KEY POINTS:
Parents look set to get more taxpayer-funded pay within the next few years after both major political parties yesterday welcomed a proposal to extend paid parental leave to a year.
The Families Commission has proposed a three-stage increase from the present 14 weeks' leave to six months initially,
then nine months and finally 12 months by 2015.
The plan, which also includes higher pay rates, would increase the total cost of paid parental leave from $95 million a year at present to $450 million.
Labour Minister Ruth Dyson welcomed the report and said it was a Government priority "to ensure paid parental leave can be accessed by even more working parents".
A 10-year Government plan promised last year to "work towards parental leave provisions that support parents who wish to care for their children in their first year of life while taking a break from paid work".
Her National counterpart, Kate Wilkinson, whose party voted against paid parental leave when it was introduced in 2002, said National only opposed it when it excluded self-employed people, and the party now supported it.
The party's speaker on family affairs, Judith Collins, said she would take the Families Commission proposal to the National caucus.
"It would have to go to caucus and have the costings done and be weighed up against other initiatives, but I'm generally not against it," she said.
"As a working woman myself, I could seriously have done with paid parental leave when I had a little child."
Only the right-wing think-tank the Maxim Institute sounded a contrary note. Its policy manager, Alex Penk, acknowledged that new parents faced financial pressures but suggested they should call on support from extended family and friends rather than taxpayers.
"They are the ones that are closest to the people that need help," he said.
"If we place more responsibility for children within the family, not only is that going to help meet the financial challenges, but in the process it's going to strengthen those intergenerational ties within families."
The Families Commission says New Zealand's current 14 weeks of paid parental leave is less than in any other Western country except Australia and the United States, which do not have it at all. New Zealand's current 14 weeks' leave at the maximum rate of $391.28 a week pays $5478.
A Labour Department evaluation published in May found that 56 per cent of all mothers of babies born in 2004-05 were eligible for paid leave, and a further 6 per cent were self-employed and would have become eligible when the scheme was extended to the self-employed last year.
The other 38 per cent were not eligible because they were not in paid work (26 per cent), had not worked for the same employer for the six months before the baby's due date (7 per cent) or worked less than 10 hours a week (4 per cent).
The Families Commission recommends scrapping the need to work at least six hours a week and extending paid leave to any parent who has worked at least six months in the year before giving birth.
It proposes that 14 weeks' leave for mothers to support their health and breastfeeding, and another four weeks for fathers or the mother's partner to encourage them to help with child-rearing.
A benefit for baby
Baby Kees Hemana, 10 months, would still be at home with his mum if the Government already provided a year's paid parental leave.
Single mother Renee Hemana, 20, went back to work when Kees was just six months old because she could not afford to stay on the domestic purposes benefit. But she didn't really want to leave him until he was at least "a year, if not longer". She says he loves the five hours a day he spends at the Awhina Whanau early childhood centre in East Tamaki, but she misses him. "I miss out on how he's learning and how he's doing every day."
She was still breastfeeding him when she started working from 9am to 2pm at the Plunket Society's Counties-Manukau office, and at first she tried expressing milk and sending it with him to the childcare centre.
She pays $160 a week for childcare, but reckons she is still about $200 a week better off through working part-time with a reduced benefit than she would have been on the benefit alone.
