Aussies make decision on parental leave

A landmark industrial relations decision did not mean workers automatically had the right to take up to two years' parental leave, Prime Minister John Howard told a television news programme.

Australia's Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) today granted 1.6 million award workers the right to ask for up to two years' unpaid parental leave and for working mothers to ask for part-time employment until their children go to school.

But Mr Howard said employers did not have to grant the requests.

"What the industrial relations commission did today was to confer upon employees under awards the right to ask for those things -- they didn't confer those things unconditionally," Mr Howard told Sky News.

"What the IRC said was you can ask for those things and an employer is only obliged to give them if he is able to do so and it doesn't result in inefficiencies or unreasonable costs."

Mr Howard said the IRC decision backed his government's push for more flexible workplace arrangements, with employers and their staff able to bargain conditions and pay.

"What the IRC was really doing was to say that at the end of the day things like that are a matter of negotiation between employers and employees," he said.

"That is a reinforcement of our policy approach and ... under our policy it is far more likely that employees will get those sorts of benefits than it would be under the policies that the unions and the Labour Party are espousing.

"The essence of our policy is that you negotiate arrangements at the workplace which suit both employers and employees and any good employer will bend over backwards to accommodate the family needs and family circumstances of employees."

Mr Howard said there was nothing in the decision to change his view that individual bargaining was the best way to arrange the work-family balance.

- AAP