in the first place.

The Barriers and incentives to labour force participation survey released this week shows that child care is one of the top barriers to work. Problems finding suitable or affordable child care is the No. 1 reason that women who want to work are not looking for work. Almost 98,000 mothers who want to work are unable to start within four weeks because of child care and family factors that prevent them, and another 160,000 women who want to work or work more hours and consider themselves available to start immediately are not looking for work due to child care and family factors. A lack of jobs with suitable conditions was the reason for another 80,000 people having difficulty obtaining work or more paid hours. This all demonstrates a need for more flexible working arrangements but also a considerable need for the government to act on the lack of availability of child-care places.

The greatest child-care shortages and the highest fees are for children under school age. If a mother with a child under five cannot find long day care or family day care at a suitable location, they simply cannot work. Increasing after school care places, which we have seen the government do—and we must acknowledge that—does not fix this problem. The government sees child-care costs as a cost for families to bear; on this side of the House, we believe it is a crucial investment for governments to make, and it is one of the fundamentals that underpins a family’s ability to work for its future. The shortage of affordable child care is a drag on our economy but, equally, it is a significant drag on a family’s ability to build its future. On our side, we believe it is necessary to start collecting data on shortages straightaway, to increase the direct investment in long day care places, to remove the disincentives for employer investment in child care by extending the categories of employer expenditure on child care that are fringe benefits tax exempt, and by increasing the child-care benefit itself.

People remaining at home because of the lack of child care are an extraordinary untapped potential for the economy. Quite often, they are people with skills, people wanting to return to the workforce, but they are also an untapped potential for a family—a wasted resource in that economic family unit that the families themselves want to put to use for their own benefit. Again, we need families to do what families want to do, and we must start providing the fundamentals that allow them to do that.

The government’s new industrial relations laws will only make the situation for families worse—and worsen the child-care crisis, for that matter. The new IR legislation changes will allow employers to require parents to work irregular and family-unfriendly hours, including early mornings, nights, weekends and public holidays, without overtime or penalty rates. Yet across Australia there are only eight child-care centres that are open on both Saturdays and Sundays, and only two child-care centres that are open 24 hours. What are Australian parents expected to do about child care when their bosses expect them to work all hours and at short notice? Again, there is no answer from the government to this fundamental question.

Australians are already working longer hours—the longest in the OECD—and much of that work is already unpaid. In June 2005 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission revealed that the hours of paid and unpaid work parents do each day cause an alarming level of exhaustion, with a majority of parents reporting feeling always or nearly always stressed and with around 35 per cent of Sydney fathers spending more time commuting than they do with their children. That is a very sad state that we find ourselves in—that families are so stretched now, trying to balance work and family life, that the quality of time they spend with their children, and indeed the number of hours they spend with their children, is insufficient at best.

The flexibility that the government champions in this new industrial workplace is a one-way flexibility designed for the benefit of the employers. The government’s proposals will lead to unpredictability of pay and working conditions. Two factors—predictability of pay and predictability of working hours and conditions—are essential for families as they make the choices in the short term and the long term as they plan their time together, as they plan the picking up of children, as they plan the sharing of parental responsibilities and, for that matter, the sharing of earnings between the two partners. Unpredictable hours affect family life. It is not possible to arrange child care, let alone commit to training the kids’ soccer teams. I have spoken to several couples in my electorate, who both work casual hours, who are unable from one day to the next to commit to each other as couples need to do to share in the parenting of their children.

Unpredictable pay affects the family budget. Most of us assume that all those things we take for granted like receiving pay on a regular basis for regular hours is the norm. It is not the norm under this new industrial relations system. You cannot get a car loan, let alone a mortgage, if you do not have regular working hours and regular pay. This places an extraordinary burden on families. It reduces their capacity to save for their retirement, to build assets and to save for a rainy day. Predictable pay and predictable hours are fundamental to any family seeking to build a good future for themselves. Again, we all need families to do what families want to do: build a secure future for themselves and build good strong relationships between them and their children.

The government’s rhetoric is that individuals will be able to negotiate greater family-friendly agreements with their employers. Isn’t that necessary in this day and age when both parents are working? Isn’t it essential, when both parents spend part of their day in the workplace, that we have arrangements between families and employers that allow families to balance those sometimes competing realities?

But the reality is that 93 per cent of employees in the private sector who are now on individual contracts have no additional family-friendly rights because of those AWAs. Recent research reveals that fewer than one in 12 AWAs provide paid maternity leave. Only one in 20 provides paid paternity leave, and one in 25 provides unpaid purchased leave, such as extra leave during school holidays. Individual contracts, as we see them now, are clearly hostile to family life. If anything, the new industrial relations legislation makes it possible for those contracts to be even worse than they are now. There is nothing in the industrial relations legislation that encourages workers to give away more than they need to give away now.

Penalty rates were lost in more than half the number of individual contracts. Annual leave was lost in more than one in three individual contracts, and sick leave was traded away in more than one in four individual contracts. Again, we need families to do what families want to do, including the ability of families to organise holidays so they can take care of their children during school holidays, to be home when their children are sick and to know that they have two days on the weekend to spend with their children. These are fundamentals of family life; they are not luxuries. They are the fundamentals on which families build their future and build their relationships between parent and child.

The new Welfare to Work legislation is another blow to the fundamentals that underpin families—in this case, single parent families. The new Welfare to Work regulation will essentially trap over half a million single parent families on welfare. If they move off welfare for even a short period—because they return to the workplace or because they form a new relationship or reconcile with their partner—when they come back onto welfare, if they need to do that, they will come onto a much harsher system of sole parent pension or Newstart. Already, parents in my area are starting to consider their future income from the sole parent pension when they make those decisions to return to the workforce.

The vast majority of parents in Australia do return to the workforce. In fact, 70 per cent return to the workforce by the time their child turns three. This new Welfare to Work regulation punishes new sole parents when they apply for the pension. It makes it more difficult, not less, for sole parents to develop the financial base that they need for their families. Again, sole parents, too, want to do the right thing in the main. We need them to be able to do the things that they want to do—that is, develop a secure financial base for their families, return to work and find meaningful well-paid work that fits in with the needs of their family responsibilities.

In 1966 the proportion of women in the workforce was around 35 per cent. It is now around 56.3 per cent. And as to the question of maternity leave, more mothers are returning to the workforce than ever before. As I said, nearly 70 per cent of mothers are back in the workforce by the time their child has turned three. The sole parents of Australia are not slackers; in most cases they are overworked in their parenting role alone, and now a vast majority of them seek to balance unfriendly work hours with the needs of the family. In many cases, we see an underutilisation of the skills of sole parents. We see them returning to the workforce at a considerably lower skill level than before they had their children and working fewer hours than they would like. Again, this is a waste of resources for the economy, but it is also a significant waste of resources for single parent families seeking to build a strong future for their children.

The new legislation makes work less attractive than welfare. Under the new changes, through tax and a reduction in benefits the Howard government will take back as much as 75c of every dollar a welfare recipient earns. According to respected independent research, single parents will work for an effective return of as little as $3.88 an hour. An even more alarming issue for me about the Welfare to Work reform is that it strips sole parents of access to training support. Under the Howard government’s welfare changes, when single parents are dumped onto the dole they will be refused access to the pensioner education supplement, which was a bonus to working age pension recipients seeking to improve their job prospects through approved training or education. Given that many of these parents spend considerable time out of the workforce and given that so many of them—in fact, most single parents—have no post-school qualifications, real training that assists them back into the workforce is one of the fundamental things that they need to build a good strong family. Again, if they do not build a good strong family, we the taxpayers pick up the tab in many ways. And so we should pick up the tab, but equally we should make it possible for these sole parents, desperate to do the right thing for their families, to build the fundamentals that underpin their work efforts in that regard as quickly as we can. Training is fundamental for families, and not just for parents returning to the workforce but for parents and their children generally.

The increases in HECS fees and the shortage of TAFE places have placed additional drains on families. HECS fees in particular place an extraordinary financial burden on families just at a time when they should be accumulating assets—when they are saving for their first mortgage and really setting themselves up as families. It is a significant drain and absolutely the opposite of the way we should be supporting families at that crucial time of their first 10 years. Workforce characteristics are also working very much against families. Australians are working longer hours than ever before—the longest in the OECD—and around 35 per cent of Sydney fathers spend more time commuting than they do with their children.

Women’s earning capacity is drastically altered by time spent out of the workforce. There is not any Australian research into this, but US research shows that leaving the workforce for just three years results in a one-third drop in earnings if you return to the workforce full-time, or $250,000 on average over the remainder of your working life. Again, what an extraordinary situation it is when we are in a time of skills shortages and we are prepared to waste the potential of so many parents who spend time, quite appropriately—and, we should say, thankfully—out of the workforce taking care of their children. If we cannot find ways for parents to move in and out of the workforce without this significant drop in earning potential, then we really are not providing families with what they need to do the right thing for their future.

How can we allow this to continue? It is an extraordinary waste of resources for the economy. A couple of years of lighter work should not be a career death sentence for either men or women. I have been talking here about women, but I can equally talk about men. Men who choose in the early years of their children’s lives to back off from their career paths talk about that being a death sentence for their careers. They too suffer earnings drops for the rest of their career lives. We as a society should be supporting parents—both men and women—who choose to move in and out of the workforce. We should be finding ways to make our work environment, culturally and through industrial relations, much more family-friendly. It is in nobody’s interests that we are getting the fundamentals of family life so profoundly wrong, that we are not building the fundamentals to support families while they strengthen themselves for their future. It is not in the family’s interest or in the individual’s interest to be underused and feel frustrated by a lack of career opportunities and a lack of flexible working arrangements. It is not in the employer’s interests in the long run and it is not in the taxpayer’s interests. We must get this right. (Time expired)

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