Super to be added to paid parental leave from next year

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The Federal Government is promising to pay superannuation to parents on its paid parental leave scheme. Under the proposal mums and dads accessing the support will also get 12 per cent super.

Transcript

00:00 The plan is for this change to take effect from July 2025. So the government says the

00:08 costings of it will be in part of its May budget and then it will have to pass legislation.

00:14 So if and when it does pass that legislation, the change will take effect from mid 2025.

00:21 So what does this do? Well, the federal government says it addresses an outlier. They say that

00:25 you get paid super on sick leave and annual leave. And under this change, you would get

00:30 paid super on paid parental leave as well. Now, the paid parental leave or the PPL, as

00:37 people call it, that we're talking about here is the government paid parental leave. So

00:43 that's where you can access up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave. Now, that will increase

00:48 gradually to 26 weeks by mid 2026. And so the idea is that the minimum wage that you

00:56 get paid on that PPL, you get paid 12% rather of that into your super. Now, Finance Minister

01:04 and Minister for Women, Katie Gallagher, was addressing the National Press Club earlier

01:08 today and she referred to some recent ATO data which talked about the gender super gap

01:14 and it puts that at between 22 and 32%. So essentially, women, they're retiring with

01:20 far less money in their super and so the government is moving to address that. Now, the other

01:27 element of paid parental leave is that some businesses pay PPL as well. And so there was

01:33 a recommendation from the Women's Economic Equality Report and that recommended legislating

01:40 the payment of superannuation on all forms of PPL. So businesses would have to pay super

01:45 on PPL as well. Now, I asked the Minister for Women, Katie Gallagher, that at the National

01:50 Press Club today. Take a listen to her response. We're going to legislate our system first.

01:55 So the first priority is the announcement today. And then, you know, we will continue

02:00 to work with employers on these matters. I mean, that's this national strategy for gender

02:05 equality is exactly about this, is about how we bring business, community, government together

02:10 to look at the issues. Government can't solve these on their own. But our position at the

02:15 moment would be that, you know, we're showing the leadership that we needed to show on this

02:20 and over to employers that don't. And I think increasingly, their employees will be expecting

02:26 this of them. The more it becomes a standard workplace condition or workplace entitlement,

02:31 which is what super is, the more likely that employers will recognise that. And many, many

02:37 have. I mean, in some respects, the government is lagging the private sector where these

02:42 arrangements already operate. Now, the cost of this, so how much it will cost in the budget,

02:48 isn't quite clear yet. But the minister there has put it at somewhere in the hundreds of

02:53 millions of dollars per year.

02:55 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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