Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his very timely question—very timely indeed. As we know, one in five working women are reliant on awards, and around half of Australian women with children under five are in the paid workforce. That is why it is so important today to make a difference for working women as they seek to balance work and family life, and that challenge will get more difficult as our population ages and as we are increasingly reliant on increasing the participation rate of working-age adults. That is why our Fair Work Act introduces new benefits and new protections to balance work and family life, including a right to request extended parental leave; including a right to request a return to flexible or part-time work; including a low-paid bargaining stream to particularly benefit low-paid areas, which tend to be areas in which women work, and to ensure that they have got access to the benefits of bargaining; including protection from unfair dismissal; and including a guaranteed safety net that no-one can rip away.

Let us compare these protections to the rip-offs under Work Choices. We know from ABS data that women on Australian workplace agreements earned less than women on collective agreements. Women working full time on Australian workplace agreements took home on average a staggering $87.40 less per week than their colleagues on collective agreements. Women working in casual jobs on Australian workplace agreements earned an amazing $94 per week less than women on collective agreements. This shameful, toxic, nasty system has been buried by us because we knew that Work Choices was hurting working women and working families. It is the Liberal Party that wants to dig up, unearth and breathe new life back into this shameful, toxic mess.

Beyond workplace relations laws, helping women balance work and family life is also about parental leave, and that is why our government is establishing the first ever paid parental leave scheme in this county. Our scheme is fully funded. They are two words you will never see pass the lips of the Leader of the Opposition. They are two words he will never say: ‘fully funded’. He will never have a sentence with those two words in a row. Until this morning, Australians would have believed that the Leader of the Opposition had announced an unfunded parental leave scheme. But from this morning we actually know that both the funding and the scheme are fictitious, because the Leader of the Opposition, was asked this morning by Alan Jones:

Finally, you have announced that you will implement if you are elected to government a policy to provide six months paid parental leave.

Alan goes on to say:

Who will? Employers have welcomed your initiatives so long as they don’t have to pay. Who would pay for your six months parental leave?

To that question, the Leader of the Opposition gives the following answer:

Yeah, well, Alan, the Sydney Morning Herald kind of jumped the gun yesterday. We have not made any announcement. I talked about this in my book Battlelines which was released in the middle of last year.

He did not make an announcement; he is on a book tour selling Battlelines. We know, of course, following today’s revelation on Alan Jones’ program is that this so-called policy is make-believe. It is uncosted and unfunded. Why would the Leader of the Opposition be out with an unfunded, uncosted, really unannounced policy? There is no policy here. Really, if you look at this Leader of the Opposition, the explanation is pretty clear. There is no policy, because he does not believe in paid parental leave. When he was a member of the Howard government, he said:

Compulsory paid maternity leave? Over this government’s dead body.

See this speech in context