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States Parties recognise that a mentally or physically disabled child should enjoy a full and decent life, in conditions which ensure dignity, promote self-reliance and facilitate the child's active participation in the community.

States Parties recognize the right of the child to education and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular:

States Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure that a child who is seeking refugee status or who is considered a refugee in accordance with applicable international or domestic law and procedures shall, whether unaccompanied or accompanied by his or her parents or by any other person, receive appropriate protection and humanitarian assistance in the enjoyment of applicable rights set forth in the present Convention and in other international human rights or humanitarian instruments to which the said States are Parties.

In accordance with the general principle stated at Guideline 2 and the UNHCR [1] Guidelines on Refugee Children, minors who are asylum seekers should not be detained…

The model proposed by HREOC has been costed by respected independent analysts NATSEM at $213m in 2003-04. In 2005-06, paid maternity leave would cost the Government $217m, which is $293m less than the Baby Bonus which relates only to one child per family and in which the full benefit cannot be reaped until five years after the birth of the child.

In order to be eligible for paid maternity leave a woman must have been in paid work (including casual employment, contract work and self-employment) for 40 weeks of the past 52 weeks with any number of employers and/or in any number of positions. Access to this payment will not be means tested. (Recommendation 5).

HREOC contracted the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) to undertake research into the cost of a national system of paid maternity leave. NATSEM has estimated that the net cost of HREOC's proposed paid maternity leave scheme would be $213 million in 2003-04.

Women incur significant workplace disadvantage from the onset of family responsibilities, not just in the immediate period following the birth of a child but over the longer term. This inevitably results in lessened economic security for women, including during retirement. The inequality of outcomes for men and women as a result of the shared duty of raising a family is self evident. While some may consider that this inequality is balanced by the communal nature of the family unit, modern family realities suggest that increasingly, economic disadvantage accrues to the individual.

Encouraging and providing assistance for parents to raise their children benefits all of us. Paid maternity leave is a mechanism which provides assistance to families so that they may better combine work and family responsibilities, to the benefit of the children, the workplace and the community. It may also have flow-on benefits for the fertility rate, community life and social cohesion.

The health and wellbeing of new mothers and babies is a fundamental argument for paid maternity leave. While income support measures may be designed to achieve a variety of outcomes, the need to ensure that women can afford to spend the first weeks of a child's life recovering from the birth and nurturing the baby requires a measure designed to provide this. The 14 weeks leave recommended by the International Labour Organization and the 16 weeks leave recommended by the World Health Organization are premised on this argument. [1]