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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3577 ..

Sooner rather than later we will have a system in Australia that makes paid maternity leave available to all. This is my dream and the dream of many other women. Women should not have to suffer disadvantage because of pregnancy. Women should not be discriminated against based on sex.

Women deserve to have real choices and paid maternity leave allows for this. In July 2002, whilst a delegate at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Conference in South Australia, I tabled two papers: one was the discrimination bill which had passed earlier that year and the other was a paper on paid maternity leave. It was a scheme that I had been working on for some years. In simple terms it showed that, contrary to what most Australians thought, the cost to fund paid maternity leave in this country was in fact minimal.

Going back a number of years when I was putting this paper together, I asked the Australians I surveyed the following question: “How much do you think it would cost to fund paid maternity leave?” They said, “We don’t know”. I asked them how much they thought they were paying in tax to fund education, unemployment, the ABC, and a number of incentives and initiatives. Those initiatives ranged anywhere from $100 a year to $1500 a year.

The cost to the private sector to fund paid maternity leave is the cost of one cappuccino a month. The cost is minimal. Yet no-one was able to put it down in simple terms until this analysis was done. And still we, in this country, rather than insist or enforce a paid maternity leave scheme funded by the taxpayer—incidentally since 1973 the taxpayer has funded a paid maternity leave scheme for the public sector—discriminate against women in business, who are funding paid maternity leave for women in the public sector. Hopefully one day someone will have the courage, the incentive to have this passed. Although this bill does not create a system of universal paid maternity leave, it does promote paid maternity leave in the private sector and therefore has my support.

MS GALLAGHER (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for Children, Youth and Family Support, Minister for Women, and Minister for Industrial Relations) (8.29): The Payroll Tax Amendment Bill provides ACT employers with a very real incentive to make available paid maternity, adoption and/or primary carer leave by allowing an exemption from payroll tax for wages paid to employees who qualify for these types of leave.

An increasing number of ACT women are employed in the private sector. For these women, employers taking advantage of the payroll tax exemption will signal an important step forward. It will bring the ACT to the forefront of encouraging family friendly policies and flexible employment opportunities. The amendment will increase options and economic support for working women and men who wish to raise children.

The provision for primary carer leave as well as maternity and adoption leave acknowledges changing work and family responsibilities for women and men, and paves the way for greater gender equity in parenting and in balancing work and family commitments. At present Australia is only one of two OECD countries without provision for compulsory maternity leave. The ACT government has implemented several measures aimed at redressing this position created by the Commonwealth’s refusal to develop a national scheme of paid maternity leave.

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