You cannot dismantle paid parental leave when you can’t even explain it, writes Rita Nasr on Senator Pauline Nation’s comments about new mothers.
Pauline Hanson stood before the National Press Club last week and asked, “Why should business pay them if they are not at work?” It was, she suggested, “fair enough” if women simply went without pay when they took time off to have a child.
By Tuesday morning this week, Hanson was on the Channel 7 morning show, insisting those comments had been “taken completely out of context” — even though videos of her remark are available to anyone.
What is alarming but unsurprising is not that Hanson said what she said; it is that she demonstrably does not understand how paid parental leave works in this country, and she has sat in the Australian parliament, on and off, for nearly thirty years.
Here is the basic fact she appears to have missed: Businesses do not pay for the federal government’s paid parental leave scheme. Taxpayers do. The policy provides 24 weeks of paid leave at the national minimum wage of $948.10 per week, rising to 26 weeks from July 1. The government provides these funds through employers or, if any administrative burden is too great for a small business, directly to the employee. Employers are separately required to provide 12 months of unpaid parental leave. That is it. That is the so-called burden on small businesses. Some employers choose to offer employees additional paid parental leave, often to new parents regardless of gender — this is their choice, typically made based on the strong business case for parental leave.
When Hanson told Channel 7 that small businesses would “go under” if forced to pay for parental leave, she was describing a system that does not exist and is not one that is being proposed. No one is forcing them to pay. No one has been forcing them to pay since the scheme was introduced in 2011. Yet here she is, shaping the public conversation around dismantling something she cannot accurately describe.
Getting here took generations of women fighting for something they were told was unreasonable, unnecessary and unaffordable.
Australia’s first formal provision of paid maternity leave came in 1973, when union advocacy spurred the Whitlam Labor Government to introduce the Maternity Leave (Commonwealth Employees) Act, giving federal public servants 12 weeks of paid leave. Private sector workers had nothing comparable. In 1979, the ACTU brought a landmark test case to the Arbitration Commission, establishing 52 weeks of unpaid maternity leave as a standard entitlement. Employers and conservative groups fought it vigorously. They said it was unworkable, that it would cost too much. Sound familiar?
The right to parental leave was extended to fathers in 1990 and to casual workers in 2001 after yet another union campaign. And still Australia lagged. By the time the Gillard government introduced the national Paid Parental Leave scheme in 2011, more than 120 nations already provided some form of paid maternity leave. We were an outlier. Before the Senate vote, more than 25,000 people signed a petition in support of the scheme in under a month. The message from working families was unambiguous ‘we need this’.
When Hanson invoked her own experience of raising children as a single mother with “no assistance, no help from anyone,” she repeated an argument that has been used to resist progress on women’s rights for decades. The logic goes I endured it, so you can too.
I did not have paid parental leave for my first two children either. But I, alongside countless other women, fought hard to ensure that families coming after us would not have to choose between maintaining their livelihood and having children. The point of social progress is not to make sure everyone suffers equally. It is to build a society where people suffer less.
There’s a strong case for paid parental leave. Research consistently shows it leads to better health outcomes for mothers and infants, improved breastfeeding rates and duration, and stronger long-term workforce participation for women. Nearly one in two Australian women have returned to work sooner than they wanted to due to inadequate leave provisions. The pressure to return before they are ready harms those women, their children and the economy.
Hanson’s comments do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of a broader right-wing political playbook playing out in real time, and we only need to look at the United States to see where it leads. The dismantling of support structures for women is accelerating.
The bitter irony is that the same right-wing conservatives driving these rollbacks are the loudest voices lamenting falling birth rates. They wring their hands about demographic decline while stripping away the scaffolding that makes it possible for women to have children and remain economically stable. Paid parental leave, accessible childcare, and reproductive healthcare are not welfare handouts. They are the structures that enable women to participate fully in both family and economic life. Remove them and you do not get more babies. You get women forced to choose.
Hanson said on Tuesday she supports 26 weeks of taxpayer-funded parental leave and would never force businesses to pay. Both positions are consistent with current law, which means she has either been opposing a phantom policy or she has spent decades in parliament without understanding the one she was opposing. Neither is acceptable.
Even hinting at rolling back paid parental leave is an attack on families, and particularly on women. The generation that fought for this entitlement knew that. The generation that will depend on it knows it too. We did not get here by accident. We must not go back.