Introduction

1. The NFAW has played a role in the public debate that has led to the Improved Support for Parents with Newborn Children Inquiry being undertaken by the Productivity Commission.

2. The origins of the NFAW role lay in the process of national consultations with women and their organisations during 2006 and 2007 on the impacts on their working lives of the former Government’s changes to the industrial relations system (WorkChoices). In consequence early NFAW discussions about a national system of paid maternity or paternity leave were framed around industrial relations policy.

3. In this context the NFAW, in association with the New South Wales Government Commission for Children and Young People, the National Initiative for the Early Years, and the Queensland Government Commission for Children and Young People, commissioned opinion polling from NewsPoll1 . This found a very high level of public support for the development of a national system of paid maternity leave, as well as support for the financing of such a system through tri-partite funding by government, employer and employees. There was a similarly high level of support for the proposition that more should be done to enable parents of very young children to spend time with them.

4. The previous Federal Government considered a number of reports on the issue, most notably from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, and from a Senate Committee established to examine the Democrats Private Senator’s Bill on a national Paid Maternity Leave Scheme. 5. However, some of the political reactions (both in the sense of formal party statements of policy and in public debate) implied that such a policy would in some way be divisive as between women in the workforce, and women as full-time carers. 6. NFAW considers that this is, and always has been, a false dichotomy.

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