The issue of paid maternity leave is coming back in the political agenda this week, with calls for working women to be entitled to paid leave for one year after giving birth.
This bold plan was put forward by Australian government's key adviser on women's issues, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick on May 21.
The scheme, if carried out, would deliver major benefits for 300,000 working mothers.
Maternity leave is not mandated in Australia, but is left to the discretion of the employer. Until now, maternity leave has been an issue Australia's major political parties have preferred to avoid, reluctant to foot the bill for a government-funded scheme and unwilling to face the political pain that would come with forcing the cost on to employers. Employers have made it very clear they don't want to have to pay it.
To many Australian women, the endless debate about paid maternity leave in Australia has become an embarrassment.
In 1973, 12 weeks' paid maternity leave was introduced for commonwealth public servants, which was intended to be a pacesetter for the private sector.
In 2000, the UN International Labor Organization (ILO) recommended 14 weeks' paid leave. Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. were the only ILO countries that refused to ratify this convention.
According to a recent research made by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, only one-third of Australian women have access to paid maternity leave -- and they are mostly educated, professional, higher-paid women working in large companies or in the public service. Women in less skilled or less secure work -- hospitality workers, for instance - get nothing.
In modern times, with most mothers working at least part-time, who should pay for women to stay at home in the crucial first weeks? It's time -- it 's beyond time -- that Australian women had government-paid maternity leave, Le Lam, the mayor of Auburn city in New South Wales, told Xinhua in a recent interview.
"It is about the equality between women and men. And the government should do something about it," she said.
According to a Newspoll commissioned by the National Federation of Australian Women, 80 percent of men and 76 percent of women would support a paid maternity leave scheme in which costs are shared by government, employers and employees, with support particularly strong among 18 to 24 year olds.
Some economists say that the problems are partly with the small and medium enterprises which could not afford to pay their employees on maternity leave.
A statistics issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2005 showed that the bigger the organization, the more likely its female staff are likely to take leave when pregnant or soon after the birth. In small business with less than 20 staff, 45 percent of women took no leave at all when pregnant and after the birth of their child -- suggesting they may have simply quit their jobs -- compared to just 16 percent for those companies with 100 plus staff.
So far, the Rudd government was still hesitant in making a clear-cut decision about the maternity leave. As a female member of parliament said, "the losers in this are not just the families involved, but the entire society".
Source: Xinhua
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