Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity today to speak to the Paid Parental Leave Amendment Bill 2022 and to state my support, as the federal member for Petrie, for the amendments to the current Paid Parental Leave scheme.

The proposed changes to the Paid Parental Leave scheme will benefit the families of Petrie in many ways. Parental leave policies are designed to support and protect working parents at the time of the birth of a new child or adoption of a child, and when children are very young and in the fundamental stages of connection to their parents. The availability of paid parental leave for each parent fosters a more-equal division of unpaid care and paid work, and improves on the goal of families to achieve a satisfactory work-life balance.

One of the core values of the coalition is the family as the indispensable forum where children are raised and nurtured, and the foundation of resilient communities and a cohesive society. Our children are our future, and I believe in giving children the best possible start in life.

Since 2011, under the current Paid Parental Leave scheme, Australian families have had access to government supported paid parental leave, which has significantly changed the landscape of our homes, our workplaces and our economy. The current scheme consists of up to 18 weeks of paid parental leave, which consists of 12 weeks of continuous leave and six weeks of flexible leave, and aims to help balance work and family commitments as caregivers return to the workforce. To claim paid parental leave currently you must qualify as the birth mother of a newborn child, as the initial primary carer of an adopted child placed in your care by an authorised party for the purpose of adoption or as another person caring for a child under exceptional circumstances. Claims for paid parental leave must also meet an income test, a work test and a residency rules test. Fathers of a newborn baby or adopted child are also eligible to claim a two-week period of dad and partner pay to assist during the very early stages of new life, when sleep evades the new parents. Having three sons myself, I understand that. Well-intended schedules turn into chaos and nappy changes seem to never end. Claims for paid parental leave can be made three months before the expected date of birth or date of adoption of the child and up to 40 weeks after the birth or adoption without affecting the full 18-week leave entitlement. In 2021-22, the Paid Parental Leave scheme cost around $2.58 billion and had a total of 276,641 claims of both paid parental leave and dad and partner pay.

The extension of paid parental leave is basically ensuring that this scheme will go from 18 weeks up to 20 weeks. If a woman is pregnant now and has been given a due date after 1 July, then these proposed changes will apply to her and her partner. This bill will combine paid parent leave and dad and partner pay, forming a single payment of 20 weeks that can be shared between parents. This measure seeks to make sharing of parental leave between parents a central part of the scheme. Two weeks of paid parental leave will be reserved on a 'use it or lose it' basis for each claimant. If, at the time of birth, a claimant does not have a partner they will be able to receive a maximum of 20 weeks paid parental leave.

Currently, the Paid Parental Leave Act distinguishes between primary, secondary and tertiary claims. This bill removes this distinction by allowing fathers and partners to claim the majority of parental leave pay without requiring birth mothers to be the main claimant. An example of this would be my friend Jason, who has two children. His partner was a lawyer. When she gave birth and the children were being raised, she went back to work relatively quickly because Jason decided to stay home because his partner, as a lawyer, earned more than him. That has worked well for that family. He has been the main carer while his partner has gone back to work. Flexibility for families is extremely important.

Families will no longer be denied access to paid parental leave if the mother's taxable income exceeds the $156,647 income test, with the introduction of a family income limit of $350,000. It is expected that nearly 3,000 additional parents and families will become eligible each year, due to this measure opening up access to parents who may be able to work part-time or are self-employed. This bill also gives increased flexibility. The measure will allow parents to take paid parental leave in blocks as small as a day at a time, with periods of work in between, during the period starting the day the child is born right up until the child is two years of age or two years after taking on the care of the child.

In the lead-up to the 2022-23 October budget, the government announced the scheme would be progressively increased from 18 weeks to 26 weeks by 2026. The legislation does not detail the change. If the government has walked away from that increase, it needs to come clean about why it was not included in the legislated amendments. As someone who was elected to this House in the 44th Parliament, there's the irony of the position that Labor is taking now in relation to a family income test of up to $350,000 and extending the scheme to 26 weeks. Guess what? That was the policy of the coalition government at the 2013 election in the 44th Parliament that I came into. At the time, the Labor opposition complained, moaned, groaned, said it was no good and voted against it. As a result, that never actually came into law. But that policy from Tony Abbott ensured that women, capped at $150,000, were able to get up to six months parental leave. The Labor government talk about the gender pay gap. But when the rubber hit the road 10 years ago, the coalition wanted to introduce this scheme to allow up to six months parental leave pay, capped at $150,000, and Prime Minister Albanese voted against it. That's the reality.

Going back to my own personal experience, my wife, Louise, and I had three sons before I came into this place. It was a special time. My eldest son is now 20 and in the Australian Defence Force. He's grown up. I remember when he was born. I remember being there at the birth and learning that midwives know what they're doing. You don't always need a doctor there. I remember giving my son William his first bath. It was an emotional time. I remember shedding a tear when that happened. My wife decided at the time, before I came into this place, that she wanted to spend time with our first child and subsequent children and breastfeed them for up to 12 months. So she wasn't able to go back to work at all for the first couple of years but then went into part-time work. We were in a fortunate position where, at the time, I was able to put additional super contributions in for her because she'd missed out on that, which was a good thing. Now my wife and I have equal amounts of super.

I have a staff member in my office at the moment who is expecting a child in July. As an opposition, I'm really thankful that we can support hard-working mothers like her, and not just her. One of our staff members in the Opposition Whip's office is also expecting her first child. Another staff member in the member for Longman's office is also expecting her first child. We very much appreciate these three women who work for the coalition in the jobs that they do. We want to wish them well for the birth of their child and want them to be able to come back to work when they are ready and when they make those choices. So the opposition is happy to support this bill to support these women and other women and their families and men right around the country.

Recently, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and shadow minister for women, Sussan Ley, was in my electorate for a roundtable for women. Women from the electorate of Petrie spoke about flexibility and more support and choice in their workplaces from their employers when juggling family and work commitments. Women are also seeking a government that supports stronger families, according to Dr Kahari, a local obstetrician at Redcliffe Hospital in my electorate, who was a participant in this roundtable. Her daughter was also there. She mentioned how supporting men to play an active role in the family is pivotal for stronger families. This was a point that Dr Kahari made to the roundtable and to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition about how important it is to support men. But you cannot deny there will always be an element of maternal physiological connection and dependency between a mother and child in those early stages that continues for years following birth. It will be interesting, then, to see whether the implementation of these amendments to the paid parental leave scheme in fact achieve the desired outcomes of increasing women's participation in the workforce and stimulating the economy, because a lot of women choose to stay at home. They choose to raise their children for the first few years after birth. We must remember, at the end of the day, it is a woman's choice how she wishes to raise her family, and we mustn't disparage a woman who chooses the hardest career choice of all, in my opinion, in raising children and homemaking. I'm very thankful for my own wife, who did that—that she chose to do that. We've got three great sons that have grown up brilliantly.

I also note what the coalition did in the last parliament. One of the things we did was catch up super payments for women that had been out of the workforce for some time. We enabled women to make additional contributions to their super so they could catch it up if they'd been out of the workforce for three or four years. Once again, this wasn't a policy that Labor really supported. It's still in place—thankfully, they haven't scrapped it yet and hopefully they don't—but they weren't very supportive at the time. Sometimes it saddens me to see a little bit of hypocrisy from the current government, from when they were in opposition to where they are now and so forth.

Many of the amendments we've heard about in this bill are in fact measures announced by the former coalition government in March last year as part of the well-received enhanced paid parental leave package reforms. The coalition has a strong record supporting government funded paid parental leave. I go back to the policy that Tony Abbott wanted to implement in this place, which Labor voted against. At both the 2010 and 2013 elections, the coalition's paid parental leave policy sought to deliver mothers six months of paid parental leave of the same amount members of the government are crowing about now which will be brought in later, in a couple of years' time. If those on the other side had supported this landmark policy, Australians could have had access to one of the most generous government funded paid parental leave schemes for the last 10 years, and the wage gap between women and men would have reduced significantly. But Prime Minister Albanese, his whole cabinet and everyone else voted against it—actually, I shouldn't say 'his whole cabinet' because some of those people weren't here in that 44th Parliament.

While in government the coalition made important amendments to strengthen paid parental leave legislation. These amendments included: increased flexibility lasting six to eight weeks that could be shared and taken at any time; introducing special circumstances which allowed a person to meet the work test if they had been impacted by family and domestic violence, a natural disaster or a severe medical condition; allowing JobKeeper and COVID payments to count towards the work test for paid parental leave to prove a genuine connection to the workplace; and indexation of the income threshold for the first time since the scheme was introduced in 2011.

In conclusion, the coalition government did a lot. We support this bill. We believe in freedom, we believe in choice and this bill will help with freedom of families to raise their children. Summing up, we support the bill.

See this speech in context