Government funded maternity leave? You mean taxpayer funded maternity leave - including those taxpayers who have made do without handouts when they have had children, and those who have never had children.

Personal greed and unrealistic views on gender roles brought on the necessity for women to work (whether they wanted to or not). If there is to be a tax on greed, let those who caused it pay.

Many mothers choose to stay at home to look after their children because they believe it is not in the best interest of their children to be institutionalised from a very early age. There is strong data to support this view.
Many also find that the rewards and challenges of raising children far exceed those of participating in the paid workforce.
Paid maternity leave discriminates against women who choose to stay at home and look after their children and it also devalues their contribution.
Families where the mother chooses to stay at home also pay tax.
These taxes are already used to subsidise childcare for working mothers.
These taxes will be used to subsidise paid maternity leave (if enacted) for "working" mothers.
Furthermore, the double incomes of families where the mother works put upward pressure on housing prices and hence reduce home affordability.
Families of stay-at-home mothers are therefore pushed further out of the housing market.
It is clear that mothers who choose to institutionalise their children for personal gain are already advantaged in comparison to mothers who choose not to institutionalise their children.
The government should seek to address the situation of the disadvantaged and discriminated against mothers who stay at home before considering maternity allowance for an already advantaged group of women.
Thereafter, any maternity allowance should be based on an equitable level of taxpayer funding between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers.

Children are not a right but a responsibility.

If someone wants children they must be prepared to pay the price of that responsibility

This is just more socialist drivel and levelling.

It is bunkum

It is the sort of garbage which has seen every other stupid socialist expectation of creating "heaven on earth" fail.

I am also against paid maternity leave. The reasons have been touched on by other posters.

Btw: An observation. When one is standing to the far Right, ANY initiatives to help others are looked on as Socialist drivel/Socialism by stealth. What utter twaddle!

If you view an image standing to the far right of it, it appears to be on the far left.

Something that has far more to do with YOUR position, than that which you view....

HOWEVER;- if you are standing SO much closer, you will clearly see how close to you your image is.

Such is life.

Yet another attempt to boost the concept of paid parental leave.

This one takes an interesting angle, new - to me at least - that attempts to place it into an international/legal/compliance framework. Which is a little bit concerning.

The acronym CEDAW is used on seventeen occasions. The words "discrimination" and "committee" occur twelve times each, while "protocol" (9), "rights" (8) and "victims" (5) are also prominent.

This tells me that the battle has moved out of the arena of common sense, personal responsibility and - one has to suspect - our own government's territory, and into those boggy marshes of international "yuman rights" law.

There is no possible justification to pay women for not working, simply because they have chosen to raise a family.

We managed perfectly well - some would say far better - when the choice was made without the distraction of welfare payments. This is simply another outgrowth of the dependency culture, exacerbated by the international yuman rights industry, which is itself the bastard offspring of a legal profession that has to invent new revenue streams for itself.

A pox on all their houses.

While I have a fair amount of sympathy for some paid maternity leave, due to the need of women to carry the children, the use of the discrimination card is a bit tenuous.

Based on equal rights, this would also imply paid paternity leave.

There are many solid arguments, discrimination is not one of them.