Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just imagine getting a phone call telling you that your mother had just been murdered by your father. Can you think of anything more shocking, more terrible and more life-changing? That's what happened to a constituent of mine, Armani Haydar. Three years ago, her mother was murdered by her father in her home in Bexley. Her mother was brutally stabbed 30 times in front of Armani's younger sister. Armani's sister was injured trying to fight her father off with her bare hands. When her mum died, Armani was five months pregnant and working as a solicitor at a firm in Sydney, and suddenly her life had been turned upside down. In addition to the grief and the trauma of losing the person who had brought her into this world, she now became a mother for her younger sisters. She had to take time off work and bring them into her home just as she was getting ready to become a mother herself.

Why am I telling the parliament this story? It's because of this: when Armani went to Centrelink a few months later to lodge her paid parental leave application, it was rejected. It was rejected because she didn't meet the required work test. The work test requires you to have worked 10 out of the last 13 months before your baby is born. Because Armani stopped work at five months pregnant, when her mum was murdered, she didn't meet that test. She missed it by five days.

There are exemptions built into the law for the work test, but domestic violence isn't one of them. There are two exemptions: the first is a pregnancy related illness and the second is a premature birth. Both of those exemptions make a lot of sense, but so does an exemption for domestic violence—so does an exemption for what happened to Armani. At the moment, if you're pregnant and you take time off work because you've been abused by your partner, or you're trying to get out of an abusive relationship, or you take time off work to grieve the murder of your mother by your father, you run the real risk, like Armani did, of losing access to paid parental leave. Given all of the evidence that pregnancy can increase the risks of domestic violence, and that financial uncertainty is one of the reasons that some women are reluctant to leave an abusive relationship, I don't think this makes sense. That's why, today, I'm urging the government to have a look at this and to change the law to help people like Armani.

Last year, Armani's father was sentenced to 22 years in jail. Armani now has two children—a three-year-old little girl and a two-year-old little boy. Armani eventually got her paid parental leave after a bit of help from my office and the intervention of the former Minister for Social Services, Christian Porter. I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank him for that. But she shouldn't have had to do that. She shouldn't have had to contact me or beg the minister—not with everything else she was going through at the time. What if she hadn't contacted my office? What if she hadn't written to the minister? What if she'd just accepted what Centrelink had told her? What if she just clicked on the paid parental leave website, read what it said, worked out that she was ineligible and didn't even put in an application? What if she was so overwhelmed by having to deal with all of the needs of her new baby and so traumatised by her mum's death that she didn't keep fighting like she did? That's why we need to change this law—not for Armani, but for the others that will follow her.