A false claim is being pumped out by Labor and the left about Pauline Hanson, that she wants to scrap paid parental leave. She never said it, and she does not. Yet on Wednesday, Tanya Plibersek stood up in Parliament and ran the same misrepresentation straight to the country. What she did not count on was our fact check.
Tanya Plibersek used Question Time to tell Parliament that Pauline Hanson wants to strip workers' rights and roll back paid parental leave. It is a distortion. Hanson backs the taxpayer funded scheme, and she has never called for it to be scrapped.
The claim traces back to Hanson's National Press Club address on Wednesday 17 June, where she questioned why businesses should be forced to pay wages to staff who are on leave and not working. Within a week she said the comments had been taken out of context, and that she supports the government funded scheme.
What Hanson actually said at the Press Club
The comments came in answer to a question about the gender pay gap, not as any plan to abolish a scheme. Hanson drew a line between leave funded by the taxpayer and leave forced onto an employer:
"If women take time off and they are not paid their wages because they're not working, fair enough. Why should business pay? But they're not at work. That's the difference. That's why the pay gap is there."
Read in full, she is explaining why a measured pay gap exists, time out of the workforce, and asking whether a small business should be compelled to carry that cost. She was talking about employer funded leave. She did not propose touching the government scheme.
What she said afterwards
On Tuesday 24 June she put the position beyond doubt:
"There's no way, shape or form that I am actually saying to get rid of it. I think it's very beneficial to women to get back into the workforce. So that was totally taken completely out of context. It's up to companies if they want to have it in their policy to give it to their workers. There are businesses that cannot afford it. It's OK for government, taxpayers pay for it."
What she actually wants
A clean split. Hanson backs the taxpayer funded government scheme and calls it beneficial. What she opposes is forcing businesses, especially small ones that cannot afford it, to fund leave on top. In her position, employer paid leave stays a choice for the company, not a mandate. That is consistent with the small business line she has held for years.
It also sits comfortably alongside the government scheme as it stands. From 1 July the government funded scheme expands to 26 weeks, shareable between parents, paying more than $1,000 a week, with superannuation paid on top since last year. Hanson is not proposing to wind any of that back.
Who actually pays for it
The government scheme is a taxpayer-funded safety net paid at the minimum wage. From 1 July it is worth $200.98 a day, about $1,004.90 a week, and roughly $26,127 in total for the full 26 weeks per family, with superannuation paid on top since July 2025. The program costs the federal budget in the order of $5 billion a year. Employer-paid leave is a separate industrial entitlement, often at full salary, that a company chooses to add on top.
That is the distinction at the heart of Hanson's argument. She supports the taxpayer-funded scheme that every Australian helps pay for. What she questions is forcing businesses, especially small ones that "cannot afford it," to fund a second scheme on top of the one taxpayers already cover.
Labor takes the misrepresentation to Parliament
On Wednesday 24 June, Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek used Question Time to tie One Nation to a rollback, telling the House that Hanson and One Nation "want to strip away workers' rights and roll back paid parental leave." Here is each charge set against the record.
| What Tanya Plibersek told Parliament | What Pauline Hanson actually said, and the record | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "They want to strip away workers' rights and roll back paid parental leave." | This bundles two separate claims. On parental leave: "There's no way, shape or form that I am actually saying to get rid of it." She backs the taxpayer-funded scheme and opposes only forcing employers to pay on top. The "workers' rights" charge is Labor's label for a separate Press Club point, her call to overhaul industrial relations laws, which she argues tilt too far against business and make it too hard to manage underperforming staff. | Misleading. The parental leave half is simply wrong, she supports the scheme. The "workers' rights" half relabels a separate industrial relations debate as an attack on entitlements. |
| "Since 2017, Senator Hanson has been saying she doesn't support paid parental leave." | The 2017 reference is the omnibus welfare bill, a $4 billion savings package. It raised the public scheme from 18 to 20 weeks for low-paid women while ending "double dipping," the stacking of the government payment on top of an employer scheme. Hanson's objection was that the scheme was too open to rorting, she argued the cuts did not even go far enough. She has long wanted the payment tightened against abuse, but wanting to tighten a scheme is not the same as wanting to abolish it, and she has never moved to scrap it. | Overstated. She has criticised the scheme's generosity since 2017, but "doesn't support paid parental leave" implies she wants it gone. She has never proposed scrapping it, and now backs the taxpayer scheme. |
| "More than a decade ago she said that women get themselves pregnant for the money." | She said it in February 2017, opposing the Coalition's $4 billion omnibus welfare bill. Speaking as a former single mother who said she "had no assistance, no help from anyone," she tied the payment to the Baby Bonus, widely reported as being gamed, and warned against a "welfare handout mentality." Her concern was a generous payment being rorted, not denying mothers support. | True but out of context. A 2017 argument about welfare design and rorting, not opposition to paid parental leave. It was 2017, not "more than a decade ago." |
| "A couple of weeks ago she said: 'You have the equipment. That's what you're here for.'" | There is no news report or dated primary source for this line. The only sourcing is footage circulated on social media by the ACTU and activist groups to attack her, with no verified date, setting or context. Without that, it cannot be established when she said it, where, or what she was actually talking about. | Unverified and unsourced. Presented to Parliament as a recent quote, but it rests only on activist-circulated footage, with no primary record of when or why it was said. |
| "At the Press Club, asked twice if she supported it, the ABC checked with her, she said she didn't support it." | There are two different things here, and Labor deliberately blurs them. Government-funded paid parental leave is the taxpayer scheme, paid at the minimum wage. Employer-paid leave is a separate top-up a company pays out of its own pocket. Hanson was talking about the second one: "Why should business pay? But they're not at work." She supports the taxpayer scheme and has said so plainly. Labor collapses the two into one so a question about whether business should be forced to pay looks like opposition to parental leave itself. It is not. | Misleading. It conflates the government scheme with employer-paid leave. Hanson objected to forcing employers, not to the taxpayer scheme she supports. |
| "Now that she's had pushback from Australian families, suddenly she's on board." | There was no backflip, and the claim that there was is false. You cannot reverse a position you never held. Hanson never called for the government scheme to be scrapped, not at the Press Club, not since. Her line has been the same the whole way through: the taxpayer scheme stays, businesses should not be forced to pay on top. The "pushback" story is invented to manufacture a reversal that never happened and to paint a steady position as panic. | False. There is no reversal. She held the same position before and after, so there was nothing to walk back. The backflip was manufactured, not reported. |
Plibersek's words are quoted from the official House of Representatives Hansard for Wednesday 24 June 2026.
Fire The Liar. Footage: House of Representatives broadcast / ParlView, Australian Parliament (24 June 2026)
Hanson was always telling the truth
The facts here are not complicated. Hanson backs the government scheme, the same one being expanded next week. Her only objection is to forcing small businesses to pay a second scheme on top of it. Plenty of employers hold exactly that view.
Plibersek stood up in Parliament and told the country the opposite. She took a quote from 2017, a separate argument about workplace laws and a clip nobody can source, and tied them together to claim Hanson wants parental leave gone. Hanson never said that. Nothing in the record says she did.
