Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I thank the member for Flinders for allowing this short interruption. For the information of honourable members, I present a petition on paid parental leave entitled ‘Time to deliver’. This morning the Prime Minister, the Minister for the Status of Women and I received this petition from 25,000 Australians calling on all members of parliament to support a paid parental leave scheme operational from 1 January next year. This petition has been coordinated by the ACTU and is a rollcall of all those Australians who have been waiting decades for a national paid parental leave scheme. Some 25,000 Australians have signed the petition and have signed up to the scheme that we have designed. Retail workers; nurses; teachers; university students; electricians; construction workers; workers in hospitality, finance, forestry, local government and the airlines; workers on the waterfront; rail, tram and bus drivers; schoolkids; mums; dads; and grandparents—the list goes on—are calling on their members of parliament to give Australian working families access to a fair national paid parental leave scheme.

The trade union movement in Australia has been at the forefront of the battle for paid parental leave for a long time. All of it is in the best interests of babies and their parents. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Sharan Burrow, the ACTU President, for her determination and leadership. We expect we are now days away from achieving a very significant step forward for Australian working families—a national government funded paid parental leave scheme that will give thousands of Australian families more time with their babies, a scheme that is fair to families and fair to businesses, a scheme that, as this petition shows, Australian families want.

It is a great privilege to have been able to table this petition with the support of the member for Sydney, the Minister for the Status of Women. We know that this is in the best interests of Australian working families and their children.

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This petition will now be referred to the Standing Committee on Petitions.