Fairer Paid Parental Leave

Matt Taylor

    Research output: Working paper

    Abstract

    Australia spends just under $1.4 billion (201213) on statutory Paid Parental Leave (PPL) to provide more than 130,000 parents with up to 18 weeks of parental leave paid at the full-time minimum wage. The Abbott government proposes to pay primary carers at their pre-birth wages up to a cap of $100,000 for up to 26 weeks. This policy would dramatically increase government outlays on statutory PPL by over $3 billion by 201617. This report describes how an Income Contingent Loans (ICL) scheme could be used to provide wage replacement paid parental leave for Australian parents. This scheme would provide the same social benefits that the current statutory PPL provides and meet the gender equity objectives of the Coalitions proposal. In contrast to the current and proposed statutory PPL policy, a PPL loans scheme would align the costs of PPL payments with those who benefit from them. The proposed PPL loans scheme is modelled using representative data on Australian families with young children from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey and the distributional implications compared with current and proposed PPL policy
    Original languageEnglish
    Place of PublicationNSW, Australia
    PublisherCentre for Independent Studies
    Pages1-40pp
    ISBN (Print)9781922184313
    Publication statusPublished - 2014

    Publication series

    Name
    ISSN (Print)2201-7615

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