Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

This is an absolutely crucial issue for the people of Wentworth. This is not just about female gender equity in terms of wages, which is absolutely crucial, but also about quality of life for men and fathers, and child development. By increasing paid parental leave and changing the rules so that men, or the second parent, have a 'use it or lose it' level of paid parental leave, we have an opportunity to fundamentally shift how we look after children in this country.

Let's start, however, with gender equity. In this country, the latest data shows that there's a 14 per cent gap in male and female earnings. However, this is close to zero when it comes to early careers. In early careers there is not a gender pay gap, but it is through the child-bearing and child-rearing ages that the gender pay gap emerges. I saw this fundamentally within my own community in Wentworth. I saw it in people I went to school and uni with, who worked similarly to their partners—in similar sorts of job, in similar levels of jobs—but then, when it came to having and caring for children, there was such a gendered experience. With almost all the parents that I knew, women took a much more significant amount of time off and, in some cases, struggled to come back into the workforce or had real issues coming back into the workforce.

I don't believe this is about misogyny; this isn't about chauvinism. This is a cultural issue in Australia, where the expectation is that women will look after the kids. Increased paid parental leave could really address this issue. If we look at the statistics around paid parental leave and who takes it, only around two per cent of Australian men use primary carer paid parental leave, compared to an OECD average of 18 per cent. In countries like Sweden and Iceland, just over 40 per cent of primary carer paid parental leave is taken by men. This is a fundamental difference in how Australia experiences the world and how the rest of the world experiences the world. It's not surprising, therefore, to see that Australia has one of the most gendered distributions of careers and one of the biggest issues in terms of female economic empowerment. So I think this is a real opportunity for the government to take leadership.

I support an increase in paid parental leave because I think that's absolutely crucial to families. But it is crucial in this design that we get to at least 26 weeks paid parental leave, and six weeks of that must be used by a second parent—in most cases, a man—with a two-week element being 'use it or lose it'. The evidence shows that, if there's such a significant amount of parental leave available, men will change their cultures, and workplaces will actually change the expectation of what happens to men when there is a baby in the house, when they have a child. If we can fundamentally change the expectation of men's and women's involvement in child rearing, we are going to increase the economic empowerment of women and also achieve two other key results. Firstly, overseas evidence has shown that, if men are more involved in child rearing, they improve their connection to their children and they improve their own life satisfaction. When you see men's high suicide rates and rates of depression, you think, 'What can you do to actually improve the lot of men?' and this is absolutely a crucial part of it. A second piece of research has shown that the involvement of male partners in the lives of their children is increased by them taking more leave at the start, and, if they do that, that increases child development. So this is a piece that can increase child development, increase men's satisfaction and address gender equity.

This is something that costs $600 million. That's a lot of money, but, compared to so many different things that we do in this country, the economic outcomes and the social outcomes we could achieve through this sort of a scheme are absolutely crucial. So I think it's crucial that the government take leadership in this space. They have spoken about wanting to lead in really empowering women in the community. This is an easy opportunity for them to pursue and to at least put us on the path to this in this budget so that we can get to the stage of having 26 weeks of paid parental leave, six weeks of which must be used by the second parent and two weeks which is 'use it or lose it'. That will achieve outcomes on all bases.

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