From 1 January 2011, Australian families in which a mother was in the paid workforce before the birth or adoption of a baby may be eligible for a new Australian Government-funded Paid Parental Leave (PPL) scheme. The scheme provides eligible parents with up to 18 weeks of Parental Leave Pay, paid at the National Minimum Wage, following the birth of a child.

The Australian Government seeks to achieve three main objectives in introducing the scheme:

• to enhance the health of babies and mothers, and the development of children, by enabling working mothers to spend longer at home with their newborn children
• to facilitate women’s labour force participation
• to encourage gender equity and improve the balance of family and work life in Australian families.

An independent evaluation of the PPL scheme was completed over four phases between 2010 and 2014. This report presents the results of Phase 3 of the PPL evaluation which used data collected between July and December 2012, along with baseline data collected in Phase 1 and data collected for Phase 2 in July and August 2011. It focuses on the short-term and intermediate outcomes of the PPL scheme.

Short term outcomes covered in this report include the progress of the scheme and its operation since the Phase 2 study. Intermediate outcomes examined here include trends in new parents’ leave-taking and duration of leave, and employers’ experiences of and attitudes towards the scheme, including comparisons with employer’s attitudes in Phase 2 of the evaluation and any changes to their parental leave policies and practices.

Phase 3 reports on data from the following studies: 

• FaWCS (Family and Work Cohort Study) – a two-wave longitudinal survey of PPL eligible mothers who gave birth in October or November 2011. Data used in Phase 3 primarily concerns parents’ leave eligibility and use in the first year after the birth. To assess change since the introduction of PPL, these outcomes are compared with those observed in the Baseline Mothers Survey (BaMS) – a survey of mothers who gave birth in October or November 2009 before the introduction of PPL.
• EMPERIA (Employer Impact Analysis survey) – a survey of employers who provided PLP to employees. Results from EMPERIA are compared with those from a similar survey of employers who provided PLP to employees immediately following the commencement of the compulsory employer role (the Employer Implementation Phase Evaluation Study – EIPE).
• Qualitative, in-depth interviews with a sample of PPL eligible mothers who gave birth in October or November 2011.
• Qualitative, in-depth interviews with a sample of employers who provided PLP to employees in July and August 2012.
• Administrative data provided by the Department.