Parental leave inquiry is investigating the obvious

Lets further suppose that you actually hired the pregnant 26 year old and had to put on a replacement while the 26 year old was on parental leave. How would you react if the replacement turned out to be the better worker? The law requires that the original staff member get her job back irrespective.

A further way of examining the issue is to suppose that, instead of pregnant women, it was redheads that were entitled to an 18 week bout of leave funded by the government (similar to paid parental leave) and up to a year of unpaid leave a couple of times during the their working lives (let's say at ages 26 and 28). How would we expect employers to react in terms of propensity to recruit redheads aged under 30?

Arbitrary discrimination, such as treating one group of people more favourably than another of similar ability, make no common sense in business. On the other hand, if we are asked not to discriminate in situations where such anti-discrimination appears to have a financial or organisational cost, there is an incentive not to comply. It is also probably safe to assume that, had employers rather than the Government been burdened with funding leave under the Paid Parental Leave Scheme, discrimination against employees taking parental leave would be far more widespread.

Employer discrimination against employees taking parental leave won't easily be measured. Like nepotism and other forms of discrimination it will be dressed up as something else (e.g. choosing the most qualified applicant) and buried by employers within the recruitment and firing processes.

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick is set to oversee a national survey to assess discrimination relating to pregnancy at work and return to work after parental leave. Employers are most unlikely to admit to wilful discrimination and employee perceptions of discrimination are often exaggerated, so it is unclear how reliable the survey results will be. A section of bureaucrats (perhaps assisted by a consultancy or two) will probably undertake further research and policy development on the topic, and cost a tidy sum. This all sounds like an inquiry into the "bleeding obvious" (as well as perhaps a parting gesture by Gillard to the Sisterhood) and the money would probably be better off spent elsewhere.

Using the "anti-discrimination police" is but one option in combating discrimination against employees taking parental leave. An alternative might be to consider some form of compensation to affected employers. This of course might need to be costly to be effective.

Overall, current policy promotes a model where women are incentivised by Government to never leave the workforce, except for short bouts of paid maternity/parental leave, and this now involves substantial public expenditures to fund paid parental leave and subsidised child care. Such expenditures now involve a considerable element of middle class welfare with dual income families being major beneficiaries. Along the way traditional self-reliance on the part of comfortably well-off families seems to have gone by the wayside, and any family where the mother stays at home while her children are very young, is penalised financially.