Labor has attacked the Coalition’s plans to limit paid parental leave for parents accessing both the government and their employer’s scheme.

On Sunday the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said the plan to limit so-called double-dipping would decrease income support for 80,000 mothers.

Last week the government gave notice it would reintroduce its paid parental leave bill, which lapsed when parliament was prorogued in April.

The bill prevents parents accessing both the government and their employer’s paid parental leave scheme, or limits federal government payments to a top-up of the employer’s scheme to the value of $11,500.

The fate of the bill is uncertain. Although Nick Xenophon indicated opposition to paid parental leave cuts before the election, the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) is still negotiating with the government on the bill before its party room of four makes a decision.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is also due to discuss the bill this week.

Parliament does not resume until 7 November, when the Senate will meet to consider government bills passed in the last sitting including the plebiscite enabling legislation and the Australian Building and Construction Commission bill.

The government’s industrial relations agenda was given a boost by One Nation’s announcement it would support the ABCC and registered organisations bills but it will spend the coming weeks negotiating support with NXT and other crossbench senators.

In the meantime, Senate committees will meet to inquire into the 2016 census debacle and the government’s bills to cap vocational education and training loans in a bid to restrain runaway loan growth from programs with poor-quality courses, low completion rates and unethical enrolment practices.

The Australian Human Rights Commission president, Gillian Triggs, may be recalled to explain a claim before another committee she has since retracted that she had been misquoted in an interview with the Saturday Paper in which she described politicians as “usually seriously ill-informed”.

The Coalition and Labor will be keen to move on from internal party divisions in the last week, after Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull contradicted each other on the existence of a deal on shotgun importation and went head to head with duelling motions for party reform at the New South Wales Liberal state conference.

On Sunday Shorten said that employer paid parental leave schemes were a condition “negotiated to offset wage rises” workers otherwise would have got, whereas the government’s scheme is a “minimum standard”.



“Why should nurses, or shop assistants or other people who have foregone pay rises in lieu of getting a paid parental benefit now be slugged because they’ve negotiated these conditions and not get the minimum paid parental leave?”

The shadow minister for families and social services, Jenny Macklin, said the planned parental leave cut was particularly unfair on women “who are pregnant right now [and] face the prospect of massive cuts to their paid parental leave arrangements if their baby is born after 1 January 2017”.

But the social services minister, Christian Porter, said more than half the parents who used the scheme – about 90,000 – would not be affected by the changes.

“Currently a parent earning $140,000 annually can receive a combined government and employer PPL amount of more than $44,000 – this is more than another parent working a minimum wage will earn in an entire year and that is not fair,” he told AAP in a statement.

The government has previously estimated that cuts to paid parental leave will save almost $1bn over the forward estimates but business groups have warned employers will simply stop offering paid leave, reducing any potential savings.