Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Higgins just suggested that the member for Sydney subscribes to an outdated concept of women in the workforce. If standing up and fighting for women to have equal pay and equal rights in the workforce is old-fashioned, then I'm pretty happy to be old-fashioned as well. What the member for Sydney said in her contribution was that equality can't be taken for granted; it must be fought for. I represent an electorate named after a woman called Louisa Dunkley, who, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, subscribed to exactly that belief: equality can't be taken for granted; it must be fought for. She fought for equal pay for women in the post and telegraph office, and she achieved it. Sadly, 120 years after she achieved that equal pay, there is still so much more to be fought for.

COVID-19 has left women not just in Australia but around the world in a position where many of those gains that have been so hard fought for are in real danger of being lost. Countries around the world know this. The United Nations knows this. We're in real danger of being led by a government who not only doesn't know this but won't do anything about it when it's pointed out to them. Australian women could be facing a future which is worse than the past, not just in the short term but in the long term.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, recently said, 'COVID-19 could reverse the limited progress that has been made on gender equality and women's rights', and therefore launched a report recommending 'ways to put women's leadership and contributions at the heart of resilience and recovery'. Some of the really disturbing events in Australian politics and this parliament of the last week have shone a spotlight yet again on the lack of women's leadership in Australian politics and the dangerous culture that that allows to exist.

Australia's global ranking for the proportion of women in the lower house of the national parliament fell from a high of 32nd place in January 2010, under Labor, to 48th place in 2019—32nd place isn't good enough for a country like Australia, but 48th place in the world is just embarrassing. The OECD data shows that Australia fell in the global rankings for the proportion of women serving as ministers from 22nd in 2012 to 33rd in 2019. Following the 2019 election, when I was so proud to be elected, along with a number of other strong Labor women, only 23 per cent of the entire coalition party room are women—and that's good for the coalition—whereas in Labor we're at half, and it makes a difference. Women's leadership makes a difference.

One of the reasons, I suggest, that the Morrison government's response to COVID has almost ignored the impact of COVID on women is that they don't have enough women's voices around the table. It's not good enough to just have people who see women as their mothers, their sisters and their daughters. We need actual women around decision-making tables so that our voices can be heard.

Gender Equity Victoria recently released a report and submissions for the Victorian budget which noted that in Victoria, as in the rest of the country, because of COVID-19 women have experienced higher unemployment rates. They've had less access to JobKeeper, greater responsibility for caring and unpaid work, and poorer mental health outcomes. But, as Per Capita noted last year, this federal government's stimulus responses concentrated on industries with high concentrations of men, particularly the construction industry, and ignored the caring economy, where women are predominantly employed. This government can't keep on representing half of the community and forgetting the other half of the community any time, particularly when that other half of the community, women, are the ones who are hurt the most.

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