Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion and I congratulate the member for Denison for bringing this measure before the House. In the remaining two minutes, I acknowledge that we do have a problem with a gender pay gap in this country. Inequality, in general, is at a 70-year high. That inequality manifests in various ways, and one of them is that women get paid less than men. It happens in a variety of ways. It happens in the most obvious sense of sometimes a woman being paid less than a man doing exactly the same job, but it also happens in other ways, with companies structuring their workforces so that it ends up being women who do the lower paid jobs while men get the higher paid ones. Or, across industries, women can be concentrated in industries where they get they get paid lower. As a result, we have a 14.6 per cent gender pay gap in this country.

What the Equal Pay Standard Bill 2018 would do is allow the government to step in—clearly the hands-off approach hasn't worked—and say to companies, 'You have to tell us that you are paying men and women equally.' It won't necessarily set the rates of pay. That will be left up to the Fair Work Commission and the company's individual decisions, but it will say that you have to pay equally. That is an unobjectionable proposition. Everyone should support the idea of the government being able to tell and direct companies to pay their men and women equally. There are other things that we need to do, like fix the Fair Work Act. We need to change it so that it's an objective of the award system that there be equal pay. That's certainly something that the Greens will be pushing for in this and the next parliament. But this is a step that we could do in the meantime. And this is a step that should get the support of everyone from across the parliament no matter what party they're in, because we must close the gender pay gap, and a simple way of doing that is for the government to direct companies to pay men and women equally. Thank you.

See this speech in context