Inquiry into the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Flexibility Measures) Bill 2020

This submission is being made by The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW).

NFAW is dedicated to promoting and protecting the interests of Australian women, including intellectual, cultural, political, social, economic, legal, industrial and domestic spheres, and ensuring that the aims and ideals of the women’s movement and its collective wisdom are handed on to new generations of women. NFAW is a feminist organisation, independent of party politics and working in partnership with other women’s organisations.

Paid Parental Leave (PPL) affects women and men in different ways; it is not gender neutral. This submission responds to the terms of reference through a gender lens. NFAW is a strong supporter of PPL, and was part of the coalition that promoted the policy prior to the Productivity Commission Report1 (Productivity Commission, 2009) that led to the introduction of PPL. In that report the Productivity Commission identified the following commonly agreed objectives (at p XIV):

• generate child and maternal health and welfare benefits by increasing the time parents take away from work. The Commission estimates that the average absence will increase by ten weeks. Many more families would have an increased capacity to provide exclusive parental care for children for six to nine months

• promote some important, publicly supported social goals, and in particular, that having a child and taking time out for family reasons is viewed by the community as part of the usual course of work and life for parents in the paid workforce

• counter some of the incentives against working posed by the tax and welfare system – potentially contributing around six months of net additional employment for the average woman over her lifetime • increase retention rates for business, with reduced training and recruitment costs.

 

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