James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the second reading of the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Improvements for Families and Gender Equality) Bill 2022. I start by commending our shadow minister for his contribution as our lead speaker. He indicated the coalition's support for this bill and made a couple of important historical points that I also want to reiterate, particularly around disappointment about the inability of the coalition, after we won the 2013 election, to implement our paid leave scheme, which of course was blocked in the Senate.

That is really regrettable because, on top of the scheme that's been in place since 2011, we could have dramatically enhanced support for paid leave. We took it to an election, and the people of Australia elected us. They wanted us and our policies, and it is a shame that that policy was not enacted, because there are a lot of people out there who would have benefited significantly from that. It is regrettable that we have a history of class warfare when it comes to supporting parents having children. There's nothing wrong with being successful and earning a high income. That's not something to demonise. Certainly I will take up every opportunity to stand up for all parents getting the most support they can get and flexibility around being able to care for their children. Higher-income earners are doing nothing wrong; we are lucky to have them. It's a shame. The scheme we sought to put in place, just to remind everyone, would have provided payments on actual income up to a cap of 150,000 a year pro rata. I think there is nothing wrong with people that earn $150,000 a year. It's becoming, in real terms, a lower and lower amount, with inflation running as hot as it is.

A mere 10 or 12 years since paid leave was first introduced, it's pleasant to see how much society has moved on. We obviously are all coming together from a bipartisan point of view to remove some of the old stereotypes that were in place, even a mere 10 or 12 years ago, around the role of men and women as parents and carers, and the concept of differentiation. As the shadow minister pointed out, a lot of the measures being adopted in this bill are measures that we ourselves announced in the budget last year. We support that.

In particular, we support the concept of equity between parents. It shouldn't be the case, for example, if a mother is earning a higher income than the father, that the couple are at a financial disadvantage under the individual income test. That's obviously ridiculous. Parents will be quite reasonably making their own decisions about how they will structure care arrangements for their newborn children in a way that works for them as a family, taking into account all sorts of issues, including income. They will not have a situation where they might make a different decision to the one they want to make because there is a penalty in place based on the income of a mother versus a father. This change removes that scenario, with the $350,000 cap for couples. We want to see equity and decision-making in the hands of parents, not being guided or interfered with because a government policy gives a different outcome depending on the decision they make. This is getting rid of the two different categories of leave, and giving flexibility around the way in which to take that leave.

The great thing about 2023 is that we are continuing to break down a lot of the stereotypes around the roles that people were expected to play within the family unit in decades gone by. Being just shy of my 40th birthday, I'm in that cohort of people with families and children. I have a lot of—what's the popular term?—lived experience in managing child care and the like in my own family, with my own partner. All of our friends are doing it in the ways that suit them best. Giving people that flexibility and giving parents the ability to make decisions in their interests, unique to their circumstances, is really important.

I'd like to commend the businesses out there that have put in place their own schemes in addition to the base-level scheme, the paid leave scheme that we're amending here, which every Australian has access to. These companies are making sure that, in their employment agreements, they are putting in place parental leave well beyond this. I mentioned at the start of my remarks that there is a growing cohort of people who don't have access to this government scheme, but it is certainly the case that a lot of employers are making the decision and recognising the need, from a talent attraction and retention point of view, to make sure that they are as family friendly and flexible as possible.

Gone are the days of merely accommodating maternity leave and keeping a role available for someone while they leave the workforce to raise children. Now I think there is a growing and important expectation that employers are providing all the support necessary for parents through their decision to have children and providing the leave they need to care for their children; and ensuring that they have financial support through those schemes and that the impact on their career around the time they leave the workforce is as limited as possible. There is also the expectation that workplace support and pathways will still be open to them into the future whilst maintaining flexibility for them to make decisions on raising children that are in their and their family's best interests.

We in the coalition are very passionate about family. We are very passionate about the family unit being the core of our society and making sure that family is the priority in our society, our community and our economy, and never the other way around. People should never have to make decisions that disadvantage their families because they have to to avoid an economic penalty. We will always be striving and looking for opportunities to better support the family unit.

It is not—this is a really difficult point to make—in the best interest of people's individual decision-making. As a nation, we have to make sure that we're supporting people to have as many children as they want to have and not in any way putting in coercive policies. We understand how vitally important it is that the demographic structure of our nation ensures that a proportion of our population continues to be significant enough to support the entirety of that population. We know that countries like Japan and Italy have very significant ageing populations and emerging significant challenges in providing the care that everyone in their society deserves, with a diminishing proportion of people providing the economic activity and the tax base to do that.

In this country, migration plays a very significant part in supporting our population pyramid. We also have a higher fertility rate than some of those countries. But we used to say, across the western world, that's not the case at all. We've just seen a milestone in China, where, for the first time probably in history, certainly with available records—putting aside the awful consequences of Communist Party policy under Mao Zedong and the years of famine et cetera—they now have a natural reduction occurring in their population. That is purely around the excellent outcome of modern medicine, meaning we are living longer, which we all are very much a grateful for, but with a dramatically reduced fertility rate. Obviously China had some social engineering policies partly associated with that, like the one-child policy. But they are in line with a lot of countries that, frankly, also have this issue of low fertility driven by the choice of couples to perhaps have fewer children than was the case in generations gone by.

We need to make sure that, on an absolute choice basis, nothing is standing in the way of people having as many children as they want to. That's why initiatives such as the ones in this bill are so vitally important. It's everyone's decision as to whether to have children in the first place, as well as how many they want to have. But we don't want to be in a situation where people are wanting to have that second or third child, or whatever their choice might be, but feel that they'll be financially disadvantaged in doing so and don't proceed to do so. Firstly, we love families to be as big as they can be, based on personal choice. I certainly think children are a blessing and the more the better, within reason. But, equally, it's also vitally important that, for our societal cohesion and our ability to provide for everyone, particularly our ageing generations, the services and support of government that they deserve and need, we make sure that we are managing the population profile of our nation so that we always have the economic capacity to provide that. That's vitally important. In this and in other policy areas, we always want to be supporting people to make their own decisions but also ensure that there's nothing stopping them from making a decision in a certain direction because there's an economic disadvantage to that.

With those comments, I commend this bill. One issue not addressed in this bill is expanding it to 26 weeks, which the government has indicated is going to be occurring in a subsequent bill. I don't know why that couldn't happen in this bill, but we hope that the government intends to honour that commitment and that we see that bill before the House in the near future. But certainly the principles of equality and flexibility are natural attributes of the coalition. These are policy positions that we in many cases had in our last budget, and on that we support the bill, and I commend it to the House.

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