Dave Sharma (Wentworth, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Kingston for putting this important matter of public importance on the agenda—the existing barriers to women working full time and starting small businesses. I welcome the opportunity to discuss this issue.

To my mind, the female workforce participation is not as high as I'd like it to be. It's not as high as it should be. It is increasing; it reached an all-time high of 61.5 per cent in January 2020, up from about 58 per cent in 2013, but there is still a very significant gap with male workforce participation. For males, at the same time, in January 2020, the workforce participation rate was around 71 per cent. So there is a gap of around 10 per cent that's still to be narrowed. In my first speech to parliament, I spoke about that. I said that reducing the gap between female and male workforce participation 'would be one of the most impactful and meaningful economic reforms we could pursue'. I also described the lost opportunity under employment and the lost human capital as a loss to economic opportunity for the country, and I continue to hold those views. This is an important issue, and we do need to look at what some of the barriers to more women entering the workforce and participating in the workforce are.

In that vein, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released a report in August—just a few months ago this year—entitled Barriers and incentives to labour force participation, Australia. It has a number of interesting findings, which I think are worth highlighting. The most important incentive cited for women who are not currently participating in the labour force was access to a childcare place. Fifty-two per cent of women rated this as very important. The second most important incentive was financial assistance with childcare costs, with 51 per cent of women surveyed citing this as important. Next, and closely behind, was the ability to work part-time hours, cited by 49 per cent. The ability to vary start and finish times was cited by 35 per cent of women, and the ability to work school hours was cited by 29 per cent of women. On the reasons that women working part time—that is, women who are already in the workforce—do not want to work more hours, in the ABS survey, 36 per cent nominated that as their preference; they were satisfied with the current arrangements. Twenty-seven per cent cited caring responsibilities. I think it's clear—at least, to me—that there are two issues here. One is access and affordability of child care, but the other is workplace flexibility. I think it's important when we're considering this issue that we consider both of those things.

On access to child care, the government's support to child care has been significant. We've committed to spending around $9.2 billion in 2020-21 for child care. Around one million Australians will be benefitting from the childcare package and, of those who are benefitting, around 71 per cent of these one million Australians will be paying no more than $5 per hour per day in daycare centres.

Now, our childcare subsidy is means tested. If your family income is over about $353,000, you're not eligible for the childcare subsidy. If your family income is between around $190,000 and $353,000, there's a cap on the amount of subsidy you can receive: around $10,500 per child per financial year. Personally, I think that's appropriate. We means test a number of benefits in Australia, and the case for giving this childcare subsidy to Australian households that are on high incomes is not well made.

I would say that COVID-19 has obviously been massively disruptive to our economy and to all people in the workforce and our overarching objective in our budget has been to return all Australians, men and women, to work. If we get the economy growing again, if we got people hiring again and if we get businesses investing again then all Australians will benefit. Of the jobs that we have created since May, 62 per cent have been filled by women. The other big disruption that has been caused by COVID-19 has been to workplace flexibility, the other barrier that I cited earlier on. I'm sure many of us here have seen this. I have certainly seen it in my own house. Workplace norms too often have limited flexibility. Things such as part-time hours, flexible hours or working from home were in the past frowned upon but have now been embraced by businesses and employers. Increasingly the ability for women in particular but also men to access flexible working arrangements, flexible hours and the ability to work from home is now becoming normalised and mainstream.

I did in the time remaining want to commend the report that was released today by my colleague the member for Boothby along with the Prime Minister. I think she highlights an important issue about female representation in the parliament, including in my own party. We do need a more diverse parliament, and that means diversity on gender and any number of other metrics. I think we have made progress there but we do have more to do.

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