Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

and their petrol costs and their private health insurance costs and the increase in interest rates. In respect of the new jobs that will be created, the minister and the Prime Minister have argued consistently in this place that any job, even a slave-wage job, is better than no job. That is simply not true. The minister would not put himself through the indignity of saying: ‘I’m in a well-paid job. How about I split my pay in half and give somebody else a job?’ Would the minister do that? Would the minister say, ‘I’ll halve my pay, no problems’? Half his pay would probably pay for six of these women in full-time jobs. The minister would not do it because he would expect people to have some respect and dignity and he would expect fair compensation for the sort of work that he puts in on behalf of this nation. These people deserve no less. These people are doing jobs with pride and dignity and they do not deserve a minister who says, ‘Don’t feel bad about having your value undercut; you’ll provide jobs for somebody else so you can all be paid less than enough to make a living on.’ That is a disgraceful argument, Minister. You would not take that attitude yourself. How dare you expect other people in the workforce to take that attitude.

The minister got up and talked to us about the importance of superannuation and the co-payments. He boasted about how that was so great for women workers. I will tell you why the co-payments are so common for women workers. It is because by and large they earn so much less and they work such unreliable hours that they do not have an entitlement to the normal super that we all expect to need for our retirement. If the minister thinks the super program will continue to flourish under pay rates like this, he is kidding himself. The reality is that you have to get a bit of extra money to put aside for savings in the first place. If you are going to have your pay rate cut by $90 a week, there is no way in the world a female worker in John Howard’s workforce would have the capacity to put away for super. So, Minister, start putting away for the pensions for all these women when they hit retirement, because they certainly will not have savings. This Spotlight award has exposed exactly what the Work Choices legislation is about. It is driving wages down. Who are the first, most soft and vulnerable people to be hit? Young people and women. And that is exactly what Spotlight shone the light on.

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