Fair Agenda

"I believe every mum has the right to be home with their baby and care for them for as long as possible. Cutting the leave would mean mums having to go back to work sooner and have someone else raise their children. Quality time is hard enough to find these days, don’t take it away from new mums!"

"I’m a sole parent of twins and without that extra paid maternity leave that I received by being able to claim both my work pml and the government ppl my children and I would have suffered greatly. Getting both of these enabled me to remain at home for the full first 12 months of my girls life and ease them into a day care situation. I was also able to remain a breastfeeding mother throughout the first 12 months when I weaned them down to just night feeds for the remaining 9 months. I think it is vitally important that women are supported to be able to properly care for their children for as long as is possible to ensure the wellbeing of the children, the mother and the family as a whole. Not all women have the benefit of support of others in their life so let’s not also remove their financial support at such a vital time."

"Cutting this payment for me as a nurse with a paid scheme will push me into 2 options early daycare and therefore costing the government more money sooner, or my husband taking the paid parental leave. Either way the government doesn’t say money and our options are just limited it doesn’t make sense. It is important to note with my 2nd child I had to pay for daycare 3 months before I needed it to make sure I had a spot when I went to work."

"In many cases, the proposals will effectively reduce PPL to a maximum of 18 weeks, which is just not long enough for a mother to recover from birth, bond with her baby and provide the recommended levels of breastfeeding.

Even more worryingly, the changes undermine the public/business partnership which was established under the current scheme to normalise PPL in the workplace and bring us closer to meeting our international commitments on improving women’s workplace participation. If employers know that establishing their own PPL scheme will make employees ineligible for a government payment, why would they bother setting up a scheme? Under the current scheme, employers only have to offer their employees 8 weeks of paid leave to bring their worker’s entitlements up to the 6 months recommended for breastfeeding by the Department of Health and the World Health Organisation, because the other 18 weeks are contributed by the Government. That’s quite an incentive for business to normalise and support PPL in the workplace! Under the amended scheme, employers would have to cover the entire period themselves to give their employees the same benefit. We are concerned that the changes will see employers drop out of PPL, leaving the Government scheme to pick up the slack and offer a too-short period of leave to new Mums. If this happens, we may not see budget savings at all.

Normalising PPL in the workplace also has the benefit of working to reduce discrimination by employers against pregnant women, women on PPL and women returning to work. In their 2013 report, the Australian Human Rights Commission found that 48% (nearly one in two) women had experienced discrimination at work either before, during or after returning from PPL.

It’s also worth noting that employer-provided schemes are often negotiated at the expense of wage rises. Pushing women on to employer-only schemes may contribute to the gendered wage gap, as workplaces with high proportions of female employees are more likely to accept wage reductions in return for decent PPL.

Meanwhile, Mums who have had difficult births or whose children are not sleeping through the night at 18 weeks or who can’t get infant child care in their area or who have health or feeding problems may lose their connection to their employer if they can’t return to work within 18 weeks. Extending the length of available PPL increases the likelihood that women will return to work because the connection is maintained for a longer period."

"Lisa Nicholls"

"Eve Gibson"