Election 2023 editorial: Parental leave as a political football

Prime Minister and Labour leader Chris Hipkins reading to children at the Brooklyn Kindergarten in Wellington this week, before announcing the party's paid parental leave policy. Photo / Mark Mitchell

EDITORIAL

One outcome already from Election 2023 is the abandonment of the artifice of proposing and opposing policy for the good of the country.

Labour made strides on this when its leader and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins this week gave his fulsome support for making paid parental leave more flexible, including allowing parents to take paid leave at the same time.

This is despite Labour recently killing a bill from National that would have enabled just this.

Labour’s policy would allow a partner to take four weeks of leave after the birth of a child, whether or not the main carer was using the 26 weeks paid parental leave scheme.

Introduced in stages, starting with two weeks of partner leave from July 2024, lifting to three weeks in July 2025 and the full four weeks in July 2026, it’s been costed at $230 million for the first four years – about $70m to $75m a year once the full four weeks are in place.

The very recent instance of National’s deputy leader Nicola Willis championing such a move put her leader Christopher Luxon in the peculiar position of pouring cold water on Labour’s policy without ruling it out.

Luxon said partner leave would be good for families and National would look “very closely” at whether it was affordable.

“We think it would be fantastic for New Zealand families and parents. The key issue is the affordability of it ... it’s really important that we are prudent with and responsible with taxpayers’ money and that we can actually afford to do it.” He added there would be more details on National’s plans in an upcoming families policy package.

Some cynism could be excused over these manoeuvres being about what is good for families.

Willis attempted to bring similar change two weeks ago with the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Shared Leave) Amendment Bill, giving parents the flexibility to split up to 26 weeks of paid parental leave between spouses or other carers to take it at the same time or to overlap it. Currently, primary carers cannot take parental leave together.

National deputy leader Nicola Willis had her proposal for share parental leave voted down at the first reading earlier this month. Photo / Mark Mitchell, File

Willis’ premature cries of “Oh, happy day!” were stifled when Labour, still the majority party, voted it down. On realising her election-eve trophy was disappearing, she accused Labour of opposing the amendment “because we don’t want Nicola Willis to get a win”.

Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni later said there were merits in looking at it some time, “but not enough work has been done on it to date”. Two weeks later, somehow enough work has been done.

The policy may be moot anyway. The UK introduced shared parental leave in 2015 and found very little uptake and failed to deliver any further measurable equality in parenting.

However, it does appear inevitable now that both major New Zealand parties support it. They’ll just need to introduce it when the other party hasn’t the capacity to block it.

Meanwhile, parents will have to carry on parenting as best as they can.