I'm glad to see from the

I'm glad to see from the interview that the parental leave is not simply maternal leave, and this perhaps should be emphasised some more in press releases about the proposal.

For a more socially-just society, we need to encourage men to be fathers, as well as women to be mothers. I think that society is ahead of the law in this regard, I've known quite a few men who stopped paid work to be fathers.

I think we can do without parental leave at all; the public need not subsidise every lifestyle choice we make so that we need suffer no financial disadvantage from it. That's life, we make choices, and gain some things and lose others. But if we have any parental leave, it ought to be for both parents.

Business Impact Needs to Be Considered

Kiashu, well written, however there is the business side of the plan which also needs to be discussed.

Until I retired I was a departmental manager in a large Australian corporation that had a policy of allowing unpaid maternity / paternity leave (up to 12 months). In theory the policy was correct from an individual point of view, but was murder to implement from a departmental perspective.

For starters, departments are allocated an FTE complement (Full Time Employeee), which also incorporated part timer, casual employees, as a percentatge of a FTE. If somebody took maternity / paternity leave, they had to remain on the department FTE complement so in effect they cannot be replaced (legal requirement). The effect of this requires is that the workload from the leave taker to be redistributed through the remaining team members (obviously corporations or companies will not increase staff numbers to cover leave takers).

In my case, 2 women (technical specialists) out of a team of 6 needed to take maternity leave, requiring their workloads to be redistributed through out the remaining team members. To put it simply, there were 2 very unpopular women in the team, when others had to work long hours to cover the leave. I was lucky that the women kept in touch with the department during leave and decided to return to work early, job sharing (50% of an FTE each) so I was able to recruit another techo.

Another major issue I found was that leave takers (in technical environments) obviously lost seniority during their leave (if they took 6 or 12 months), and in a number of cases found their peers promoted while they were on leave. This did cause friction with those returning from leave.

We did try a number of alternatives to reduce impact to the department and remaining staff, and one of these was telecommuting (working from home), but gave up due to the major problems with this work mode (eg. workcover requirements to inspect home environments)

Where to from here. What will happen is that women of certain age groups, numbers will increase in low paying, low skill jobs, and decrease in their employment numbers elsewhere, where maternity leave has the potential to impact department productivity. Men applying for jobs will be assessed for their potential to want to take paternity leave. Sorry, but I would suggest that this is already happening with the reported numbers of women in senior management positions not increasing although more women are entering the workforce.