Treasurer Joe Hockey has taken a swipe at employers who may drop their parental leave schemes because of a government policy change, describing such a move as a "scam".
In the federal budget on Tuesday, the government outlined a plan to stop new mothers from accessing both the government leave scheme and that offered by their employer.
The $1 billion in budget savings - affecting both private sector and government workers - would be put into new child care arrangements.
Labor says the existing scheme works well and the government owes new mothers an apology for describing them as "double dippers" and rorters.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief Kate Carnell has said it's hard to see why employers would continue to pay parental leave if the government stopped providing the top-up.
Mr Hockey said on Friday if employers took that attitude it would regrettable.
"A good employer offers a fair dinkum paid parental leave scheme to their employees and the government's scheme is meant to be a safety net," Mr Hockey said.
"If they change the scheme to try and scam the government and scam taxpayers, well, that reflects on them as much as anything else."
He said the government had to find savings to pay for new spending on families.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott said it was particularly unfair that public servants received two rounds of taxpayer-funded parental leave.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said the government was attacking working women who had negotiated a few extra weeks of parental leave in return for not taking further pay rises.
"If employers and employees know that they're going to get penalised for negotiating better parental leave, they'll negotiate some other condition so there'll be no savings to the bottom line for the government," Mr Shorten said.
Mr Shorten said the government should stop saying "small business good, public servants bad".
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