Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to rise in the Federation Chamber this afternoon with regard to Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2021-2022 and the related bills that are before the House. It has been eight long years, and there have been more than eight reports now that have detailed the grave situation facing Australian women in terms of both their safety and lack of economic independence and security in this nation. In addition to those very detailed reports warning this government over the last eight years, we have heard the very powerful testimony from women like Brittany Higgins. We heard her allegations of rape just metres from the Prime Minister's office in this building. We have had tens of thousands of women around this nation march for justice—indeed, descending upon the lawns in front of Parliament House in this capital. We have seen Chanel Contos's petition, which was circulated amongst schoolchildren and schoolgirls in particular, and the horrific experiences she has been detailing. I defy anybody in government to say that they have not been suitably warned about the dire situation facing so many Australian women in terms of their safety and lack of economic independence. This government scurried around and there was a lot of talk going on just before the budget. Then someone rang up the PM's office and said, 'No joke, we've got a women's problem.' What was the solution? He amassed all his Liberal women and passed the problem on to them. He passed the burden on to his Liberal women to form a task force to try to figure out what to do. They made an effort to try to put some renewed focus on it. The budget before us was going to hit the reset button for women. But, on the night, my goodness, what a disappointment!

Yes, we see the return of a women's budget statement, which is one very, very tiny step in the right direction. I say 'a tiny step' because this was not a women's budget as Labor would understand a women's budget statement to be. This was not a gendered analysis of the budget. This was not running a gendered lens across all of the revenue collection and spending decisions of this government, so it should come as no surprise to any of us that this budget, in the end, failed to address any of the structural inequalities for men and women in Australia.

Why is it important that we should have a gendered lens on these budgets? I'll tell you what happens when you lose sight of monitoring and auditing of the way in which government spends its money. Some of you may recall in this House that Australia once led the world in gender-responsive budgeting. We led the world when Susan Ryan, the Labor minister for women at the time, lodged the very first women's budget statement in the Australian Parliament on budget night. That tradition and that analysis of budget expenditure and its differential impacts for men and women was continued right up until 2014, when, with his election as Prime Minister, Tony Abbott—who, let's not forget, made himself minister for women in Australia—decided we didn't need a women's budget statement anymore. We didn't need one. It was unnecessary.

To the eternal shame of Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and, indeed, Scott Morrison, till this year they have never ever honoured that agreement to return proper gender-responsive budgeting to the Australian parliament. Why is that important? It is important because we have no way of tracking anymore how we're actually going internally here in the Australian parliament. But we do have global rankings about gender inequality, and I have to say that Australia has now plummeted to 56th position, I think it is, out of 156 nations participating in the global Gender Inequality Index rankings. This is the absolute worst we have ever been. Having once led the world, we are now No. 56 and going down each and every year. That should ring alarm bells for any woman in Australia listening today.

There was the failure of the government to take an opportunity to ensure that, when we looked at the road to recovery out of COVID, we were going to not only adequately recompense women, who bore the brunt of the impact of COVID-19. Let's not forget all those female-dominated caring economy jobs that got lost and heavily impacted. Women lost jobs more quickly, they lost hours more quickly and they wore the primary caregiving and educative roles in their households—all of that. And what did we see out of this budget? We didn't see anywhere near the kind of backing we needed to see for Australian women. We didn't see our domestic violence and frontline services getting the adequate support they need, despite the spike in increased demand.

Frankly, women now have nowhere to go. I've spoken in this parliament before about this issue. My crisis services are maxed out. You cannot get into a women's refuge in Newcastle and, once you are there, you can't move on to permanent forms of housing and accommodation, because there are zero properties on the rental market that you can afford to actually take up. So we have a massive housing crisis with literally nowhere to go for women fleeing domestic violence and family violence.

I have a service called Jenny's Place in my electorate which turned away 558 women last year. Let that sit with you for a minute. We have a shortfall of 3,100 homes in social housing in Newcastle alone. People are waiting 10 years on average to get into a social housing property. As I said, there's a 0.3 per cent vacancy rate in the private rental market, which utterly fails vulnerable Australians. The government is not funding those frontline services to the degree they need to. I mentioned Jenny's Place turning away 558 women. They are seeking a very modest $300,000 in order to be able to run a telephone service. This government shoved it back to the states. The states are shoving it back. The Liberal governments in New South Wales and at the federal level don't care. They cannot find $300,000 in the so-called women's budget to help a frontline women's service run a telephone advice and resource centre. We have seen them cut the funding to the working women's centres in the Northern Territory. It's a diabolical situation. This cannot continue.

You don't get to stand up and congratulate yourselves about delivering a budget for Australian women when you have failed dismally to address any of the deep, systemic, structural inequalities that have existed for decades, continue to exist and are getting worse under your watch. We are not seeing a dent in the gender pay gap. We are not seeing increased opportunities for women here at all. So it's a very, very disappointing budget on that front.

I will end on this on the women's budget statement. For all the spruiking from the government, we actually saw less than one per cent of targeted investment into specific women's services. Let's not crow about counting $1.7 billion for child care, which is not a women's issue. It should be a parental and family issue more broadly. They are spending $1.7 billion dollars on childcare funding, which is delayed, as we know, until 2022, but they have given $18 billion in tax breaks to government business write-offs. So when you start to compare and contrast who gets what in this budget there is no-one that could in all good faith stand up here and talk about this having been a reset moment for the government in dealing with their so-called women's problem in Australia. We're not going to buy it. Australian women have got this government well and truly clocked.

In the remaining few minutes I would like to talk a little about the shambles and the irresponsibility of this government when it comes to the national vaccination rollout and the quarantine issues in this nation, particularly as the vaccine rollout is playing out in the aged-care sector right now. This is not a Victorian problem. I want to make this very clear in this chamber. While we have a focus on Victoria and we indeed are thinking very much of our Victorian colleagues and the men and women in Victoria now, I know that in my hometown of Newcastle, while we have ensured that most of the residents in aged-care facilities have, after a very long and complicated process, been vaccinated—some fully but not all—it is most likely that less than a quarter of the aged-care workforce has been vaccinated. This is appalling. I cannot tell you how stressed out my aged-care facilities are at the idea. They know full well that they have workers coming and going across multiple facilities. Vaccinating residents but not their aged-care workers is deeply problematic. It fails to provide that protective shield that they are in fact seeking to do—and through no fault of their own. One of the aged-care facilities where they have managed to have their staff vaccinated—what was the solution? What did they have to do? They had to pack up all their staff and go to Sydney. It was a 2½ hour drive down the M1 to get to the mass vaccination centre to their staff vaccinated. That's what they had to do. What a shame.

We have an aged-care minister being asked questions today, over in the other house, in the Senate, who has got zero idea how many workers are vaccinated or not. He hasn't got a clue. There is no national register. There is no way of tracking this. It is appalling. You had two jobs you had to do this year, Mr Morrison. What were they? A national vaccine rollout and quarantine. Well, we know our quarantine system is leaking and we've known this for some time. You have been warned time and time again about the airborne nature of COVID-19 and yet failed dismally to respond, to lift to the need for purpose-built facilities, to actually stand up and take responsibility for quarantining in this nation—as is your constitutional obligation. How dare you stand by and shirk off your responsibility in this place again and again and again.

You cannot have this both ways. You made all the states and territories do all of the heavy lifting when it came to combating COVID-19. This is the Commonwealth's response. It is your job now to stand up and ensure that the recovery out of COVID is the best it can be. What are the two ingredients we absolutely must have in place and sorted out? One is the national vaccine rollout. Fewer than two per cent of our citizens are fully vaccinated. Shame on you. It's not an issue of supply anymore. We know that. So what is it? Why don't you come clean with the Australian people? Why don't you give access to some very transparent, open data about what is going on with vaccinations? Why aren't there mass vaccination hubs everywhere? Not everybody has access to a GP. We know that. Even if you do, not every GP gets to have access to this vaccine, not in any even-handed or orderly manner that's for sure. It is absolutely unforgiveable that this government has completely failed to protect our citizens. You've had 12 months to think about how you were going to ensure a secure quarantine system and ensure every citizen was vaccinated. You've failed. You've failed us badly.

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