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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3575 ..

Senator Stott Despoja introduced a private members bill in the Senate to establish a system of paid maternity leave for Australia, as we were only one of two OECD countries without paid maternity leave. The democrats propose 14 weeks government funded leave at the rate of the minimum wage or, if a female employee usually earns less than this, at her normal wage. There is also the flexibility for this to be topped up through additional payments or periods of leave, locally negotiated between employer and employee. The estimated cost of this program would be around $352 million a year.

In developing this legislation, the democrats consulted extensively with employers, unions, community and women’s organisations. It was widely agreed that small business could not afford the added cost of providing paid leave to their female employees, hence the role for government.

Many larger companies in Australia now recognise that it makes more sense to retain employees that have young families than lose experienced and valuable workers. Businesses cannot afford to lose talent, expertise and productivity of working women, just because they decide to have a baby.

As business and the wider community increasingly recognise the value of paid maternity leave, the onus is on all of us to continue the debate about balancing work and family, to ensure that all governments understand why paid maternity leave is an essential part of the mix. It is more than politics. We all benefit from the creation of the next generation, not just in terms of tax revenue and productive work.

I appreciate that the ACT government does not have the resources available to fund a universal paid maternity leave scheme for the territory. However, we should be doing whatever we can to encourage businesses to fund parental and adoption leave for their staff. So this bill, in its modest way, provides some financial rewards to large employers who offer paid maternity or adoption leave. For that reason, I am glad to extend the support of the ACT democrats to this bill.

MRS CROSS (8.22): The Payroll Tax Amendment Bill 2004 provides a payroll tax exemption to employers who provide paid maternity, adoption and/or primary carer leave for ACT employees. As a long-time advocate of private sector paid maternity leave, I applaud the government on this incentive and will be supporting this bill.

The benefits of paid maternity leave are numerous. Not only does it go some way towards addressing the female disadvantage in the labour force, but also it is likely to encourage more women to have children, thus increasing our population and our future tax base. Paid maternity leave assists with the large costs of childbirth and it also contributes significantly to reducing the attrition rate of women in the workforce, which certainly saves employers significant sums in recruitment and training costs.

The Women’s Electoral Lobby put it well when they said that paid maternity leave “helps Australian households adjust to the difficult transitions that are part and parcel of the arrival of a new child, as well as the complicated return to work phase”. These benefits were recognised by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission when, in its 2002 report Valuing Parenthood, it advocated “some form of universally accessible paid maternity scheme”. Similarly, International Labour Organisation

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