Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not a member of this committee but I am very pleased that the committee has seen fit to have an inquiry into this matter. I commend all of those who participated in the inquiry and the many organisations, firms, government agencies and individuals who took the time to make a contribution to the work of this committee. But I have to say that it is with a deep sense of disappointment that I stand in this House again to speak on the matter of pay equity for women, because it was in 1975—if my memory serves me right—that the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission made a ruling on the basis that there should be equal pay for work of equal value. And here we are, 37 years later, still debating an issue of pay equity for women. I find this extraordinary. I feel ashamed that in this Australian parliament we are still debating this issue of pay equity for women.

We are talking about a group of people, more than half this population, who have not only made an enormous contribution in the paid workforce to the great economy—a benefit that flows to all men, women and children in this country—and in the distribution of taxes but also played the leading role in the unpaid workforce. A disproportionate number of women work in the unpaid workforce. They care for the elderly, the sick, people with disability and children. Not so long ago I spoke in this parliament about Welfare to Work. I remembered, as I prepared for this speech, that 83 per cent of sole parents in this country are women, and they do a very tough job indeed—often unsupported, unloved and uncared-for.

I know, because I was one of them. I was left with three little babies, not by choice, and it was tough going. I have worked every day of my life to give my children a future. I feel very strongly about this issue and I think all of us in this place should be absolutely ashamed that we are still debating the issue of pay equity for women. When I was left with my three children, I had to go and work in a commission job. It was the only way I could get pay equity. The only way I could get pay equity was to work in a job where I was paid according to my success, a commission job. It was the only way that I could expect to raise my children and to provide the kind of future I aspired to for them. So I feel very deeply about this; I have very personal experience.

I feel ashamed that we are still debating this issue in this place. I feel ashamed because women have had to fight every inch of the way in this country: firstly, to earn the right to go out and earn a living; and, secondly, to earn the right to continue to hold their job after marriage and having children. It is impossible for women in this place today to imagine what it was like to be told that you had no right to go back to work and earn pay after you got married. It is inconceivable. Women have had to work and fight to modify the workplace culture to be family friendly so that they can take care of the children, the disabled, the aged and the sick. Women have had to struggle to promote the notion of pay of equal value for work of equal value. And still we are debating this matter in this place.

I am pleased that the report acknowledges that the work of women continues today to be under-recognised and undervalued, and yet, without this work, the economy would falter. If we were to pay every woman—and there have been studies done on this—something, just a small wage, for the unpaid work they do, what an incredible amount of money that would amount to.

One of the reasons I remain concerned about this is that it has a flow-on effect. When women are not paid for this work and when they are underpaid for work of equal value in the community, they also have unequal savings, they also have unequal superannuation and they are also consigned to rental and social welfare accommodation, mostly for the rest of their lives. So we are denying women any security in old age—the ageing women in this country, who have taken on the lion’s share of the caring role, who have not got a promotion because they have been home looking after their children, their disabled child or their ageing parents. They are forgoing not only wages but also the opportunity for security in their old age. We are consigning a whole lot of women to poverty in old age, and that is truly a disgrace. I just cannot imagine it. I have at different times begged leaders in this place to address this issue, and it has fallen on deaf ears. It is totally unacceptable.

It is not confined to women holding the usual kinds of jobs—in child care, in nursing and in teaching. There has long been an undervaluing of those professions and those jobs in our communities, some of the most important jobs that can be done. How obscene it is when you see businesspeople being paid millions and millions of dollars when they have run companies into the ground at shareowners’ expense, and you see women—the majority of people in some of these professions—being paid a pittance for some of the most important work that is carried out in this country! It is inequitable and it is unacceptable.

But it is not just in those professions, where most women gravitate, that we have come to expect that they are badly treated, underpaid and undervalued. A recent Women in management report showed that there is a 17 per cent gap in full-time earnings between men and women. But in WA, my home state, the report reveals that the gap between male and female co-workers is closer to 30 per cent. The member for Hasluck is nodding, because she is one of my Western Australian colleagues and she knows. This comes on the back of an enormous financial bonanza for this country, and still the inequities are there. Okay, we have had a few hiccups, but we have had this enormous financial growth and bonanza and people have got rich. But the women in Australia, largely, have not been able to share in that wealth, because we have not allowed it; we have done nothing to allow equity in pay for women.

At one stage it was often reported that women just did not have the skills—they had not gone to university or they did not have the training. It might have been the case in the past as a way of explaining away, in part, the gap, but women today make up 55 per cent of all university students. That has been occurring for at least a decade. So the lack of progress on equal pay, I have to say, is very puzzling indeed. Education and training, or the lack of it, can no longer be used as an excuse.

There is a report in this morning’s West Australian which also suggests that things may actually be getting worse. An article on page 6 of today’s West Australian points to the example of Wanneroo education assistant Jo Parnell, who believes that sectors largely populated by women, such as education, are missing out on substantial pay increases. I have been aware of that for some time, but nevertheless it highlights it again. She is quoted by Shane Wright, the economics editor, as saying:

… it seemed the gap between male and female workers across the State was getting bigger, with sectors populated largely by women missing out on any substantial pay increases.

We have to ask why.

The tragedy is that government, which has the ability to take the lead on redressing this inequity, really remains silent. I am talking about the Commonwealth and I am talking about the state governments. People responsible for paying people in the public sector have done very little in terms of government. We cannot expect the private sector to take the lead on this. I have made this argument in relation to jobs in the disability sector: we ask the private sector to do it, but we are not prepared to do it. If you look at the number of people being employed by the Commonwealth who have a disability, the numbers are going south—and yet we are out there saying that industry should pick up the tab, that they should fix this. We are not prepared to take the lead; it is unacceptable. If we want to fix the equity in pay issues for women then government simply must take the lead on this, do something concrete about it and stop putting it off.

Women have always had the ability and they have certainly had the will, but now they have the skill and the training to match. Apart from a few speed bumps in the last 12 months, Australia’s economy has had a golden run for 15 years and we should have made greater progress in overcoming what clearly are prejudices against women in the workplace. The American writer E B White said:

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

The facts are before us and they have been before us for a very long time. This report once again highlights those facts. The facts are stark and we should no longer ignore them. The facts are out. They have been evident for decades and there can be no further excuse for this cruel inequity. It is cruel for the reasons I have outlined, because it consigns many women to poverty in old age. The government must show leadership and make sure that the signal goes out that we value the contribution of women in this country to both the paid and the unpaid workforce. They must deliver true pay equity. It is time—in fact, it is beyond time—this country stopped exploiting women. When you get right down to it—don’t let us mince words—not having pay equity in our community is exploitation of women. It is as pure and simple as that.

I feel very deeply about this matter. I think it is an inequity that has failed to be addressed for a very long time. It is fantastic that we have this report, but please can we work together—all of us—to act, to make sure that we redress this very long-outstanding inequity in this country, to pay women what they are worth and to pay them fairly for the value of the work they contribute to this community. We must do something to make sure that women are not the people who remain in poverty in old age and we must value the unpaid work that women in this country do to the benefit of all of us.

Sharryn Jackson (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I rise to speak on the Making it fair report, in addition to the five minutes that I spoke as the chair of the Standing Committee for Employment and Workplace Relations. The five minutes that the chair gets to speak is never sufficient, particularly after a report of this nature. I am pleased to follow the remarks of the member for Pearce and I thank her for speaking about this issue with such passion.

As I said last night, it was to my horror that I discovered that 15-year-old girls starting in the workforce could be paid differently because of their gender. This was a shock to me and sparked both my political interest and my commitment to social justice. With growing anger over the last 17 months of this inquiry, I realised how little we have achieved in the last 32 years, so I am very pleased to be associated with this report. It was a mammoth undertaking. From the beginning, the committee wanted to ensure that it was a detailed look at the issue, not just another commentary about the situation existing in a particular state or industry, and to make some real and positive recommendations about changes for the future. At the time of the initiation of the inquiry we were also facing a substantial skill shortage in Australia, a skill shortage that is looming again, particularly in my home state of Western Australia. It seems at times like this most employers, industry and business understand the need to encourage the greater participation of women in the workforce.

The committee received more than 150 submissions. We held 29 public hearings and, as I said, the report is the result of an inquiry that took some 17 months. There are 63 recommendations in total. While some of them are not unanimous recommendations, a substantial number of them are. They are extremely wide-ranging recommendations and I urge people to read and digest the report and understand the nature of the recommendations we are making. I have to say that for committee members involved in the inquiry who regularly participated—notably, by gender, only two women and eight men—it was a long and worthwhile journey. Some of us may even have started with fixed views that equal pay, at least as between men and women involved in the same occupation, had already been fixed and that we were somehow looking at some other difficulty. I think those views were substantially changed as a result of the overwhelming evidence presented before the committee. I have to say that I was shocked myself at the prevalence of the lack of gender pay equity across industry and across Australia. I think many readers of the report will find that the statistics it contains that set out the scene that exists in Australia are quite shocking.

I want to make a couple of comments about the nature of the report and the minority report. I note the presence of the member for Grey here in the Main Committee and I should indicate, before I make those comments, my very grateful support and respect for both the deputy chair of the committee, the member for Kalgoorlie, and the member for Grey, who joined the committee after it had been initiated and had an awfully large catch-up to do on the bulk of evidence that had been presented. It has been a pleasure to work with the two of you through the course of the hearing, along with my Labor colleagues.

I know that, although not all the recommendations were agreed to unanimously, there is nevertheless a will to see the issue of pay inequity addressed by both sides of the House. I also hope that we can make some substantive changes together, particularly in the next 12 months of this parliament. Where we differ a little bit is on the issue of waiting. Maybe it is a naturally conservative view that when you have a relatively new piece of legislation, as we do in the Fair Work Act 2009, the desire is to wait and see how it operates for a little while. But, as I said in my foreword to the report and in my comments last night, I think Australian women have been waiting long enough for this issue to be addressed.

A lot of people do not want to be too interfering in individual workplaces by issuing greater regulation or obligations on them about this issue. But, frankly, if we do not take some positive steps for change, I think we will be back here in 10, 20 or 30 years time bemoaning the fact that we have not seriously addressed the pay equity gap. And I have to say to you with great goodwill that the direction of governments in recent years—and when I say ‘recent years’ I am taking the last two decades—has been this idea that we will promote community awareness about the issue, we will raise community and business understanding of the concerns, we will promote, by way of reward and prizes, best practice in individual workplaces and, when people see the wisdom and greater productivity that comes from ensuring pay equity, somehow, miraculously, this will flow across the country. Well, the evidence is in, and the sad reality of this report’s findings is that the evidence is unequivocal: over the last two decades the pay gap between men’s and women’s earnings has gone backwards. So the current system does not work. If we are to change this and address this decline then we need to act and to act now.

I particularly endorse the comments by the member for Pearce regarding the impact that low pay is having on women, particularly as they age, with many living in poverty in their retirement. Already it is women who are more likely to be on pensions because of their lack of access to superannuation.

I did not want to be critical but I find myself today needing to be so. I think most members of the committee endorsed the Australian government’s decision to participate in a pay equity test case in the community services sector—and that will soon be underway through Fair Work Australia. I indeed applauded that decision and thought it was long overdue. However, tragically, the decision by at least the shadow minister for workplace relations to not support the legislation which would see the proper implementation of a national system of industrial relations has thrown some of the important questions associated with that pay equity test case into great confusion. I say that because many the employers involved in that test case are not-for-profit organisations and charitable organisations who to this day are unclear about whether they are captured by the terms of the Fair Work Act 2009, in the same way they were uncertain about whether they were captured under the terms of the legislation that this act replaced, which we know as Work Choices.

I would urge members of the opposition to reconsider their position, not only because the legislation is sensible and businesses and others have been calling for a national system of industrial relations but also because the lack of such a system will throw this test case into complete confusion. We need to address this issue and address it as a matter of some urgency. Frankly, the test case is one of the issues referred to in the minority report as a reason to hold off on the legislation, in that members of the opposition hope that through this test case under Fair Work Australia there would be clear progress on the implementation of pay equity. But I would urge them to consider their position on this matter to ensure that we do not waste the time or the money of these organisations in trying to determine whether or not they are training corporations, whether or not they are caught by the terms of the act, and just put in place a national system under which people can clearly operate.

There is another industry that I want to touch on, and the nature of this industry reflects my view and, I think, echoes the comments by the member for Pearce that what is at the heart of this issue is the lack of proper value attributed to women’s traditional work, whether that is paid or unpaid. I am talking about things like cleaning, catering and caring occupations. There was an overwhelming amount of evidence presented by organisations, employers and employees, as well as peak bodies and unions, involved in the aged-care sector throughout Australia, a sector that we know is largely dependent on the Commonwealth for its funding. And its concerns were echoed by sectors like disability services, which are largely dependent on state funding for much of their wages.

While I am convinced that if the government acts to implement the recommendations of this report we will have ensured that there is a mechanism in place which will assist and provide an avenue that is less adversarial, a means by which we can properly do research, and collect and analyse the data and put forward practical solutions to these issues of gender pay inequity, it is my great concern that the aged-care sector be one of the industries where this issue is addressed as a matter of urgency. Certainly, in my foreword to the report, I have called on the relevant ministers, including the minister for finance—the person with the chequebook—to be involved in those discussions. I do hope it is something to which we can have a joint approach and not a party political one.

The other issue is the importance of the breadth of the recommendations. I do not think that you can just act on one section and one section alone and hope that that will cause the kind of change that I envisage happening across Australia; we need to implement the vast bulk of those recommendations. We need a combination of amendments to the Fair Work Act 2009 and to the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 in order to increase the powers of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner. We need to establish as a matter of urgency a specialised pay equity unit with a very broad mandate for change under the guidance of a deputy president. We also need an advisory committee of industry and employers to be behind that industry pursuit and examination of practical solutions and proactive approaches to addressing pay inequity.

There is much work to be done, and I hope that we will have a government response early in the new year which sees much of this report, if not all of it, implemented as a matter of urgency. If these recommendations are implemented, we will begin to actually address the issue of pay inequity. Perhaps some of that anger that I still hold and the spark that burns still bright might finally get some relief in the long term.

Along with the member for Kalgoorlie, I placed on record last night my thanks to the committee secretariat. I have found this inquiry process and working with the committee secretariat one of the most satisfying things that I have been involved in since I became a member of parliament. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the professionalism of the secretariat and the staff and the work they do, and I know that is a view shared by all members of the committee.

In closing, I thank the state and territory governments around Australia as well as all those people who participated in the inquiry. Their invaluable contributions and their willingness to provide additional information and put up with the foibles of a committee of people of divergent views and backgrounds made it a pleasure to be involved. I thank them for their support and I thank also the people involved in the parliament who provided our web casting and who visited and travelled with us. I thank the Hansard staff and all involved in what I think has been, as I said earlier, a long and worthwhile journey. I hope the government implements these recommendations, I hope we begin to address the issues of pay inequity and I commend the report to the House.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At the outset I would like to thank the member for Hasluck, my chairwoman on the Standing Committee for Employment and Workplace Relations, for her generous comments. It is my melancholy duty to tell you, Madam Deputy Chair, that the member for Hasluck is somewhat unreconstructed in this area. She had an unnerving habit of referring throughout the discussions to the Commissioner for Equal Opportunity as ‘her’. I pointed out to her that I thought that, if we were to have a commissioner for equal opportunity, the position should certainly be open to males as well. So I counsel her to try to reform her ways in this field in order that the debate may be moved forward.

With that small aside out of the way, I too would like to thank the secretariat for its sterling effort. The report is a substantial piece of work. There is much consideration in there and the secretariat has done a wonderful job of compiling it all. In fact, I wondered through the inquiry how on earth we would ever come to any recommendations at all.

As the member for Hasluck pointed out, I only joined the committee halfway through, so it did require a bit of catch-up on my behalf. I do not think that many people realise the depth of gender inequity in the workplace. We took a lot of evidence that undoubtedly shows that women’s lifetime earnings are significantly lower than men’s. We worked very hard to explore why this might be, and it comes down to many issues including length of employment, periods of absence from the workforce, superannuation issues and promotion issues.

Overwhelmingly, what was pointed out to us through the duration of the inquiry was that the jobs where women are employed in high numbers, in certain streams of the workforce, were typically the caring and low-paid roles in our workforce. It is an issue for society generally to make that decision about how highly they really value these roles. Does our society really value those who care for our children, our aged and those who are disabled? At this stage, I think all you can say is: we do not. And that is a real challenge for all of us—to make sure that we send the messages out there that will put some balance back into this situation. I broadly support this report. There are, I think, off the top of my head, 68 recommendations—

Sharryn Jackson (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sixty-three.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you—63 recommendations. There is a section, which my chair referred to, which I have some issues with, and that is chapter 5 and the recommendations, as she clearly identified, Nos 1 to 18, which refer to amendments to the Fair Work Act. In so much as the Fair Work Act is still to be fully implemented, and will not be until January, and there is still unfinished business in many areas and the test case she referred to has been launched—I also concede that is an area of some political discussion at the moment—the members of the opposition felt that it was too early to be amending an act when we have not really seen the full effects of it through the workplace, given that some of its stated aims are to effect equality. If indeed the Fair Work Act does not deliver on those stated objectives, then it will be time to revisit those recommendations.

One of the things the inquiry did identify was the lack of comprehensive data. We had discussions with the ABS and industry, and it was difficult to tease out enough data to put your finger on exactly why women were not receiving a fair deal in the workforce, so some of the recommendations we have made were around that area of delivering more information. Given that I only joined the inquiry half way through and had to do revision on the rest of the work, I, for one, was concerned at the lack of private industry that chose to give evidence to the committee. I did ask around in some private circles about why this might be, and there was, I think, a general fear that if any company or organisation was to out itself as taking any kind of position that might be perceived as being against equal opportunity for women, they might be branded as sceptics—a word that is being used in another debate in this place! But it was disappointing to me that we did not have more private employers come to us and talk about what they were doing within their workforce to achieve equity and also about what the financial implications might be of any recommendations we might make.

One of the things that I constantly raised and constantly came across through the inquiry was the situation we found of women being predominantly employed in those caring positions I have referred to that are lowly rewarded. Much of that industry is indirectly or directly financed by governments. I feel quite strongly that it is governments’ position to lead on this. Given that they are one of the chief culprits in undervaluing this work in society, and given that they can always pass on any costs through the taxation system, I think governments have a role to lead on this. Whether or not they will be rewarded for it at the ballot box is where we come back to that decision by communities about how highly they will value these jobs. If they punish governments for rewarding women correctly for the work they do, then I do not know how we address some of these issues, quite honestly. But I think it is the role of governments to lead in this area, so I encourage them to do so.

When we look at the aged-care industry, we see that a registered nurse in the aged-care industry is receiving a wage a bit less than 80 per cent of a nurse working in the healthcare sector, and goodness knows that the healthcare sector nurses are not overpaid by any means; in fact, one could put up a very good argument that they are underpaid as well on a professional scale. Given that aged care nurses are paid less than healthcare nurses, therein lies one of the great travesties and one of the great truths of the system we are operating at the moment.

One of the other things we found which surprised me, I must say, was the lack of parity in some of the professional strains of employment. We had the Pharmacists Guild give evidence and they have a very flat pay structure. They could not really locate any form of inequity towards females in their workforce. But it was a different matter when the lawyers came in. We all love to love lawyers, particularly people like me who are farmers by nature. But it did come as quite a shock to find that law firms systematically pay women lawyers less than men. The worst offenders, it seemed, were governments. It was pointed out to us that women are receiving the more lowly briefs on the government contracts. Once again government has the opportunity to lead. It did come as a surprise. My own daughter is not a lawyer. She is in fact a chemical engineer. I spoke to her about pay equity and she said, ‘I don’t think I have got quite as good a deal as the blokes.’ That is starting straight out of university and at a time when children are in the dim, distant future.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Get her in the union, Rowan. They’ll look after her.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I suggested she go and negotiate with her employer and tell them how good she was, actually.

I started off by saying that I do not think many of the Australian public understand or realise that we do have a pay equity issue. They think that if you are getting $15 an hour for work, males and females will get paid the same, and by and large across most workforces that is the case—apart from lawyers, of course. So prima facie they do not see the problem out there. But we dug deeper, and I do not think there is any doubt that we do have issues. I hope the recommendations address most of those. Certainly we laboured over them long enough. I am probably lucky I sat on the committee for nine months and not 18. It has created a lot of interest amongst women’s groups back in my electorate. I spoke to Zonta about this particular issue and they are very keen for some recommendations and some changes out of it.

I commend the report broadly to the House notwithstanding the fact that the opposition has a few different emphases on the recommendations.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am also pleased to speak on the Employment and Workplace Relations Committee report, Making it fair, and I commend the member for Grey for his contribution to the debate and to the report. This report shows us in no uncertain terms what most of us already know—that is, more needs to be done to address pay inequality in Australia. The report also links the issue of pay inequality with the symptom of the under representation of women in the workforce. As at July 2008, only 58.4 per cent of women of working age were in the workforce. While this participation has increased significantly since the 70s, there is still much to be done to achieve parity. In their submission to the inquiry the Queensland government—my former employer—said:

… it is clear that increases in women’s wages, the cost of living, the availability of suitable jobs, education attainment, labour market experience and duration of residents are all recognised to significantly increase women’s labour force participation and the number of hours they work.

Access to child care and family-friendly workplaces are also big considerations for women returning to the workforce. I know from the experience of my partner when we had our first child and there were almost no childcare places available so that was a consideration. By the time the second one came along—she works in a workplace that is not family friendly although the hours are reasonably family friendly but you cannot take children to work—thankfully I was able to take children to work occasionally. However, addressing the gender pay gap is the first step we need to take towards increasing women’s participation in the workforce.

What a journey it has been. Some topics have been touched on by other speakers but they are worth revisiting. If we go back to the suffrage movement of the 18th century through to the 20th century, we might think of that as the first wave of feminism and Australia played its role in that. Then you look at the second feminist wave that began in the 1960s and dealt with gender inequality in laws and culture. Some of the heroes from then were Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer whose book The Female Eunuch came out in 1970. I am not sure about the other people in this room, but I am one of the few people who has read that book as part of a book club. I would suggest it is certainly an interesting polemic if not a great book to read.

In the 37 years since the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission granted men and women the same minimum wage very little else has changed. This report is in the context of the third wave of feminism in that we are trying to deal with the failures of the second wave, the things that were started but did not actually change. You can look back at 1972, when the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission handed down that decision, and see what has changed. In fact the average industry gender pay gap is still around 17 per cent and in some industries, like finance and insurance, the gap is as high as 32 per cent. It is interesting that the member for Grey referred to lawyers. I want to quote a particular section of the report, being one of the current members of parliament who has been a lawyer:

…in the legal profession the number of female law graduates exceeds the number of male graduates that men are earning $7,000-$8,000 more than the women in the first few years. Women are exiting the industry earlier than men, and there is a clustering of women in the lower paid end of the profession. Further, women barristers remained significantly underrepresented in court appearances, particularly at senior levels and in more complex matters.

The Law Council of Australia added:

In 2007, 56% of Australian law graduates were women who tended to also to feature disproportionately among top graduates.

One would think that a lawyer would have an understanding of their rights and the potential avenues of redress et cetera, but still we have horrible situations in too many law firms. Obviously things need to be done. Only two per cent of our CEOs are women and that is a shameful statistic in 2009. Also, two per cent of the chairs of the big boards of our Top 200 ASX companies are women. The inequalities are not just limited to the high end of town or the private sector. Even in the Australian Public Service, women account for 57 per cent of all employees and yet only 20 per cent of the senior executive service positions. It is shameful that in 2009 we are still trotting out these figures. The Australian Public Service Commission told the inquiry that on average women were paid less than men across nearly all employment levels.

These inequities remain despite countless education campaigns over the last 30 or 40 years. We tried advertising, we tried informing, we tried carrots, we tried cajoling, we tried everything, but unfortunately it has not worked. I think of it as like one of my other jobs which was working in the mining industry. You go to a mine and the miners are incredibly safety conscious. They do everything by the book and they have high standards of safety at the mine—as I am sure other members in the room know—and they then go home, put on their thongs and mow the lawn wearing a singlet. Because the laws are not there to change them they do the wrong thing.

Likewise, this committee came to the conclusion that the government needs to do more than just tell employers that they need to treat men and women equally. That is why this report contains a series of practical recommendations to close the gender pay gap, so that in 40 years time we are not having the same report with the same recommendations. These 63 recommendations are practical, and I am proud to say that I support every single one of them. These amendments include: amending the Fair Work Act 2009 and sex discrimination legislation to make equal remuneration for men and women employees for work of equal or comparable value the explicit object of legislation; the federal government elevating pay equity as a clear objective of modern awards; the Australian Industrial Relations Commission reporting to the committee prior to the finalisation of the awards on how pay equity principles have been achieved; amending the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 to make it mandatory for employers who are repeat offenders discriminating on the basis of pregnancy or carer’s responsibility to be required to attend counselling or an approved training course; government leadership strategies, including annual pay equity audit reporting for all government agencies; establishing a pay equity unit with education, research and enforcement roles—and enforcement roles are very important—to focus approaches to address the gender pay gap; and removal of the exemption from the payment of the nine per cent superannuation charge for employees who earn less than $450 per month. They are just a couple of the 63 recommendations that I have touched on, but they are certainly all commendable.

In my experience, before I became a lawyer I was a teacher and then worked in industrial law in the education sector. I was amazed when looking at the incredible work done by school officers, that probably 95 or 96 per cent were female. If you looked at the spread of their wages and then looked at a gender breakdown, often the top roles went to males, even in that sector. We called it the school officers sector, the non-teaching sector of the education area. Also, as a union organiser I would go to talk to a principal about something as simple as a job-share arrangement for, perhaps, a woman who had children or a woman who was towards the end of her years and wanted to retire. So often, if it were women, the principal, normally male, would say, ‘No, it’s too much of a hassle, too much of a complication,’ when normally you would end up getting two fantastic teachers for the price of one.

In closing, I want to particularly thank the committee chair, the member for Hasluck, for her untiring efforts in driving this inquiry. The flame does still burn brightly. Her passion and her advocacy to see inequalities in the workplace overcome was an inspirational force that has helped to deliver such a comprehensive and practical report. I also commend the deputy chair, Barry Haase, the member for Kalgoorlie. I certainly think it was an eye-opening experience for him and the member for Grey, as he touched on. Whilst they were not able to agree with every one of the recommendations, I commend them for their participation and input. I commend the report to the House.

Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to begin by commending the report from the Standing Committee on Employment and Workplace Relations entitled Making it fairwhich was only tabled yesterday evening, so in my contribution tonight I am not going to do full justice to the very comprehensive overview of this very critical issue. But I do want to say that I think this report will stand the test of time and that it will be another milestone in that eternal quest for pay justice for women. I did read the foreword, in which the chair writes:

Pay equity or the lack of it was one of the issues that sparked my interest in politics and social justice. As a young woman I was outraged that someone could or would be paid less for their work because of their gender.

It angers me that over 30 years later, despite some progress, this is still the case.

I think in those words the chair of the committee, the member for Hasluck, has summed up the feelings of many women who have campaigned for a long time about this critical issue. I must say that in our previous lives before we were elected as members of this parliament both the member for Hasluck and I had lots of ongoing campaigns about this very important issue.

I think the fact that we now have this report kind of opens a new era in terms of looking at some proactive strategies for the future, because we have realised some of the limitations in the approach that up until now had placed a lot of the emphasis on trying to secure justice through the IR system. So I want to commend her and members of her committee in producing a report of great substance. There is a wealth of information in there that will make for fascinating reading. I think it is very important that the issue of pay equity is now on the mainstream national political agenda.

The report has 63 recommendations. I have only had the opportunity to skim through them but I have found them to be very comprehensive, strategic and yet very practical. It is clear that, 40 years on, we need a wide-ranging proactive strategy to end this historical injustice that remains so entrenched despite our best efforts to deal with the issue over four decades and more. As the member for Moreton said, it is probably now the third wave of feminists who are looking at this issue with fresh eyes. I think the committee has done a fine job in raising the profile of this issue onto our national agenda.

We all know that 40 years ago the first federal equal pay case was prosecuted by the ACTU and it established the principle of equal pay for equal work. We all thought that was going to be nirvana. Despite our hopes that it would put an end to the enshrined inequities that have plagued our wage-fixing system, we saw over a period of time that the narrow definition of ‘equal pay for equal work’—how do you define ‘equal work’?—was not going to be the big breakthrough that we all hoped for.

It is interesting though that, during the war, the contribution of women was recognised and their wages were raised from 54 per cent to 75 per cent of the male basic wage. It was suddenly realised that women were an integral part of our economy, but when the war was over the injustices resurfaced. I was lucky in that when I began teaching in 1969 I was the beneficiary of an earlier ruling by the New South Wales commission in 1958 that provided equal pay for teachers. I had always been in a profession where if you were doing equal work you were remunerated equally, but it did not compensate for the fact that all the women were congregated on the lower levels of the pay scales and all the top hierarchy were men—a very common situation in many professions.

When it became clear that the principle of equal pay for equal work was unable to advance the interests of women across the board, because they were congregated in female dominated occupations, it became clear that the narrow definition of ‘equal work’ became a barrier in our quest for wage justice, so that principle was expanded in 1972 to the concept of equal pay for work of equal value. Yet again we found in practice that the IR system had difficulty in defining objective measures by which to assess work of equal value, for it was a fact that historically women’s skills and experience had been undervalued and not given the same accreditation as those of men.

I remember thinking at the time: how did one explain why a skilled female machinist earned substantially less than a male who fixed the machine when it needed repairing? Why was one set of skills credentialled, given recognition and well remunerated at the end of an apprenticeship and the other set of skills—those of the female machinist—not valued because they were never formally recognised through our vocational system? Even today I find it hard to find an explanation for why an apprentice hairdresser is earning $80 a week less than an apprentice builder.

Pay inequity was an entrenched fact of life embedded in our awards and in wage relativities prior to the 1970s. However, ironically, when we looked at how we were faring against comparable OECD countries, the fact that we had a fairly regulated centralised IR system underpinned by awards meant that we as a nation were able to claim that our outcomes were pretty good in comparison to those of other countries. So we did well in closing the gap at the minimum rates of pay.

Then we had award restructuring and the minimum rates adjustment, which for the first time allowed us to compare women’s wages in certain occupations to others. The metal industry award was then set as the standard. But, regrettably, there were too few cases pushed under those principles. I do recall at the time that librarians and childcare workers used the opportunity to win good increases for their members.

Unlike in other countries, pay equity issues in Australia to date have largely been addressed by wage-fixing tribunals within the IR system rather than by direct legislative measures. However well we did within the scope of the regulated industrial relations system, it was once you stepped outside that area of regulation that the gap really became very problematic.

So where do we stand 40 years later? The last lot of data I looked at by the ABS for average earnings for women showed that it was $729.80 a week compared to men’s earnings of $1,110. That is $380 more for men or almost $20,000 over the course of the year. It adds up, as the report says, to a 17 per cent wage gap between men and women. In traditionally male dominated sectors like mining, manufacturing and construction you would expect that men would do better but what really shocked me was that even in female dominated sectors like health and community services and education the progress has been appallingly slow. In education—the field that I came from; a female dominated sector—women’s average weekly earnings in May 2009 were $841 compared to men’s $1,055.

So even in those sectors things are really bad and, as the report points out, the gap between men and women’s wages at ordinary-time earnings are now at the highest level they have been in 21 years. That is a consequence of the deregulated system that we had under the Howard government and the focus on individual contracts. So it is clear to me that there are factors outside of the control of the IR purview of wage rates. There are factors that need to be addressed beyond the IR system alone. It needs more than test cases—as important as they can be—to address wage inequity. And that is why the recommendations in this report are so important.

I do not want to underestimate the importance of historical test cases and I do want to commend our government for its support of an impending major test case on pay equity for people who work in the community sector. This sector employs more than 200,000 employees—87 per cent of whom are women. I cannot think of a more deserving group of workers entitled to substantial wage justice. These are the workers who keep our communities together but, to our common shame, they have been poorly paid for what has now become for many a labour of love.

These are the workers who provide accommodation and support for people with disabilities and who run crisis accommodation, counselling services, and home and family day care. It is scandalous that these workers at the coalface, working for our communities, currently can earn up to 30 per cent less than those people in the public sector and the public service doing comparable work. So to that extent I think this impending test case will be another important historic step along the path. But the report rightly points to a whole range of factors that need to be addressed in a comprehensive strategy. We all know that women’s skills—particularly in the caring occupations, because somehow that is seen to be women’s work—are not properly valued.

We know that women receive a lower share of discretionary payments, like overtime and bonuses, that have been outside the scope of industrial regulation and despite our best efforts we do not seem to have made any substantial inroads there. We know that occupational industrial segregation has an impact. We know the impact of family responsibilities. We know that because women work in part-time and casual employment that that has a bearing. I think the report also shows that the issue of the invisibility of the pay gap at the workplace level is an important factor, and that is addressed in one of the recommendations, which suggests that government ought to lead the way by doing regular workplace audits.

So there are a whole host of factors that need to be considered. In the chair’s foreword she says:

From the outset of the Committee’s Inquiry we agreed that we needed to go beyond past reports because we wanted substance to our recommendations, to recommend legislative reform if that was required, to use best practise examples that worked and to build on successful initiatives in states, territories and individual workplaces and internationally.

To the chair and the members of the committee I want to repeat, as someone who has spent a lot of years of her life actively involved in the eternal quest for justice for women, the chair’s own words:

Some will say that we should wait – for what I am not sure, divine intervention?

It got to the stage where it seemed that nothing we had tried, while we were making progress at a snail’s pace, comprehended the totality of factors that contribute to this historical legacy of inequity. I want to say to the member for Hasluck that this is a seminal report. It will open a new chapter in the quest for equal pay. I am sure that many groups, particularly women’s groups, are really looking forward to reading this comprehensive report, full of incredible data, historical context and practical, strategic and proactive recommendations. As I said, I have only had time to glance at it in a very cursory manner, but it is going on my pile of Christmas reading. I am looking forward to reading and digesting the contents of this substantial report. I thank all our colleagues for placing this critical issue on the national political agenda.

Danna Vale (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the representative whip from the Labor Party for their indulgence in letting me speak on this. I was not listed to speak. I have not read the report, but, from listening to the discussions and the erudite and intelligent response by the members for Hasluck, Pearce and Throsby, I was stirred to make a contribution on this. The historic low pay of women goes back to the early days of Australia. We could probably look at all of the industrialised world and see that women in the very early days were used as factory fodder.

It is interesting to note that eight of the 11 people in this room—and I know that we are to be joined by two male colleagues—are women. So we have the workforce participation victory. We are here participating in the workforce. But equal pay seems to be a huge stumbling block. I look forward to reading this report and particularly the recommendations. I note the goodwill and cooperation with which members of both sides of the House have worked towards this report and the enthusiasm with which it has been received by both sides.

I would like to reflect on the lament by the member for Pearce that, even after all this time, women do not receive pay equal to that of men. There is a disparity in pay of 17 per cent to 32 per cent—that is absolutely huge. To think we are here in 2009—it is really disgraceful. No matter how much we talk about equality, there is no equality unless we have economic equality. Everything else is all pie in the sky; it is all pretend. It seems to me that the work that women have done is seriously undervalued because a lot of people do not realise the exact contribution women make. We have spoken about the disparity within the legal profession, and I can understand that. Female lawyers are paid 32 per cent less than male lawyers. But how do we explain the non-paid contribution to our society and our community for which women never get any recognition—the care of the disabled, the care of the aged and the job of being a housewife and contributing to your own family unit, which we all accept is the foundation of nationhood?

Let’s go back a little bit further. I want to talk about the enculturation of society, because women do that. With respect to our male colleagues here today, men do not contribute to enculturation; women do. I want to give you an example. Once upon a time, just as many men from a certain country came to Australia as men from northern Europe. As we all know, from the time when the British decided that Botany Bay would make a nice penal colony, men from northern Europe settled in Australia. At the time of the gold rush, men from another culture came here. But there is no evidence of their culture because those men did not bring their women with them.

I am sure you know who those men were. Those men were the Chinese. We see evidence of their occupation here in Australia in the great gold rush towns of Beechworth, Ballarat, Bendigo, Bathurst and Hill End. But they did not actually leave any evidence of their culture from that time, because they did not bring their women with them. Many Chinese went back with their gold, many died here, and many who remained here married Irish girls who came out in the famine ships. Their children might have looked a little bit Chinese but they did not speak Chinese and they did not eat with chopsticks, because they took on the culture of their mother; they spoke either Gaelic or English and they ate potatoes and Irish stew. Sometimes we forget the contribution that women make to nationhood. It is not measured, because we all take it for granted.

We can look even further back in our history to when the Normans invaded England. The Normans were a very interesting race. The fathers, the males, were called Normans but they were actually Vikings—they were Norsemen, and that is where the name ‘Norman’ came from. They settled in that part of northern France. But they married French women, and their children spoke French. When the Norman conquerors, under William the Conqueror, invaded England, for the next several hundred years, especially up to the Plantagenet reign, the main elite language, the language of court, was French. We even get the word ‘parliament’, where we are here today, from ‘parlay’. It is a French word. So I think we underestimate the importance of mothers and the mother tongue.

But there is another period in our history for which women have never been recognised, which concerns me greatly. Not only do women enculture their societies but they provide the foundation of nationhood. And that is exactly what happened here in Australia, especially after the First World War. Do you know, we lost 65,000 men. We really did lose the flower of a generation in that war. We all understand the legend of ANZAC, the way that particular cohort forged the values of our nation. But back home, without those 65,000 men, without the fathers, the brothers and the new husbands, it was the women who were left with the children, without any government support—actually, with no support at all. They buckled down and rolled their sleeves up, just like women have after all wars, and created the foundation of this nation. There is a book to be written, Member for Hasluck, because it was the women after the First World War, after so many of our young men had died, who forged this nation into the great nation that it is.

Then, of course, they were involved in the world’s worst depression. However in the world did those women cope? When I say that, I remember my grandmother, Nellie Beazley, from 106 Rodgers Street, Carrington. She was a war widow and my mother was a war orphan after the First World War. I often wonder: how did nanna cope? There was no government support in those days. There was maybe two-and-six that came through from the government because she was a war widow. But how did the women of that generation cope? And then, after the Depression, these were the women who sent their sons off to another war. My goodness, what stout-hearted women they must have been.

I look at this history and think of the value, the contribution, that these women have made to the nation that we are today—the finest democracy in the whole world. The very least we can do is pay them equal pay. And the very least we can do is recognise that fine, gold-clad contribution they have made. If we do not, if our generation of women do not look back and do that and we do not honour them by paying women today what they are worth, where will this country be in the future? Democracy is about equality. It is about equity. It is about fairness. This report is beautifully named—Making it fair. That is what we should be doing. I look forward to reading the report. Thank you, Member for Hasluck. Thank you for chairing the committee. I really do look forward to those recommendations.

I was a little bit concerned to hear that governments are not leading by example either. The federal government is, however, leading by example. I think we women here, who have the same job as our male colleagues, are all being paid on the same basis as the men. But if there are governments or local councils that are not paying the right amount of money, I say a pox on all of them, because they have a duty to lead by example. We cannot tell private enterprise what it is supposed to do unless the government leads the way. So I do look forward to the recommendations, Member for Hasluck, and I do thank you and your committee for your hard work.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Firstly, I congratulate the member for Hasluck, the chair of this committee. I know that we are looking at the report we have before us today because of her total commitment to this issue. I was a member of the committee very early in the piece—in fact, up until June of this year. I was overwhelmed by the number and quality of the submissions that came before the committee, just as I was overwhelmed by the dedication of the people who have worked in the field and fought this battle for pay equity for women for decades.

I find it really disturbing that it was not until 1972 that women were granted equal pay. In the first job I had I did not receive equal pay. I completed my high school certificate and worked in a job where there were males who had completed the exam when I did and had not performed in it as well as I did but who received 30 per cent more pay than I received. I thought it was very unfair. They were also given better jobs than I was given because women like to do very routine, methodical, rather rote jobs rather than jobs where they need to think and have ideas and express themselves! I think this was what was put to me at that time. I think I lasted only 12 months in that job—and I am sure that, if I had not left, they would have asked me to leave—because the whole philosophy and mentality of that organisation did nothing to inspire a woman to achieve anything or to aspire to any sort of career.

Over the years, things have changed. In the past, women had to resign when they got married or when they had children. I remember applying for a job not long after that which was rather like that job. I had to assure the employers that under no circumstances would I get pregnant. But, woops, I actually did get pregnant, and I left and did not tell anybody that I was pregnant at the time, because, in a way, I suppose, I felt guilty. I think things have changed, but that there are still a lot of barriers that women have to get around, and to say that women are equal in the workplace and have equal opportunities is not quite true.

We had to face a number of stereotypes whilst I was a member of the committee. There were statements such as: ‘Women don’t like to work in technical jobs.’ It was said that women do not like to do this kind of work or that kind of work. It was said that women would rather be with their families, that women would rather stay at home with the children and that women really are quite happy if they do not have to accept a job with high pay because it means that they do not have to put their private life on hold. There were numerous stereotypes like those put forward.

As for barriers, there are enormous barriers still in place that prevent women from obtaining equal pay to men. Some of those barriers are unintentional and they are unconsciously placed, but they are still there.

I should also acknowledge the fine contributions by the member for Pearce, the member for Hasluck and the member for Throsby. It is really inspiring to hear such depth of knowledge about and commitment to the fact that women really should receive equal pay for equal work. And that is all that everyone has been arguing for for a very long period of time.

Discrimination still exists at all levels. Even in the most basic or entry-level job, discrimination still comes into it and impacts on the level of pay that women actually receive. As was very ably put to the House tonight by previous speakers, the role that women play as carers means there is an expectation that they put their careers and their lives on hold to provide this caring role, yet they are given no prior learning recognition for that kind of work in the workforce. They are given no credit whatsoever for the work they do as carers, where they do develop transferable skills. In addition, as I said, their careers, their working lives, are put on hold.

Like many members of this House, I have women who come to see me who married 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago but their husband has died and they are short of the pension age, so they are in a situation where they are being asked to re-enter the workforce but they have no skills, no recent work experience. This means that they are not in a position to obtain employment without undergoing retraining, which would probably take them up to retirement age in many cases. For those women, that means that they are doomed to a certain lifestyle, a level of poverty and wage inequity because they do not have superannuation, which is a very big issue when it comes to women. The fact is that once they do reach retirement age, because they have usually spent time out of the workforce having children, they have less disposable income upon retirement.

Pay inequity impacts at every job level. Even in jobs where men and women work alongside, it is still the men who tend to fill the jobs in the upper echelons. We had some very interesting presentations from the Public Service and from the CPSU, the Commonwealth Public Sector Union, which showed—I do not have the figures in mind at the moment—that, once you got up to the ASO5 level and above, the number of women in those jobs dropped dramatically. But, when you went to the base level, there were more women than there were men. So the jobs that pay the highest are more likely to be held by men and the jobs that pay the least are more likely to involve women.

It was also pointed out to us by the Community and Public Sector Union that, whilst women in the Public Service are very lucky because they can access maternity leave, simply the fact of accessing maternity leave and returning to work on a part-time basis is detrimental to their career. I know a number of young women that that has happened to. They have gone back to work and because they have decided that they will work for two, three or four days a week they have to resign themselves to staying on a certain level within the Public Service because they cannot aspire to higher levels until such time as their child-rearing days are over. This is a form of discrimination against women and this leads to pay inequity. The public sector is one area where we as members of parliament can direct some effort towards addressing that pay inequity.

I must say that the recommendations in this report are fantastic. I am a bit disappointed that not everybody could get behind them, but there was not a dissenting report, which is great. I think that the report sets everything out. I do not think that there is one area that the committee has left neglected in looking at this issue. Look at CEOs. Less than two per cent of CEOs are women. Look at the number of women who go to university. They certainly are not two per cent of the university population. Look at the number of women who achieve in the top 10 per cent at school, in their HSC, and at university. It certainly is not two per cent. I see the fact that there are so few women represented in the upper echelons of every occupation as a missed opportunity for Australia, because Australia is losing a valuable resource. We are losing the expertise and the ability of these women who could offer so much to Australia.

The other issue that I think is really important that was touched on in the report is how enterprise bargaining, individual agreements, work against women. Women do not tend to negotiate a pay increase or conditions quite as well for themselves as men do. I think that all wage agreements should take into account all the aspects of a job. I think there is a very strong argument in favour of the fact that individual agreements do not work well for women.

Finally, I would like to say that I strongly support this report. I am looking forward to reading it in more detail over the break. As well as being impressed with the recommendations and the whole of the report, I think the foreword written by the chair is outstanding; I really do. I think that it touches on so many different aspects. I have to say that it is one of the best that I have read in any report. Member for Hasluck, I can see that you have a passion and that this is an area that you have invested a lot in over your working life. That comes through in the report. I think that this is a blueprint for what government and our society should adopt and accept in relation to pay equity for women.

I think it has been far, far too long that we have sat back and accepted that this is okay, that this can continue. It is not okay. It cannot continue. It is really a blight on our society that we have a situation where 50 per cent of the population are receiving a 30 per cent lower income and where two per cent of our CEOs are women. If we look at these recommendations and if this report is adopted, Australia can then be proud of its achievements in this area. Thank you, Member for Hasluck, for this wonderful report.

Debate (on motion by Ms Vamvakinou) adjourned.