Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Holt for her question and welcome her back with Baby Ilia. Congratulations. I know that she is a big supporter of paid parental leave.

It's hard to imagine that, before the Rudd and Gillard governments, Australia was one of the very few developed countries that didn't have a paid parental leave scheme. It was Labor that first introduced the scheme, and it's this Labor government that has expanded it. In fact, under this Prime Minister, Australians receiving paid parental leave are about $12,000 better off. In fact, we've almost doubled the paid parental leave entitlement, and about 180,000 families are benefiting every year.

Those families are getting more time—an extra two weeks this year and an extra two weeks next year. They're getting more money, with higher payments, and paid parental leave will be getting superannuation for the first time. So, in retirement, those people will be $4½ thousand dollars better off. They're getting more flexibility, with parents able to take more time off together, and more people are eligible than ever before. Of course, when those parents get back to work, they also benefit from cheaper child care—thousands of dollars off the cost of child care.

But, of course, those opposite have always been deeply divided on paid parental leave, from the days of Treasurer Hockey calling mums getting their paid parental leave 'double dippers' and the former prime minister Scott Morrison calling them 'rorters'—'double dippers,' by the way, was on Mother's Day, in a stunning act of timing!—to, more recently, the member for Goldstein saying to me: 'PPL is a very bad scheme. It's not my choice that women have children—it's genetic.'

Of course, if that's not enough, we've had the members for New England, Bowman, Barker and Canning try and hijack the debate on Baby Priya's bill. To her credit, the Leader of the Opposition properly supported that bill and, indeed, it should have been above politics. Instead, we had these blokes trying to hijack the debate, implying that women would get pregnant and have a late-term abortion to receive an entitlement to paid parental leave.

While the Liberals and Nationals continue to be divided on paid parental leave, on this side of the House we are absolutely clear: we support families, we support new mums, we support those families with their beautiful new babies and, if a family has that terrible tragedy of stillbirth, we will support them too.

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