House debates

Tuesday, 31 August 2021

Bills

Paid Parental Leave Amendment (COVID-19 Work Test) Bill 2021; Second Reading

6:13 pm

Photo of Andrew LeighAndrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

I will be speaking on the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (COVID-19 Work Test) Bill 2021 on behalf of the member for Barton. She of course would do a far better job than me in presenting Labor's view on this bill but is impeded today by technological problems. If only Australia had a first-rate national broadband network, you would be able to hear from the member for Barton rather than me!

I move the second reading amendment that has been circulated in my name:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1) notes many families would not need these changes if the Prime Minister had done his job on quarantine and vaccine roll-out;

(2) further notes the Government's delay in providing certainty about Paid Parental Leave rules in relation to both Jobkeeper and the COVID-19 Disaster Payment; and

(3) calls on the Government to ensure that families that rely on Paid Parental Leave are not left worse off".

This isn't the first time in the 46th Parliament that we have discussed changes to the national paid parental leave scheme. These changes are a reflection of the frustration that many of the recipients of paid parental leave will be feeling amidst a year of intense frustration for so many Australian households—those who are angry about the slow vaccine rollout and the quarantine failures, those who are frustrated at the Morrison government's lockdowns stopping them seeing loved ones and those who, as my kids have at times, have said to their parents, 'Mum, Dad, can we have another home-school teacher?'

The fact is that these are very hard times for Australian families.

The Paid Parental Leave scheme is a Labor legacy, a proud initiative of the Rudd and Gillard governments, which is taken up by parents of around half of the 300,000 children born in Australia each year. It allows parents to take time off while staying connected to their workplace, by providing 18 weeks of payments at a rate based on the national minimum wage of $772.55 per week, a total of $13,905.90. There are two payments in the scheme: parental leave pay and dad and partner pay. The second, I believe, is somewhat underrated, and there's good research right now indicating that it's possible to close the gender pay gap by ensuring that there is greater equity in parental leave. The so-called daddy months which have been put in place in a range of Scandinavian countries and Germany seem to narrow the gender pay gap. It is an important finding and an important consideration in a week in which we've discovered that the gender pay gap has indeed widened under the Morrison government.

Eligibility for the Paid Parental Leave scheme requires a person to have worked for around one day a week—330 hours in 10 of the last 13 months. A recipient cannot have had a break from work for more than 12 weeks. Those who don't meet the paid parental leave work test may be eligible for family tax benefit. When the pandemic was ramping up in March last year and lockdowns were announced, the government appropriately changed the rules so periods on JobKeeper counted as work. It did so by creating an exemption so people could remain eligible if they passed an extended work test which required working 10 out of the last 20 months. But those amendments came seven months after the first lockdown in March 2020. That was an unnecessarily slow response from the government. Labor and many community groups had pointed out to the government that it needed to tweak the Paid Parental Leave scheme, but the government took seven months to act, causing unnecessary anxiety for Australian families and a family tax benefit debt for families who considered themselves to be ineligible over that seven-month period.

That change to the work test ended with JobKeeper in March 2021, but we had Melbourne's third lockdown in February and the fourth starting in May, and those families had no certainty that they would manage to pass the work test for paid parental leave. The government is now proposing to make the period of time spent on the COVID disaster payment count towards the Paid Parental Leave scheme work test, which is effectively the same as the arrangement for JobKeeper last year. This time the change would be made for individuals who live or work in a Commonwealth declared COVID-19 hotspot and are eligible for the COVID-19 disaster payment. We've been advised that the enabling rules will ensure that parents relying on state government business support will also be eligible.

This amendment is necessary because, without it, parents who cannot meet the work test because of lockdowns would otherwise lose access to paid parental leave. But the government has been characteristically slow to act, so the new provisions would take effect from 3 June this year, that being the date of the Prime Minister's announcement of the COVID-19 disaster payment. That was a while back—almost three months ago. It's taken three months for the government to finally, again, be shamed into offering support for working families suffering under lockdown. This has been a slow response which the government is now looking to push through the parliament. Labor is happy to facilitate the rapid passage of this bill. But why has it taken this long? Why wasn't the government bringing this bill into the parliament months ago?

The government may also like to consider reaching out to those families who thought they weren't eligible for the Paid Parental Leave scheme because of the work test and now assist them in applying. That sort of action by the Department of Social Services would be helpful for many Australian families. There will be many parents who claimed family tax benefit in the meantime thinking they were ineligible for the work test. Again they are likely to have incurred a Commonwealth debt, the same problem that arose last year, and I call on the government to manage such debts sensitively.

Families have been doing it very tough over the last 18 months. The Australian Institute of Family Studies carried out research that found that, in the first lockdown, there was a great deal of uncertainty, anxiety and financial stress for many families, and that many parents have been struggling to manage. Seven out of 10 parents reported they were either actively or passively caring for children while they worked. And, while multitasking has led to some lighter moments, with children interrupting Zoom meetings, it has also led to considerable stress, the bulk of which has been borne by mothers. We know that there's a growing body of research suggesting that lockdowns have widened the gender pay gap, particularly by holding back the progress of working women. We know women are five times more likely to take on the primary caring role and to be caught in a juggling act between work and kids. I can't say that without a shout-out to my own wife, Gweneth, who, while I'm standing here in the parliament, is homeschooling our three wonderful little boys—

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