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

I rise today to speak in support of the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Improvements for Families and Gender Equality) Bill 2022. I welcome this legislation because it will make a difference both economically and culturally to this country. It will benefit women, it will benefit families and it will benefit parents.

Australia has a wonderful egalitarian culture, but parenthood is one area where we are not as egalitarian as we think we should be. There is a default view in our community that the primary carer of a child is a woman. Our current parental leave standards and what is being sought to change in this legislation will drive that through.

I remember when my sister had her first child. Probably unusually for many women, she was the primary breadwinner. She had her own business and really needed to get back to work pretty quickly. But to enable her partner to take on primary care responsibilities and be supported by the government, she effectively had to say that she was no longer the primary carer. As a woman, I remember her saying, it made her feel like she was an inadequate mother because she wasn't doing what was expected of her because parental leave was about maternity leave, not proper parental leave. I welcome, from this point of view, this idea that parental leave is a shared responsibility of parents. This is the huge change that, culturally, we need to make.

Secondly, I think of this in terms of the economic lens for women. Today we heard from the United Nations group for women about how Australia lags the economic development and economic empowerment of women. We're No. 43 in the world. In the Prime Minister's words, economywide we are a top-20 country but in empowerment of women we are No. 43 in the world. I think a lot of that comes back to the way we still have a very gendered view of women's place in the workforce, and that is really driven by women's place in the home.

Our default view in this country is that women are the primary carers. The opportunity for the paid parental leave bill is to change this. It's this default view that is holding us back. It's holding back children and it holds back this country. Recently, Treasury released some research showing women's earnings have been reduced by an average of 55 per cent in the first five years of parenthood, which they call the motherhood penalty. This penalty is a result of lower participation in paid work, reduced working hours and a reduced working hourly wage. It doesn't just happen where the father is the breadwinner; even for women who are the primary earner, the motherhood penalty is large. When you look at female economic empowerment, and you look at the statistics, you see that women are more educated than ever and are more educated than young men. But, from the early 20s onwards, female economic empowerment and female economic participation drops off, and it is crucially to do with our role in child care and looking after our children. This is the reason I support this legislation.

I will quickly go to what the bill does. The bill combines paid parental leave with dad and partner pay into one 20-week scheme. You can see from dad and partner pay exactly how gendered that paid parental leave has been to date—this reinforcement that it is the dad who's the secondary parent and it's the mum who is meant to look after things. Two weeks will be reserved on a 'use it or lose it' basis. This is what the current system is. This ensures both parents have a role.

The bill also ensures the leave can be taken flexibly within two years and raises the income threshold so that more people will participate in this. It removes those claimant categories—primary, secondary, tertiary and birth parent requirements—and will be effective from 1 July this year. I believe from the statistics it's going to help 180,000 families each year, which is absolutely crucial, and it's going to be scaled up to up to a full six months by 2026.

I am supporting this bill on the basis of enabling female workforce participation. Women want to contribute economically but we need to make change and we need to make change in our homes as well as our workplaces. This bill has the right opportunity to change our cultural norms that the work of the family is the responsibility of the women. At the same time this isn't just good for female economic participation; this is good for dads and kids as well. There is strong evidence to show that if second parents, which are typically dads, are more involved in raising their children from early ages, this engagement persists. This is good for parental mental health and also good for childhood development. It's absolutely crucial this is seen not just from an economic point of view but also from a social point of view. It will also, I hope, encourage more people to have children, which is also really important when we look at our long-term economic performance.

I very much rise in support of these changes, but I would like the government to pick up the pace. It's absolutely crucial we cement in culture this change that says parenting is a joint responsibility of the parents, not just of the mother. So I would like to see the 'use it or lose it' part expanded to six weeks so that there are six weeks that are a 'use it or lose it' component for each parent, and the remaining weeks are then on a shared basis. The reason I say this is that we already have two weeks of second-parent—typically dad—parental pay, but there isn't as much take-up of this leave as you would hope, and if people aren't taking up the leave it's not going to make a difference.

Sure, two weeks is helpful, but it doesn't actually cement the core responsibility, which is that raising children is the responsibility of both parents. I think that six weeks of paid parental leave is an amount that really creates enough time for a parent to have sole responsibility of their child, to really bond with their child and to really take responsibility for the child. It will build those habits so that it's not just two weeks—almost like holiday looking after the kids—but it's actually six weeks of taking that care, because I think that is going to be most important in driving cultural change.

This would make a greater difference, I think, in terms of the long-term impact of this change not only on female economic empowerment but also on the mental health of second parents and on childhood development. Ultimately, I and many in the community would like to see Australia move to 12 months of paid parental leave, but at six weeks, with that parental leave to be shared equally between parents, if we can equally share parental leave between parents and set those cultural norms from the start that raising children is joint work, we will truly make a difference to the economic empowerment of women.

I'm standing in support of this bill because women in Wentworth, where I'm from, want to be economically empowered. They want great jobs and they want to have wonderful families. They want to do both, and they believe that they should be able to do both, so we need to change the economics and we need to change the culture, because this is not just about the difference for women; it's about the difference for second parents—typically men—and also for children so we can improve mental health, we can improve childhood development and we can improve the economic empowerment of women.

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