Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

To pick up where I left off, I was reflecting on the fact that today we saw a report come out tracking national attitudes in our community to gendered violence. Unfortunately we see that one in three people who participated in that survey thought women made claims for vengeful reasons of sexual assault and that overall four in 10 people surveyed mistrust reports women make around sexual violence. This is despite the fact that research suggests that 87 per cent of victims-survivors do not tell police and that false allegations are extraordinarily rare. Clearly this is further evidence that we as a community need to do much more to ensure everyone in our community is treated with respect and that we need to work very hard and do all we can to ensure there is meaningful gender equality in workplaces, in communities and in homes right across the nation.

This piece of legislation is one of a number of pieces of legislation that have been put forward by our government to do just that—to address the fact that we don't have gender equality in this country. This bill for the first time will mean the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, WGEA, will report gender pay gaps at an employer level, not just at an industry level. We know we have a lot of work to do in workplaces across the country. Of course, the Set the standard report detailed the ways in which this particular workplace, the Parliament of Australia, needs to improve. But so too before that did the Respect@Work report. I'm really proud to be in a government that made a commitment to implement every single one of the recommendations in the report to ensure women have the best chance of being safe at work. But there will always be more work for us to do, because culture is something we always need to be vigilant about, making sure the high standards Australians rightly expect and deserve are maintained.

Through capturing more information at an employer level this bill will mean WGEA is able to give us more data that helps us get closer to closing the gender pay gap. We're at 13.3 per cent as of February this year, which is an improvement from where we were earlier, at 14.1 per cent. But at the current rate of progress, estimates indicate it could take as long as 26 years to close the gender pay gap, and that is simply not good enough. Improving workplace gender equality is absolutely critical. Everybody deserves fair and safe working conditions, and working women deserve equal opportunity and equal remuneration. I'm really proud to be part of a government that has ensured through reforms to industrial relations that feminised industries such as the care sector will finally be able to access the remuneration those workers so sorely deserve and so sorely need to keep up with the rising costs of living.

There are some pretty stark statistics on Australia's track record here, and I think it's important to be honest about where we stand. I'm a big believer that sunlight is the best disinfectant, so airing this information can only be good for us in taking the necessary steps to address the problem of gender inequality we have in this country. We came 43rd on the World Economic Forum's global gender gap index, and we've gone backwards over the last 10 years, which is really shameful. The median undergraduate starting salary for women is 3.9 per cent lower than for men, despite the fact that women graduate in greater numbers from university courses. Something we should be able to celebrate is that we have the fourth-highest number of women graduates in the world coming through our university system, but what makes it difficult to celebrate is the fact that, once they go through the university system, they're already starting from behind in the workforce. As I said, they earn on average 3.9 per cent less than men.

Women's super balances are 23.1 per cent lower than men's. Older women are the fastest-growing cohort of people who experience homelessness. And women over 60 are the lowest earning of all demographic groups nationally. Women's workforce participation consistently lags behind men's by eight to nine percentage points. We've put in some measures to address the workforce participation issue, such as making child care cheaper and ensuring that we have more flexible provisions for paid parental leave, but this is a serious problem in our communities.

There are enormous economic costs, as well as the social costs, of gender inequality. Addressing gender based violence in Australia currently costs us $26 billion a year. I began this continuation of my speech by reflecting on the fact that the attitudes in the community are still below what I think Australian women deserve in terms of the problems that face us. Gendered financial abuse is estimated to cost $10.9 billion a year. Sexual harassment costs $3.8 billion a year. The gender pay gap represents $51.8 billion a year. These statistics were featured in the scorecard that our government put out on International Women's Day. They are a stark set of figures that remind us of the work we need to do. This bill represents the work that is being done by the Albanese Labor government, a government I'm very proud to be part of. I am one of the 52 per cent of women who sit in our government party room, which is a historic first.

It's always difficult to speak on bills such as this because of course we want to celebrate the progress that we've made collectively as a nation in ensuring that women have opportunities. We want to acknowledge those who've come before us and laid the path that so many of us in this place have been able to tread—people like former prime minister Julia Gillard and former Speakers Joan Child and Anna Burke. We also need to reflect on the fact that we are still not as equal as we could be—that too many women live in poverty, that too many women experience gendered violence and that too many women are not listened to when they come forward with those claims. So this bill represents us doing the difficult work that needs to be done, as one of many steps that we are taking to bring about meaningful gender equality in homes and workplaces across the country. Our housing policy understands the fact that we need to have more crisis accommodation for women and children escaping gendered violence situations in the home. We understand that we need to do more to ensure that women are able to return to the workforce after perhaps taking time out to have children.

This work is not easy—changing culture is not easy—but I'm proud to be part of an Albanese Labor government that is determined to do the work that this country needs to be done and to have a prime minister who is so supportive of the work that needs to be done. I am really proud to support this bill, which will mean that there are some practical things that will happen to both track the gender pay gap in this country and give us the information we need to take further action in the future so that the next generation of women to end up in this place don't have to make the same kinds of speeches that we've been hearing for years about this persistent gender pay gap.

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