I’ve taken two bouts of paid parental leave, both while I was a public servant with excellent additional maternity leave provisions. I received 18 weeks at minimum wage under government PPL (introduced by Rudd in 2011), and 14 weeks at full pay from my employer. This meant I was able to spread the funds to essentially a part time salary and get around 9 months in total at home before re-entering paid work, part time. This was a fairly common calculation and arrangement in my circle of friends who had children around this time.
My first child was born in 2016. And because for many people parenting and family policy is quickly forgotten once your baby era is over, I just want to take a little walk down memory lane.
The 2010’s was a wild time in politics. Many will remember the 2014 federal budget as one with wide ranging cuts, including to community and social services – a lot of not for profits lost funding in this budget. At the 2013 election, the Liberals had a PPL policy which would have given women six months of leave at their actual salary. By the 2015 budget, this policy had been ditched, and then Treasurer Joe Hockey, was dubbing parents who took both government and employer paid parental leave as “double dippers”, “rorters and fraudsters”. Noting here that a co-contribution was always part of the policy design intent.
There was a fair bit of back and forth at this point when Abbott declared that the election policy was intended to in fact end the “double dipping”, and they costed a budget saving of nearly $1b over 4 years, affecting 40% of new mothers, into the 2015 budget.
In the end there was huge political backlash, and the Government didn’t have the numbers in the senate to pass the bill. But for someone wanting to fall pregnant in these years, it was whiplash of not knowing how to plan for your future, or if you could even afford to have a child at all. I remember reading the **newspaper** and following the debate on **twitter** to be across every shift in this debate.
So why am I having this nostalgic moment? Well, that first child is about to turn 10, and in that time PPL has almost doubled. We now have bipartisan support for paid parental leave, and the outrage following Hanson’s comments last week shows just how strongly supported and embedded this policy is for Australians.
So, I’m pointing out two truths I see in all family policy – one is that significant progress can be made and we can quickly forget how far we’ve come, and two, that politics can be harsh and ever changing, so we always have to protect progress in order to move forward.