Double dipping. The catchphrase was never going to go down well — especially when applied to new mothers, as the Abbott government has been doing in the past week while trying to sell its trimmed-down paid parental leave scheme.
Convincing the electorate that new mothers are rorters and fraudsters is a tough, probably impossible, sell. Now, with the revelation that even some of Abbott’s own ministers “double dipped” on paid parental leave — or, as assistant treasurer Josh Frydenberg put it, “we accessed both schemes as my wife was entitled to” — the whole lie has been exposed.
Finance Minister Mathias Cormann went one step further when pushed on the issue:
“Let me confirm … that I have indeed had a little child in 2013 and that our family of course worked within a system that was available at the time like any other family and that my family will work within whatever system is in place in the future.”
Well, yes, exactly, minister. So how and why did this become double dipping?
Has the communications adviser who came up with this soundbite been sacked? He or she should be.
“that I have indeed had a little child” things must work differently in Begium. Maybe the electorate was supposed to eat him after that.
Frankly disgusted at Abbott & Coy ongoing populist villification of “Double dipping public servants” and failure of Shorten & Coy to take govt to task on this.
Public servants pay and conditions are the outcome of negotiated agreements. Particularly at more senior levels, the pay is poor vis a vis the private sector but partly compensated by more enlightened terms and conditions such as PPL. What makes it suddenly OK to unilaterally remove one such condition? More dog whistling by a fundamentally dishonest Prime Minister, desperate to stay in power at any cost.
I agree that the language used, fraudsters and rorters, is not acceptable. But this situation should never have arisen in the first place.
It is said that approximately 50% of mothers are currently in the position of having eligibility for two PPL schemes. As far as I’m aware, no one has had ANYTHING to say about the other 50% of mothers who can only access the government scheme of 18 weeks. Not to mention the so-called stay at home mothers who get nothing!
If we are going to talk about fairness and equality, then I propose that ALL mothers be treated the same. What makes some women and some babies more important than others?It should then be possible, with a combination of work and government PPL, for all
(Cont). mothers and newborns to have six months at home before returning to work.
And don’t run away with the idea that stay at home mothers don’t ‘work’. If that was the case, why do we need child-care workers to look after the off-spring of mothers in the workforce?
I’m with CML. Nothing annoyed me more than watching a colleague on a huge wage getting the very generous paid maternity leave of my employer, and also getting the government payment.
As the vast majority of people who are getting paid maternity leave are either employed by government, in which case the taxpayer pays twice, or they are employed by big corporates, and that is also subsidised through the tax system.
If they are getting paid by their employer they shouldn’t receive the govt payment, that is not just reasonable and fair, it’s fixing what was an obvious flaw in the initial payment.
On equity grounds it is an incredibly difficult argument to carry, that those who have should have more.
But yes, they could have couched this differently. It is double dipping, but they could have used softer language.